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# Chapter 01 – Rain on the Permacrete
The rain never negotiated.
It hit the black-zone catwalk in flat, ugly percussion—permacrete drinking neon bleed from the megacity above until every surface looked like a wound that wouldn’t clot. Water sheeted off the service rail in trembling edges, caught emergency-strip blue, then stall-spill gold, then the bruised indigo of a sign that had half-failed and kept advertising something no one sold anymore. Raitis leaned one shoulder into the rail and let the weather find the seams of his neural-spike coat. Cold. Honest. Better than people.
Easy money, he told himself, and almost laughed. Easy money was how you got a jaw full of cybernetic scar and a coat that hummed when the market lied. Easy money was how hunger learned to wear a snark face and call it professionalism. He had practiced that face in reflections that never stayed still—puddles, cracked holo-glass, the wet side of a phage crate—until the snark could stand up even when the want behind it was a raw animal.
Planet P’s black zones did not do silence. They did layered noise: rain on metal, rain on stone composite, the wet slap of runoff into vertical shafts that went down until light gave up. Ventilation fans fought the water and lost in places, coughing mist that smelled of copper, mold, and the sweet-chemical tang of phage coolant. Somewhere a negative-mass pack thumped as it settled wrong in a crate. Somewhere else a wetware tray hissed under a cheap preservative field. This was not the mist-shrouded outposts of cleaner stories. This was the megacity’s underside—undercity markets strung along catwalks and service ledges like nerves exposed under peeled skin.
His crimson tattoos itched under the wet fabric—faint, not flaring, just the little market-animal awareness that said *client approaching, don’t look hungry.* Pale gray augmented eyes tracked the shaft: depth stacked in anamorphic smear, film-grain rain, high-contrast silhouettes moving on levels he would never name. Holographic stalls breathed dim inventories—false promises stacked as product codes, vials glowing sickly pale ochre, shadow alcoves where deals preferred not to be witnessed. No cathedral bass. No club liturgy. Just commerce with teeth.
He rolled his tongue against the scar ridge along his jaw and tasted metal and rain.
A vendor two platforms below shouted strain numbers like a priest who’d lost the holy and kept the volume. Another answered with a laugh that had no joy in it. Raitis ignored both. Noise was free. Attention cost. He had built a life on knowing the difference.
Hunger sat behind the sternum and made its usual inventory: profit, connection, survival—three mouths, one throat. Mocking it was cheaper than feeding it. He mocked it anyway, quietly, in the private language of a man who had learned that sincerity got you cut open in places rain couldn’t wash.
Months back—same zone, different alcove—he’d closed a premium handoff for people who answered to Havria’s circle. Numbers sharp. Favors sharper. She’d stayed for the count herself: cool-toned eyes holding his a beat too long, silver-white hair unbound under strip light, porcelain wrist near the flare of his tattoos. The deal should’ve ended at payment. It almost didn’t. Breath close enough to taste rain on scar; snark dying mid-sentence; hunger showing its stupid soft edge—until a client’s shout and market violence ripped the alcove open and left the almost unfinished. Debt unnamed. Charge still live.
And now another job that smelled like her circle.
“Of course,” he muttered in the low Latvian-lilt rasp he used when no one was paying for charm. “Of course it does.”
He watched rain run the vertical shaft like fire-water and tried not to inventory his own want. The shaft walls were layered history—old conduit scars, new emergency paint, graffiti in languages that had been market slang before they were warnings. Neon from above arrived broken, refracted, made beautiful only by accident. Planet P did that: beauty as a side effect of systems failing picturesquely.
A silhouette cut the neon. Client shape: hood, careful hands, the walk of someone who didn’t want their shoes remembered. Water beaded on the hood’s edge and fell in a steady betrayal of calm. Raitis didn’t straighten. Straightening was free hope.
“You’re late,” he said.
“You’re early,” the client answered. Voice flat, market-trained. “Premium wetware. Resonance-laced. Handling only. Pay on transfer.”
Raitis’s tattoos gave a thin answering heat—tech-emotion, or just the body being a traitor again. He kept his face bored. Water tracked off a coat spike and tapped the rail in a second tempo, as if even his clothing wanted to keep time with someone else’s pulse.
“Pay up front. I don’t do trust. Especially not with wetware that hums like it’s got a heartbeat.”
A pause. Rain filled it, patient and merciless. Somewhere below, a stall projector stuttered and recovered. The client’s fingers flexed once, almost a tic—nervous or practiced, same difference in this economy. Behind the client, a freight cage rattled down a side shaft, metal shrieking, then gone.
“Half now. Half when the dive parameters stabilize.”
“There it is,” Raitis said softly. “The word *dive* dressed like a parameter.” He held out his hand, palm up, rain striping the lines of a life spent taking and not asking what it cost inside. “Half now. If it hums wrong, I walk. If your circle’s name is on it, I still walk—unless the number makes my hunger look stupid.”
The client placed a credit chit against his palm. Cold. Clean. The number was not stupid.
Raitis’s jaw scar itched.
Havria’s cool gaze flickered behind his eyes—not a full echo, just the market-memory of almost. He crushed it under snark like a cigarette and still felt the ash. The chit still felt like a door handle. He hated doors that opened onto rooms he’d already almost entered.
“Fine,” he said. “Bring the shard to the alcove two levels down. Service bay with the cracked holographic rim. I don’t do theater in the open rain.”
“You’ll activate on-site?”
“I’ll decide if it deserves activation.” He closed his fingers on the chit. Easy money. Ha. “And if it starts singing hymns, I’m billing for the headache.”
The client’s head tilted a fraction. “The circle prefers discreet handlers.”
“The circle prefers results,” Raitis said. “Discreet is what you call a man who doesn’t scream when the product bites.”
That earned nothing. Good. Clients who bantered were worse than clients who paid. Banter meant loneliness looking for a co-signer.
The silhouette melted back into neon and vertical weather. Raitis stayed at the rail a second longer, watching the shaft drink light. Crimson ink under his coat answered with a faint pulse—not fear, not desire, just the body clocking stakes. A double of his spikes glittered in a puddle and dissolved when a boot-splash ruined the mirror. He almost missed the double. That was a bad sign he filed under *later*.
Hunger sat in his chest like a second heartbeat he refused to name.
He named it anyway, privately, because refusal without honesty was just another market lie: *You want the number. You want the almost. You want to still be the kind of animal that walks away.*
“All right,” he told the rain, the market, the dead almost in his memory. “Let’s pretend this is still a job.”
He pushed off the rail and went down into the black zones, where the stalls waited and the wetware learned new ways to lie. Each step on catwalk metal rang wet and true. Each breath tasted of phage coolant and megacity runoff and the faint mineral ghost of permacrete dust that never fully left the air. Behind him, the rain kept not negotiating. Ahead of him, a cracked holographic rim and a case that would pretend to be simple.
Raitis smiled without humor and let Planet P’s underside take him lower—into the wet dark where identity was just another commodity with a half-life, and he still pretended he was only there to sell time.
He paused one landing down where a mural of old corporate safety icons peeled under mold, eyes of cartoon workers washed blind by runoff. Even the propaganda here rotted honestly. Raitis touched nothing. Touch was how the zone collected fingerprints and stories.
