Free Rain

It rained on the Tenderloin at 2 a.m., a full warm illegal downpour, and seventy thousand people came out into the street to stand in it, and somewhere on a rooftop three blocks east Glasswire watched them get wet and felt, for about ninety seconds, like a person who had done something good. Then her earpiece said, "They've found the relay," and the ninety seconds were over, and she was a felon again. It had not always been like this. Glasswire was old enough to remember when rain was just weather — when it fell on everyone, rich and poor and in between, with the magnificent stupid indifference of a thing nobody owned. She had been a child then. She remembered standing in it. She remembered that her mother had not had to break any laws for her to do so. Then the city had sold its weather. People said it like that, sold its weather, as though it had been one clean transaction, and it had not, it had been a thousand small ones over twenty years. The atmospheric-management contracts. The cloud-seeding rights. The drainage privatization. By the time anyone in the dry districts looked up and understood what had happened, the sky over the city belonged, lock and cloud and rainfall, to a hedge fund called Meridian Climate Partners, and Meridian had done the entirely rational thing, the thing the system was built to reward: it had started charging. Rain fell now where the subscriptions were. The Hill got its gentle scheduled showers, its green parks, its clean cool evenings. The dry districts — the Tenderloin, the Flats, the long baking sprawl of the Underline — got the runoff of nothing, got dust and heat and water trucked in at a price, got children who had never once felt rain on their faces because rain on their faces was a service their families could not afford. Glasswire ran free storms for the dry districts. That was the whole of her. That was the job, the crime, the calling, depending on which side of a Meridian boardroom you asked. She found the seams in the atmospheric-management grid — and there were always seams, a system that complicated could not help leaking — and she pried them open, and she rerouted a night's worth of someone else's paid-for rain onto the streets of people who had none. Tonight it had been the Tenderloin. Tonight seventy thousand people were standing in a downpour with their arms out, and some of them were old enough to remember and some of them, the children, the ones it was really for, were feeling it for the first time in their lives. It made her a folk hero in the Flats. It made her a line item in a Meridian threat assessment. It made her, practically speaking, a person who could not hold down a relationship, a lease, or a phone number, which her partner Den never failed to mention and never quite managed to leave over. "Found the relay," Den said again, in her ear, because she had not answered. "Glass. Meridian's enforcement is in the grid. They've back-traced the reroute to the relay on the Carson Street roof and they have a team eleven minutes out. You need to be off that rooftop and the relay needs to be a puddle of slag before they get there or they don't just lose a relay, they get the relay, and the relay has your fingerprints all the way through it." Glasswire looked down at the Tenderloin in the rain. A man was dancing. Just one man, in the middle of the wet street, badly, gloriously, the way you dance when something has been given back to you that you had stopped letting yourself want. "Eleven minutes," she said. "How far's the Carson Street roof?" A pause. Den knew that pause. Den hated that pause. "Glass. No. Carson Street is nine minutes away and the relay's slag procedure takes four. You do not have thirteen minutes inside an eleven-minute window, that is not how minutes work, that is the entire problem with you as a person—" "It's how minutes work if I stop arguing with you about minutes," Glasswire said, already moving, already swinging her bag onto her shoulder, already grinning the grin that Den had once, in a weaker and more honest moment, admitted was the reason he had never managed to leave. "Keep the channel open. Tell me if they get faster." And she went down off the rooftop into the warm illegal rain, three minutes short and a city long, to go burn the evidence before the people who owned the sky could use it to find the woman who kept giving it away.