Chapter 12: Casket City — The Syndicate's Cornerstone

The transit-gate deposited them in an alley that smelled of wet concrete, old cigarettes, and something underneath both of those that had no name but that Desta recognized immediately, the way you recognize a word in a language you learned by surviving it.

Rain.

Not Varenthal's light-catching drizzle that bent into prisms around oath-calcite walls. Not the theoretical precipitation of a network simulation. Real rain, purposeful and indifferent, the kind that had been falling on this city since before anyone living had thought to ask it to stop. It came down in vertical curtains and pooled in the gutter seams and ran in thin black rivers toward a harbor Desta could smell but not see, salt and diesel and the particular decay of things the water had been working on for years.