For the second time in thirty years, the entire world has fallen asleep...
Thirty years after the Greymen caused the decimation of her people, high school drop out Rain Collins spends her days learning to pickpocket and hold her booze. Yet she long...
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"Stop!" a shrill voice rang out behind me. I recognized it immediately as Miss Becky, the baker. She must have seen me lift those croissants from her stand. And I thought I had this stealth thing figured out.
Squaring my shoulders, I whirled around to face her. "Miss Becky, hi." I put on my saddest, sweetest face, tucking the croissants firmly behind my back.
"Rain Collins. Of course." Miss Becky bent down, bringing her eyes level with mine. "Do you have something of mine?"
I backed up a few inches so that I couldn't smell her breath, which stunk of just about everything but mint. "No, Miss Becky. I don't have anything of anybody's."
Her hand shot out too quickly for me to react. She seized my arm, pulling it and the croissants from behind my back. "And you paid for these?" She sneered as she wrapped the soft pastries in a cloth napkin and stuck the bundle into her apron pocket. "What are you even doing here, Rain? You can't be running around like this all the time. You should be in school. Don't sleep if no one's making you."
I was about to sneer back and tell her exactly why I wasn't in school when I realized that Miss Becky and her husband bought their eggs from my father, who still had no idea that I'd dropped out of school a month earlier. If he found out that his perfect little girl was roaming the streets and pilfering pastries like some sort of urchin, there would be hell to pay.
"Gosh," I said, looking at the sun, high overhead. "Look at that, Miss Becky. You're right. I must be late for home economics by now. I'm a mess before I get my breakfast." I pulled my last coin from my pocket and gave it to her, along with a syrupy smile. "I'm so sorry about the misunderstanding. I'll be on my way. Send sweet dreams to Mister Will. And the girls."
As I walked away, she called after me, "I'll be talking to your father this afternoon, Miss Rain. You can count on that."
Grimacing, I beat the pavement hard on the way over to The Red Dragon, one of two bars in town and the only bar open during the day. Decades ago, this city was a metropolis where hurried men in business suits and glamorous women with powerhouse personalities ruled. After our near-apocalypse happening and decades of disuse, the buildings stood nearly as tall and pristine as they did back then, but the men and women were few, their personalities bleak.
The Greymen didn't destroy our countries or our monuments or our homes. Just our people and our minds.
The Red Dragon ran out of what used to be the home of an unnecessarily elaborate and ostentatious collector. It had been named for the hulking statue of a red dragon that sat in the center of its cramped courtyard, surrounded by closely planted flower beds and a too tall iron fence.
