The rain smelled of salt and something else—rotting kelp, maybe, clinging to the stone walls. Twilight bled across Haven’s harbor, a bruised purple and grey where the jagged cliffs met the restless sea. It wasn’t a pretty harbor, not anymore.…
The rain tasted like rust. It hammered against the corrugated iron roof of G Catedral da Lua Negra, a constant, insistent rhythm that mirrored the frantic beat of my pulse. Lisbon clung to me, slick and fragrant with wet stone…
The rain in Havenwood tasted like ash and regret. It clung to the slate roofs, slicked the cobblestones into a bruised purple sheen, and smelled like damp wool and forgotten promises. I’d been tracking this for weeks—not a crime, exactly,…
The rain tasted like metal and salt, slick on Elisse’s skin. It hammered against the corrugated iron roofs of Ossa Bay’s marketplace, a rhythmic percussion that blended with the creak of wooden carts and the guttural calls of merchants hawking…
The rain tasted like static. Old Man Tiber, they called him, though nobody knew if he *was* an old man anymore, or just a construct wearing the skin of one. His shop, a cubbyhole wedged between a noodle stall and…
The chrome of Neo-Kyoto slicked with perpetual drizzle. Rain wasn’t water anymore—nano-bots, designed to cleanse the air, but leaving a greasy film on everything. I navigated the market, dodging projections shimmering from every storefront. Old Christmases, graduations, first kisses—memories for…
The rain slicked alloy of the undercity clung to Anya’s boots. Voidberries, bruised purple, rolled underfoot as tech hustlers huddled in the decaying nanogrime sprawl, their voices murmurs lost in the static hiss of failing power conduits. She needed a…
The slick, obsidian tide crept up the cracked plasteel of Fremont Street, reflecting the fractured neon of a dying city. Rain wasn’t water anymore, not here. It was data – corrupted, fragmented, *wrong* – leaching from the ruptured servers beneath…