The roof tasted almost clean.
Ren shouldered the last door open and staggered into the storm. Cold water hit his face like hands—hard, immediate—and the shock punched through his skin into his chest. His breath hitched, failed, came back wrong. Wind slammed into him, flattening his clothes, shoving him half a step sideways before he caught himself.
Light and motion came at him all at once. Rain streaked past the floodlamps in dense, slanting lines that his eyes couldn't track cleanly. The ground shifted under him—not moving, just slick—his footing uncertain on water-sheened concrete. He blinked, and the afterimage of the duct's dim metal stayed burned across his vision, a phantom ceiling that wasn't there anymore.
He sucked in air too fast. It scraped going down—ozone, wet metal, salt—too sharp after the recycled flatness below. His lungs overfilled, stalled, then forced a cough out of him that bent him forward for a second before he locked his knees and stayed upright.
He tipped his head back anyway.
Rain struck his face, his eyes, his mouth. When he shut them, the dark wasn't steady—pressure pulsed behind his lids, light still flickering there. The wind didn't let him settle; it kept moving him, reminding him there was nothing close enough to brace against.
For a second, his sense of space lagged. No walls. No ceiling. Nothing close.
Sumi stepped out behind him and stopped dead. He heard her breath catch—once, sharp—then break into something like a laugh that didn't quite make it all the way out.
"Gods," she said, voice thinning in the wind. "I'd—" She stopped, swallowed, tried again. "I'd forgotten—" Another hitch of breath as the rain hit her face. "—what sky feels like."
Sky felt wrong.
Ren forced his eyes open. The clouds overhead churned too fast, too layered—dark mass over darker mass, threaded through with pale, twitching knots of something that moved like thought instead of weather. Lightning crawled sideways, stuttering across the underside of the storm, never quite striking.
His focus slipped for a second—distance hard to judge, edges blurring—then snapped back.
Cables cut across the roof in low runs. Beyond them, the antenna cluster rose—too much of it, too many angles, stacked and bolted into something that didn't resolve cleanly at a glance. Old pylons, dish shapes, skeletal frames jammed together without rhythm.
The closer he looked, the less stable it felt. Lines doubled. Edges hummed.
It made a sound—low, constant—but not just in his ears. It pressed, faintly, at the base of his skull. His balance shifted with it, just enough to notice.
Sumi squinted at it, fingers rubbing together like she was trying to catch something between them. She didn't answer right away.
"It's—" she started, then stopped. Tilted her head. "Feels like—" Another pause. "Like it's smoothing things. Pushing… edges away."
Ren swallowed, eyes still on the structure. The hum crawled along his teeth.
"Not calling anything," she said finally, less certain. "More like—" She shook her hand once. "Like it wants nothing to notice."
He let that sit a second, rain running down his face, before answering.
"Figures," he said, voice rough.
He turned toward the far side of the roof, but not cleanly—his foot slipped half an inch on the wet concrete, forcing a quick correction before he found his balance again.
Beyond the low safety wall, the city spread out in broken pieces—dark shapes, vertical lines, gaps filled with water and fog. Distance still felt wrong, like it might shift if he looked too long.
He didn't move immediately.
Wind shoved at him again. The hum pressed. The open space kept refusing to become something his body could settle into.
"We—" he started, then stopped, scanning instead. Edges first. Movement. Anything out of place.
Nothing immediate.
"We find a way down," he said, slower now. "Before they—" He cut himself off, listening. Feeling for anything changing. "—before this changes."
Sumi nodded, but she didn't step right away either. Her shoulders were tight, not loose—head turning in small, sharp movements as she took the space in piece by piece instead of all at once.
"Left corner," she said after a second, less certain than before. "Usually. Maintenance access." She squinted through the rain. "I think."
"You think," Ren echoed.
"I listen," she shot back, but there was a hitch in it—attention split between the roof and the sky and the thing humming behind them.
He took a step. Then another, slower than he wanted, testing the surface each time. Water pooled around his shoes, shifting under his weight.
They moved. Not cleanly. Adjusting as they went.
The rain thickened, then thinned again in a pulse that didn't feel entirely like weather.
Something tugged at the back of Ren's neck. Not a clear signal—just a pressure, wrong direction, wrong timing. The things in the clouds twitched in answer.
He slowed without meaning to, head turning.
On the tower's flank, far below, movement.
Two figures. Climbing.