Always End In Rain

“Why…Why does it always end in the rain?”

The words slipped out of her before she even knew she was thinking them. The city around her blurred into streaks of silvers and neons. The rain fell like a curtain, closing over the final act, but there was no applause. Just the sound of water as it pattered off her coat, soaked through her gloves, slipped down the back of her neck. It never bothered her. She’d done all her work in weather like this.

Rain blurred vision.’

Rain blurred guilt.

Rain washed away blood.

Rain made it easier to not see her own reflection.

She stood beneath the sagging awning of an abandoned tram station, boots sunken into glossy black puddles, formed where rain washed the oil from the streets. Thunder crashed through the silence like a warning. She ignored it, just like she ignored most things that try to warn her. That was the job. That was what she had to do.

“In the name of real hope,” they told her. “In the service of a better world.”

She believed them. God, she used to believe them.

Hope is such a beautiful lie.

Her targets always used it like a weapon…preachers, politicians, philanthropists, all the kind who promised salvation to the masses, as long as they simply obeyed. Hope had the power to save lives. But in their hands hope was a cage. And she…she cut those wide open.

She exhaled. Breath misting in the cold, wet air. She didn’t need to check the communicator on her wrist to know someone was watching, waiting for her to be done wallowing. They hated when she “got philosophical”, as they called it. But she was allowed this moment – this one sliver of introspection under the weeping sky – because she had just completed her third mission in as many nights. Three figures who used hope as a cudgel, three cages broken open.

She expected a few more moments of silence. Instead, the communicator blinked.

UPLINK: NEW MISSION. PRIORITY LEVEL: FINAL

Her jaw tightened.

Final?

She tapped to open the file. A single name, a single location.

The Dry Crescent.

A region that hadn’t seen rainfall in twelve years. A place where water was rationed by the milliliter and guarded like sacred treasure. A place where the man she was ordered to kill had hoarded the region’s remaining reserves for reasons that officially, were selfish and tyrannical.

Rain dripped off her lashes.

Funny, she thought, how they always called people tyrants right before she put them in the ground.

She crossed dunes, sands cascading down ancient wind swept mounds. She passed rusted pipes that once carried water to thriving cities. She stepped over carcasses of machines that had meant to save them. Everything was dust, everything was sun-bleached, everything was starved.

Her world taught her one thing about starvation:

Not everything that staves is cruel.

But everything that starves learns cruelty.

The stronghold stood alone on the horizon like a confession.

She infiltrated it the way she always did – quiet, clean, efficient.

But the deeper she traveled into its chambers, the more the mission soured in her gut. There were no slaves. No soldiers. No gaudy throne built from the labor of thousands. No stolen luxury. Just… machinery. Tanks. Pipes. A system designed to store unimaginable quantities of water.

She expected excess.

She found preservation.

And then she found him.

A thin man with tired eyes and sand-cracked skin, bent over a filtration unit humming softly in the dim light.

“No guards?” she asked, stepping from the shadows.

He didn’t flinch.

He just offered an exhausted smile. “If someone is coming to kill me, guards won’t stop them.”

“Then you know who I am.”

“I’ve known for weeks.”

She raised her gun.

He looked at her. His eyes held something soft, almost like pity. Not the fear, or guilt, or desperation, she had come to know from these types.

“Tell me why,” she said.

He gestured to the massive tank behind him; clear walls, full to the brim with shimmering blue. “Because…the rains never stopped. Not really. They just moved.”

“What?”

“This region’s drought…it’s artificial. The companies you work for redirected atmospheric condensers to keep the capital green. They left us to starve. I’ve been storing and distributing water in secret. If they knew…well I suppose they do know.” He gazes fixes upon her.

This broke something within her.

Something inside her, something she always thought was written in stone – cracked clean through.

She lowered the gun.

“There’s got to be another way,” she whispered.

He smiled again, soft and resigned. “I wish that were true.”

The alarms began screaming. Red light filling the chambers.

Her employers had arrived. They never intended for her to investigate. They intended for her to confirm the kill.

He pushed her aside as the blast tore through the chamber. Water tanks ruptured, glass exploded out like razor shrapnel. She scrambled to him, dragging his bleeding body out from under a collapsed pipe. His breaths were shallow, eyes glossing over.

Water from the broken tanks streamed down his forehead, but he didn’t seem to feel it. “I just wanted them to have this…” he whispered. “A future with water.” His eyes slipped shut before she could answer.

Her throat closed. She tried to stop the bleeding. She couldn’t.

His body went still. She stayed there, kneeling in the growing red pool of stolen water, surrounded by the ruins of his life’s work.

Above them, the sky was cloudless and blue, clearly visible through the hole in the ceiling. Even under this clear sky, water began to rain down over her. The first drop hit her cheek. Then another. Then a thousand more.

Rain poured over his lifeless body, over the broken tanks, over her shaking hands. No, not rain, just water from the broken tanks. Water he stole to save millions, now lost to the desert who drank it greedily.

“Why…why does it always end in the rain?”