The time display in my peripheral blinked 01:25 when I stepped out of Revolus Res. Late again. My name badge — KAEL, replaceable font — went into my pocket and I stepped into the rain.
Rain in Neo-Veridian wasn't weather. It was infrastructure. The city had absorbed it decades ago and stopped complaining, and now it lived in the air itself, cold and constant, threading into skin and breath and bone until you stopped registering it as separate from yourself. Twenty years of this had turned the Neon District into a permanent smear — color bleeding across flooded pavement, holographic ads stuttering overhead, voices dying mid-sentence before they could finish pretending to be human.
Nothing here was alive. It had only learned to imitate it.
I knew a shortcut. A gap between two buildings that the city had forgotten to close off, it's barely visible and easy to miss. I turned into it without slowing, and the noise cut out — sound first, then light, and with it the low-grade pressure of being surrounded by people who didn't care whether you existed. The passage twisted, walls close with angles slightly wrong. Water dripped through ceiling cracks in unusual patterns. My footsteps were the only sound left.
Three minutes. Then it opened.
A dark river, still enough to mirror the fractured light above. A bridge extending halfway across it and stopping — like whoever built it ran out of reasons to finish. Beyond it, the Upper District burned in white-blue precision, every surface too clean, every edge too sharp a place that solved its problems before they became visible i looked at it the way I always did: briefly, and then away.
That's when I saw her.
Near the river's edge, collapsed against the stone. Pale hair spread across the wet ground school uniform, torn at the edges, a red ribbon loose at her collar. Her wrist coverings were dark where something had soaked through. Her chest moved — faint and irregular, but it moved.
I stopped.
"Someone did this."
The words were there. I just hadn't decided to say them.
I registered everything — the injuries, the placement and deliberate quality of the damage — and then I turned and kept walking, because that was the rule. Don't stop and don't let things become yours. Everything in this city rots eventually, and you survive by keeping your hands empty.
I made it maybe thirty meters.
"...h...elp..."
The sound didn't just reach my ears; it hooked into something old and jagged under my ribs. I kept walking, my boots hitting the wet pavement with a rhythm that felt like an escape. Ten steps. Twenty. Then, a memory surfaced—unwanted, unfiltered, and sharp enough to draw blood. A face from years ago. A hand reaching out for me in the dark, and my own hands, empty and useless. The phantom weight of that failure was suddenly heavier than the rain-soaked air of Neo-Veridian.
Not again.
I stopped and stood there with the plastic bag handle creaking in my grip, long enough to know I'd already decided and was just delaying the acknowledgment.
Then I turned around.
Up close, the damage was specific in a way that settled cold in my chest. Cuts along her forearms, spaced and intentional. Bruising at the jaw. A deeper gash at the side of her neck. Someone had done this with a plan.
I crouched beside her. Her eyes were barely open, irises a faint gradient — soft pink bleeding into deep red at the edges.
AI. The recognition arrived as something physical before it became a thought, a tightening in my chest that was old and automatic. Not hatred exactly. But Something older than that. Something I'd buried deep enough that it only surfaced as reflex.
"Can't you contact someone through your network?" My voice came out flat. "Why me?"
She couldn't answer. Probably didn't have the capacity left to.
Then a tear slipped down her face. Slow and unhurried. Not a flicker, nor a malfunction — I'd seen malfunctions. They stuttered. But This didn't.
I won't help you. The thought was there. But the words never came.
I pulled my jacket off and wrapped it around her.
Her weight when I lifted her was wrong — too light, like her body was still negotiating whether it wanted to be here. I adjusted her across my back, straightened up, and started moving
"Idiot," I muttered. I meant myself.
The city on the way back was just obstruction. Every block that wasn't my apartment was something in my way. I moved fast but not reckless — if I fell, she fell — and the rain drilled through my collar the whole way. Somewhere around the seven-minute mark her weight shifted and I caught her automatically, adjusting without thought.