His hands are wrapped up around one of mine. I can feel the buzz of his aura ripping shreds in the walls that are too close around us, claustrophobically close. He’s sending tingles up my arms, maybe on purpose but maybe not, and it’s making the blue nail polish on my fingers chip and peel. Suddenly everything’s narrowed into watching flakes of paint flicker in the air as they crinkle in the heat he’s making, hitting the floor as glittering ashes. He feels like destruction but he’s clinging onto my hand like it’s the last thing in the world he can really feel properly any more, probably is the only thing he can feel except for the heat and the shuddering of his anger felling four walls that were meant to be holding us in. I keep my eyes open even though I can’t see much through the dust, and wait until he’s looking back at me again. Then we pick our way out, nice and slow because he’s shaking like a child, a skinny child hanging on the end of my arm, and grinning huge, out of it on the buzz of the aura power flooding through him, in too far. I have to lead him down three or four corridors totally lost. Far enough in one direction and we hit a wall, which he makes rubble in seconds but even he isn’t fast enough. There are shouts behind us now and people are running at us so I go with it. I drag him behind me as I try to run,

“I could burn them Mara. Just burn them all no problems, bring the roof right down over them. See them burn, Mara, you want to see them burn right?”

His eyes are on me, real bright, and his body’s twitching with the power and the heat. I take a look back through the stumbling and the heat haze and the dust and see the future.

“Yeah,” he’s like a devil, grinning through the flames, blue-green eyes straight into mine daring me to let him jump off the edge, “burn them Jass,” I say. Right over the edge, no hesitation. Burning, roof comes down. One of them brings the rain, some power right there, but it’s too late.

Rain over the city was uncommon, but the weather barriers were unreliable to the point of uselessness and when it came, it all came at once in a great rush of dirty downpour. Muddy water filled up inadequate drains and streets, rivers across roads for weeks and then afterwards mess and dirt, dry and cracking on broken paving stones everywhere. People stayed in doors. Riy watched the third night of rains through her dark glass window, a thousand tonnes of water catching a million street lights and car head lights and neon shop signs in the city below her, a billion tiny droplets filled with dirt and cold. There were lights going on forever, distorted by water cascading off rooftops and windows and tall buildings. She watched her translucent reflection in the window, her own strangely unfamiliar face filled with the moving, dancing lights of the drowning city below and around her and for the first time in years she felt a longing for something more. Things felt different, recently, as though some essential part of her had simply dropped out of being, the strange sense of need and misery combined with guilt, an ever-present coldness, like being alone. She felt the urge to open the window to let the rain in, let it burst through empty space where thick untarnished glass should have protected her and flood the apartment, freezing her to the bone, lashing her face and arms and stomach, removing all thoughts except the experience of cold and wet and the anger of nature scorned. The world was not as it should be.

Time passed, she tore herself away. The room was unnaturally quiet; breathing in the age of the apartment complex that kept hiding in corners and attics even after the place had been remodelled over and over. A bed, a computer terminal, an old fashioned writing desk, and a wall taken up by the window. Suddenly overcome by desperation, she threw on a coat and left, swirling down the stairs and out in to the rain. It soaked her instantly, hair plastered onto her face, her back, her neck; eyes blinking away drops, clothes darkened, dripping, the coat was useless. The beauty was gone now she was on the ground, soaking litter and wet dusty bricks and debris, the aftermath of thirty years of destruction filled to breaking point by the interminable rain. Riy fixed her eye on the skyline, still sparkling despite the imperfection of the world below it, and half waded forward barely knowing where she was going, barely recognising that she was walking at all. Grief, long suppressed anger and misery, flowed past, each drop adding to it, each step building momentum until she was running from and to nowhere. When she was aware again, she found the road beneath her feet unknown but the skyline still the same. She slowed the maddened stumbling to a breathless, staggering walk and cursed her own weakness. It was so unlike her to have no purpose, the perfectionist part of her filled in the days with some task or other, constantly and faultlessly working on anything she could think of, anything that came to her, any distraction from the unfamiliar mundane that had fallen upon her. A kind of numbness had settled now, emotionless rationalisation of her uncharacteristic burst of insanity lead her to bright neon signs promising alcohol and live coverage, solace in company while still being alone. The smoke was heavy; sitting in the air comfortably as though it had been there for a long time, and the place was quiet with few occupants. She was three empty glasses down before any one came and sat beside her at the bar, and she could feel the knowledge coming from him straight away even through the alcohol and the exhaustion. His eyes were bright and clever, his expression piercing as he set his eyes on her face and smiled a soft sideways smile.

“I know you,” he said, an easy accent not from this city, “you probably won’t remember me. I knew Grace, from a while back. She used to talk about you a lot. It’s a great loss for us all, right?” He hadn’t been drinking, his voice layered with cautiousness. Was he trying not to offend her? Deciding not to answer, Riy caught the barman’s attention and averted her eyes from him. The feeling of oneness with him distressed her, the affinity between the different and the knowing too much to deal with after such a long time. “You really have forgotten us?” he murmured, moving in closer to her so that only she could hear his lowered voice, “I thought- I don’t know why- I thought you’d hold it off somehow. Don’t you feel any loss?” Riy turned to him, took the full force of his melancholy gaze.

“Loss?” she replied, “It’s a great loss for us all.” She felt like her heart was bursting, hunger pushing through her chest and into him and his likeness to her. She wanted to say, ‘don’t leave me, I want to hear about your loss’ but instead she downed the last of her drink and turned away again. He seemed to sigh, and the burn of his eyes on her fell. She heard his chair pull back, his feet soft on the alcohol sticky floor, a touch of her hand and the pressure was gone. Riy took a cab home and threw up until her throat burned with acid, sat in bed feeling the dizziness in her head churn with her empty stomach and read the card he had dropped into her hand over and over again. A name, a phone number and on the back unruly handwriting in melting black ink.

Remember me, Riy.

Her dreams were overtaken by his face and the feeling of familiarity that swam over her when she thought of him, she was at the bar smiling, talking to him, breathing in his secrets and his life and then suddenly he was drifting away, turning to continue their conversation but then less and less, talking to someone else, staring straight through her. She tried to get up off the chair but found herself stuck down, paralysed, foggy with drink, dizzy, falling twisting to catch him but she couldn’t see where he was any more. The floor pressed against her face smelled like spilled beer and cigar smoke, which bent and transformed into cold dirty air and misty rain floating through her open window. She focused unsteadily on the fading darkness outside, stars sucked into a cold rising sun inevitably draining into daylight. Morning felt too quiet, too still. Crisp winter air prickled her face; the clock told her that it was before 5 o clock and only recon workers would be out at this time – picking up the damage the downpour had left. The cold silence left by the stopping of the rain was somehow more oppressive than the constant pattering and dripping she had got used to. Riy brushed her eyes with the back of her hand trying to figure out what was making her so uneasy. A thought flashed into her head, when had she opened the window? Panic gripped and she spun, searching for something missing, something lost or moved or changed, but found nothing. All was pristine, chilled by the frigid air, curtains billowing gently. She opened desk drawers and rummaged frantically through papers, old bills and payslips, metro tickets, a passport with tickets and boarding passes long passed their use stuffed inside. Right at the bottom, a panel that sprang up and back, flinging debris over the floor, and below- another card, and written on the back in the same spider handwriting:

Do you remember?

Riy sat back on her heels; a sense of clarity through utter confusion soothed her mind as she surveyed the disarray that she had created. She flipped the little card in her hand, humming quietly to herself and felt, for the first time in months or even years, awake.

Lan Stahl, all untidy brown hair and tired eyes, leaned over his desk and groped desperately through the disarray that made up his office. Lan was a researcher, not that any one employed him, or that anything he researched was of any use to any one but himself. He was originally from Asia, born of European parents and schooled in post-nuclear Japan; his accent had been transformed from Japanese-French into American spoken English with an indistinguishable European drawl that pleased him. His office wasn’t so much an office as the back room of what had once been a bookshop and before that an antiques shop, and now was nothing more than an abandoned set of dusty, empty shelves and behind it a slim corridor, peeling wallpaper, empty cardboard boxes, a door with a heavy padlock to hold it shut and behind the door, Lan’s office. He had rented it five months ago and paid almost nothing for the space that nobody else wanted, which was all he could have afforded any way. He was a frugal man, his debts a constant sprawling mass at the back of his mind, and his only indulgence remained expensive coffee house coffee Despite the push of daylight peering in through the dirty window cut into the door that fell across the empty floor the room was lit by a dusty, old style bulb hanging from an open wire on the ceiling. It was piled high with old yellowing papers, ancient computer boxes spilling over with broken and reconstituted hard drives, wires, cables and half empty coffee cups surrounding a desk barely visible beneath the mess and Lan brushing his hair from his eyes, coughing the dust from his throat and trying to find what he needed to finish his final project. He was tall with long fingers and strange, pale eyes that contrasted with dark hair, hidden beneath a layer of white paper dust. His face seemed old, lined with wear and dust and time, but his features themselves were that of a young man and his body slender and strong in the determined manner of aging soldiers. His hands calloused, finger nails dirty, unruly long hair held into clumps by the dust that hung in the air and lay on everything around him, unshaven. He found, finally, beneath a set of other papers a pile of printed notes held together by a green paper tag and a smile flashed across his lips, transforming his face suddenly to that of a child. He breathed gently, lovingly over the top sheet and before picking up a brief case from beneath the desk, sliding the sheets inside and snapping it shut. After he had left, the swinging light turned off, the door locked securely and the windows barred with wire and darkness, the dust continued to float endlessly from above and below. Twenty years of information hoarded and loved and studied over and over sighed quietly and went back to sleep.

When Lan broke out in to the air the dust floated off him like an aura and he shook his hair joyfully, remembering suddenly that he needed a shower, and a hair cut and hot coffee with steamed milk. He flipped out his phone and dialled a number.

“Drey, I’m ready. I’ve got it.” He smiled a genuine smile and although the person on the other end of the phone line could not see him, he pointed to the coffee shop ahead of him, “come and meet me, we’ll get some coffee.” He crossed the busy street, stopping cars as he wandered in their way, the blindness of someone who has spent months studying in dark places. He had met Dreyan, he had wandered coolly into his life with burning ambition and unexpected devious subtlety. Lan had been sitting right here, coffee cupped in his hands, on the sharp end of massive debt, his wife’s disappearance and a numbing depression that filled him and blunted him leaving him cold and tired. Dreyan had sat down opposite him, making himself comfortable on the soft green velvet armchair, leaning forward, smiling gently past three-day stubble and long brown hair, and declaring:

“I know you and I need your help,” then sitting back and watching Lan’s reaction.

“I don’t know you, I don’t know what you mean…”

“You’re Lan Stahl, you’re a scientist and you haven’t worked for years, your wife Grace has disappeared but your marriage was a mess years before any way, you’re forty-three, you don’t have any friends any more, these are all things you know to be true about yourself.” Another quiet smile, waiting for a reaction.

“Are you here about the loan? Because I’ve already told you I can’t pay you yet, just give me a few more weeks and I’ll have it ready, just not yet.”

“I don’t care about money. Actually, I was going to give you some money, if you’re interested in what I have to say. What you know about yourself, it isn’t true.”

Lan paused, mouth open ready to insist that he wasn’t interested in any sort of loans or investments, and then stopped.

“What do you mean what I know about myself isn’t true? Who are you, any way?”

“You knew me not that long ago, you just don’t remember now. I think if you spend a minute you’ll see the gaps there but I won’t stay now, just keep me on your mind and when you remember something call me.” He stood up through Lan babbled protests; met Lan’s eyes with own his piercing blue ones once more, and left as though he had never been there at all, leaving in his wake a mind buzzing with disbelief and self-doubt. He had left a card on the table behind him, slowly turning brown as it absorbed some spilt coffee, which Lan snatched up and glared at. His mind, only moments before so blurred and muffled, felt sharp and in control, and something- yes, he was right. Something was wrong. The strange young man had said, “just keep me I mind,” but whenever Lan tried to turn his thoughts onto him something was wrong, like a tang of thought that blocked all concentration. It’s a curse, he thought, and then wondered what he had meant by that, and who had said that to him before. He became totally involved in his personal world, the strange revelations and ideas rushing through his head, back and forwards through unused passageways of his mind. The blissful waves of remembrance shifted over him, as though they had never left, as though he had never forgotten. After a while, he ordered another coffee, his eyes wide with realisation, from a bemused barista with multi coloured hair, sat and fell into deep thought, his coffee steaming untouched. It took a long time for his mind to return to normal, the fullness of the memories breathing into him and then exhaling a different person, a new revised version of his previous self combined with the dust clogged man aged by exhaustion and silence. When he re-surfaced, the coffee cold in his hands, he had sighed softly and dipped a finger into his bitter lukewarm coffee and bit his lip. After a while he stood slowly, unsteadily and found Dreyan waiting for him outside, lounging against an ancient, dilapidated motorbike and reading a paperback novel. It had been quite surreal, Lan thought, as though there were someone else’s thoughts in his head, and it still didn’t feel quite right. He found himself making connections and not knowing why, only to realise a day or a week later and wonder at the vastness of his own mind.

It took Dreyan another thirty minutes to turn up, his face unusually cloudy.

“Who spat in your breakfast?” Lan asked him jovially, offering him the uneaten half of a blueberry muffin sitting sideways on a square plate. Dreyan picked at it sulkily, while Lan spread out some papers on the low table. “I’ve found some good info this time. We can open it all up, I’m not kidding, all of it.”

“Yeah,” Dreyan murmured non-committal. “Right.”

Lan lifted his eyes from the type-writer style yellowed notes and stared at the younger man. The muffin was a mess of crumbs spread across the plate.

“Alright now, what have I missed?”

“I saw her, last night in some shitty bar, totally fucked up. I tried to- but she didn’t remember.”

“No, of course she didn’t remember. You give her your cryptic act like you did to me?”

Dreyan shrugged. “It was hard, seeing her again. And like that. You should see her, she doesn’t look right. Not like herself, it’s...unsettling. She was so much herself,” He took a breath, eyes blazing with defiance, unaccustomed to talking, really talking, to another human being, flailing to find the right words. It must be difficult for him, Lan reflected, being honest with me again after what he’s had to do for me these last few months, after being alone all these years. “I gave her my card but I don’t know if it’ll do any good. They worked deeper on her than you. I can’t deal with seeing her and not have her know who I am.” Dreyan’s expression dared him to say anything comforting, go ahead and patronise me old man, I’ll show you who needs saving. Instead, Lan leaned forward, gently took the plate from Dreyan’s unsteady hand, putting it back down on the table.

“You wanna have a look at this or not?” he asked, tone carefully neutral. Dreyan pouted sulkily, his shoulder high and tense, but business was business, and he picked up the nearest sheet.

“There’s been eight break ins over the past few years, mostly human rights crazies who got shot down easy enough or paid off or whatever. All of those got covered up, only pretty badly, enough for me to get the info on basically first or second level skill hacks. One was a guy looking for his kid, and he was killed, it was written off as suicide when they found him hanged from a tree in some park.”

“I heard about that guy on the news, father committed suicide after his kid died of leukaemia, right?”

“Yeah, that guy. Harrison. I couldn’t get any info on his kid, and I can only assume he didn’t commit suicide. I figure they buried it a little deeper after he got into the public eye, but all the others are almost surface cases.”

“Why would they be so careless?”

“Who knows, I’d say they’re arrogant but it’s more likely they’re under funded. And they weren’t expecting any one to come looking. I haven’t even got to the interesting part yet.” Dreyan rubbed a hand over his eyes, scanning the third sheet of paper quickly, the hand not holding the paper tap-tapping impatiently against his left eyebrow. “I said there were eight attempts.” Lan continues “Three were activists, three were intelligence guys from Japan, Russia, China, trying to figure what the hell was going on. As far as I can tell they were sent home with politely with fuck-all to work with and not much left of their minds either. You know the score. Honestly, I don’t know why they bothered. Number seven was Mr Harrison and he’s not applicable to interrogation. The last one’s the thing, because it’s not a break it, it’s a break out.”

At this Dreyan’s eyes snapped up, “One of the kids?”

“Could be. The reason why it caught my attention really is because there’s basically nothing on it at all. This is all I could get,” Lan handed over another typed sheet, notably shorter.

“Wall and ceiling damage, staff insurance claims, shit they wrote it off the record, two blanks staring me in the face… they killed people to escape?” There was a heaviness to his voice now, a kind of dark delight, and Lan recognised the obsession in it, the cracks on Dreyan’s carefully built mask all too easy to see, sparkling in this anger and this joy.

“Killed six wardens as far as I can gather, and they can’t have been older than fifteen ‘cause of the ward they were in. And, this is the best part, I managed to dig out some records. They’d got rid of all the information, or at least hidden it so deep I couldn’t get to it. But I managed to get names, you know, who was there before and who wasn’t there after. It’s two kids, brother and sister, reported missing eighteen months ago by a Mr and Mrs Marshall, parents, and I got an address. Looks like something to me, you in?”

Dreyan grinned, an honest to God real smile like Lan hadn’t seen him pull since back when he was only fifteen and full to the teeth with raw power and craziness, and smacked the table with a fist hard enough to make the papers fly out of order.

“Damn I knew it’d be worth bringing you round. This is something.” Lan found himself smiling along too, laughing self-consciously, Dreyan’s sudden enthusiasm infectious. So when the smile drained abruptly from his face Lan was left laughing alone. He turned, slowly, to see what Dreyan was staring at, eyes wide, complexion unusually pale, a strange confusion of expressions clouding his face. The man standing behind Lan’s chair was a tall, his age difficult to identify beneath the dark tan. His hair, a bright dyed red, fell to his shoulders and was pulled roughly into a piece of string behind his head. There were several, cruel looking, red scars across his face and collar bones, disappearing beneath his shirt. He stood, smiling sideways, his eyes bright, arrogant, looking directly at Dreyan’s twisted face. Lan moved closer to Dreyan’s ear,

“So what’s his story?” he whispered, and Dreyan held up a hand, eyes narrowed and teeth bared like a defensive animal, and Lan felt his danger and ferocity as a kind of mental shock.

“Just wait here, don’t you dare follow me.” He stood and walked stiffly across to the man. Lan became suddenly aware of the noise of the coffee shop returning to him, as though Dreyan had held the normality of the place away with his apprehension. It was as though the two young men now standing shoulder to shoulder, staring each other out, were in a different world to the rest of them, and it was probably only Lan that could sense the powerful tension between them, sense the way it shook the air. He saw the tall guy say something softly, and Dreyan hissed through his teeth back at him and spat onto the coffee shop’s tiled floor, a reaction that made the taller man laugh and stride away, mockingly opening the door and gesturing for Dreyan to go through first. Lan watched them leave, sipping his cold coffee and tidying up the papers on the table while he waited for them to go out of sight.

He was just fast enough to catch them, walking sedately like old friends round a corner at the far end of the high street. Even from a distance, Lan could see that the man had a hand on Dreyan’s arm, something that should have been an innocent gesture of affection but to Lan seemed more like a warning, controlling gesture, and something in him riled at the thought of any one being able to spook Dreyan in the way that this guy had. For as long as Lan had known him, Dreyan had been a fireball of self-assurance, a drinking, smoking gun pulling insanity, a solid rock of unswayable certainty behind eyes that gave everything and nothing away. Lan had been saved by him, and had saved him from himself more times that he could remember. Despite the fact that it had been months since he’d thought straight, he couldn’t sit by and let his friend, yes, friend was the word, his friend just walk away with some unknown danger. It was ridiculous, and Lan could see that, to follow them with no weapon, with no understanding, and the sensation of almost hopeless determination invigorated him. The excitement of finding some real, hard, useful information felt hot in his veins, spurred him forward. It had grown cold while he had been inside, or maybe it had just been so warm in the coffee house that the outside felt colder in comparison. The sky was grey and clouded, as though another terrible rain would follow only a day after the last one had ended, the street was misted and hushed as though the shoppers and workers who passed him were trying to keep the avalanche of water from falling by staying quiet. The corner that Dreyan and the mystery man had turned ran on the way out of town and into some more residential areas, not exactly threatening but empty and quietly soulless. Lan couldn’t see either of them, and feeling lost he wandered a little aimlessly further down, half hoping to just catch them turning another corner. He didn’t, the adrenaline wearing down made him suddenly tired, and cold was turning to mist and darkness and probably soon more rain. When he returned to the coffee house it was closing its doors, Lan muttered defiantly to himself that he was damned if he was going to wait in the rain for that damn idiot. He caught a tram home, a first floor apartment in a forty story building, feeling defeated and despondent. His apartment was dark, cold and smelled like damp and unwashed dishes. He hadn’t actually returned there for days, falling asleep most nights in a pile of paper at his office, waking up and drinking machine coffee, not moving from his chair and desk except to use the bathroom and retrieve more coffee or a sandwich. There was no desk in his apartment, but there was a laptop computer and a bed, which he sat on to watch the second rain storm in two days and let his body calm down and warm up. He worried, deeply for a while about Dreyan, and then forced himself to remember that he could look after himself much better than Lan could look after him nowadays. An hour later he had fallen asleep, sitting up on his bed with his head lolling forwards and his hands tangled in the sheets at his sides.