Free After the Red Rain by Barry Lyga, Robert DeFranco

just delayed gratitude for his rescue earlier.
    He turned and looked at her, almost as if he’d read her mind. A breeze blew her hair across her face, and he swept it aside for her.
    “Where did this come from?” he asked, and she knew what he was talking about. His gaze on her scar burned; she turned away and rearranged her hair to cover it again.
    “I didn’t mean to—”
    “I don’t know where it came from,” she said. “It’s always been there. It’s just part of me, is all.”
    “You shouldn’t hide it. There’s nothing wrong with—”
    “I have to hide it. I hate it. Other people hate it. Why should they have to look at it?”
    “They shouldn’t treat you like that,” Rose said. “And you shouldn’t believe them.”
    She realized she was touching the scar through the shield of her hair and jerked her hand away as if she’d infected herself. She didn’t want to think about her deformity. Not now.
    “I have to get back to L-Twelve,” she said, not wanting to. “I have to deliver my sling-bag. And it’s close to curfew.” Off in the distance, the sky lit up in alternating bursts of orange as the drones flashed the thirty-minute curfew warning. She would have just enough time to get back.
    She stood to leave, and he got up as well, but otherwise did not move, staring out at the skyline.
    “Are you coming?” she asked.
    “Not yet,” he said.
    “Curfew.” No other words were needed. Curfew was an inviolable fact of life.
    Rose tilted his head to one side. It was as though she’d fed him the idea of curfew and he was trying to decide if he liked the taste. Standing by the edge of the rooftop, his form outlined by the gray light of twilight, he smiled at her confidently. “I’ll be all right,” he said.
    Just before she climbed back down, she looked over at him, a bundle of green against the skyline.
    “Will I see you again?” she called.
    He waited so long to answer that she thought he either hadn’t heard or was ignoring her. But at last he answered, with great difficulty, “I don’t know.”
    That made her sadder than she expected. It was a longer walk back to L-Twelve than it would have otherwise been. She let Rik scan her bag at the door and left quickly, not wanting to see or speak to Jaron.
    Still, as Deedra fell asleep that night on her government-issued mattress, safe under the webbing of government-issued roach netting, she did so with a smile on her face. And with the metal flower perched on the edge of her bed, close at hand.

CHAPTER 6
    N ight falls, and the City stretches for hundreds of miles in every direction. Rose feels it around him. Even with his eyes closed, he is acutely aware of the dark buildings and the lassitude of the masses within, sitting or lying down, lit only by the strobing lights of cracked, ancient thumb-flicked touch screens. The City itself is a dead body—mute concrete, dumb steel, insensate alloys. Scurrying on it and in it and through it are the people.
    Fog has rolled in, gray and stinking. He stands in it, arms outstretched, taking in what the sky has to give.
    Above hover the drones, insect-silent and flat black to blend into the cloudy night sky. Rose senses them, too, unnatural eddies in the damp night air, crisscrossing the sky endlessly, seeking, searching, seeing, reporting.
    A drone glides overhead, far beyond rock-throwing range, scanning the ground for curfew violators. Rose stands directly in its sweep and does not fear.
    It is long past curfew.
    The drones cannot see Rose. He cannot see them, either, but he knows of their presence.
    The air smells of old copper and rust and ozone and feces. Rose imagineshe can peer through the cloud cover and see the stars. They are still out there, after all. The stars, the moon, the endless horizon of the universe.
    He breathes in deeply. Any breath is good, no matter the foul taste that lingers. Breath means life. Life is good, for no other reason than it is life.
    With another deep breath, Rose