Chapter 86: Ashes and Rain

The rain began the morning they found her, a fine, persistent drizzle that clung to the city like a shroud. It was not a cleansing rain, not the kind that washes the streets clean and promises a fresh start. This was a weeping sky, a sky that had given up. It seeped into the cracks of the pavement, blurred the neon signs into watercolor smears, and drummed a monotonous, funereal rhythm against the windows of the living and the dead. For Rodrigo Shirvinton, the sound had become the world. It...