I lie in the dark while rain taps steadily against the windows overlooking Halo. The sheets smell faintly of Kauss because he slept here last night, because he has been here so often my apartment has started keeping pieces of him without asking. I turn my face into the pillow and breathe him in until the tears start again.
I swore I would never risk my heart like this.
I swore I was done being the woman who loved more, hoped harder, gave first, and got left with the bill.
Yet somewhere below the grief, beneath the humiliation and anger and old wounds reopened fresh, one terrible truth refuses to die.
Kauss did not look like a man who wanted to leave.
He looked like a man who did not know how to stay.
I cry myself to sleep with that thought lodged under my ribs, sharp and stubborn and impossible to pull free.
CHAPTER 24
KAUSS
The tunnels are screaming before I reach them.
At first, I think the sound is rainwater in the storm drains. Halo has been drowning all night beneath hard coastal weather, and the old drainage system always complains when the tide-control pumps fall behind. Water rushes through cracked culverts, hisses in runoff channels, and pounds against rusted grates with the force of a city trying to empty itself into the sea. The noise rises through the access hatch in the alley behind Kesto’s pawn shop, deep and ugly, carrying the smell of sewage, brine, mold, and electrical burn.
Then I hear a child cry.
The sound cuts through everything.
I rip the hatch open so hard the hinge tears out of the frame.
Cold, filthy air blasts upward, wet and rotten, thick with panic. The ladder below is slick with black runoff. Emergency glow strips flicker red along the tunnel walls, but half the lights are out, leaving the shaft below in broken flashes of color and dark. Water roars somewhere beneath me where it should only trickle.
No.
My body understands disaster before thought names it.
I drop down the ladder faster than safety allows, claws scraping metal, boots striking rungs hard enough to bend them. The air grows colder, wetter, fouler with every foot. When I hit the tunnel floor, water splashes over my boots up to the ankles.
It should not be here.
This passage stays above the main runoff line except during storm surge. Even then, the floodgates divert pressure west. Someone opened something. Someone broke something. Someone did this.
“Kauss!”
Maren’s voice comes from the east passage, raw with terror.
I run toward it.
The settlement is gone.
Not destroyed cleanly. Not bombed. Not burned. Flooded. Violated by water, which is worse in some ways because water takes everything and keeps moving as if damage is only gravity obeying itself.
The main chamber where the heater coil stood is waist-deep in filthy runoff and rising. Tarps hang torn from their lines. Crates bob and slam against walls. Blankets, clothes, plastic containers, broken lanterns, food tins, and one of Esme’s folded paper dragons spin in the dark water. A mattress floats upside down near the central pillar. Sparks spit from a loose power cable thrashing near the wall, turning the water around it blue-white for half a second at a time.
People scream from everywhere.
A man clings to an overhead pipe with one arm, blood streaming down his face. Doreen is pinned against a crate stack, her cybernetic ankle jammed between twisted metal supports while water pulls at her legs. Maren stands on a narrow maintenance ledge with her son clutched against her chest, both soaked, both shaking. Old Juno is trying to cut through a tarpwrapped around someone’s arm while water slams debris into her knees.
The heater coil is dead beneath the flood.
Al’s supply drum floats past, spinning slowly.
