It’s while she’s in the library rereading an old book, that Chie hears the alarm. The announcement that follows is almost unnecessary—she’s heard the words and known what they mean since the age of 5. Regardless, the announcement is the only sound in the dimly lit room, and as the message reverberates in the large library walls, she can’t help but echo the words to a point. Regardless, the dull tones are drawn out with technical jargon and calls for calmness when the actual point can be summed up in 4 words: The rain is coming.

When Chie opens the library door, he father rushes past, and she can’t help but flinch a bit, and in the intervening moment that he’s gone, she absentmindedly touches the almost healing bruise on her arm. She braces herself when he comes back and tells her to barricade the entrances and windows. She walks off to the patio to do so, almost tempted to question the necessity of barricading a house a few stories up, but she knows as well as anyone how high the water can get. Despite the height, her house is actually one of the shortest ones, barely meeting the minimum requirements.

Before she gets to her work, she stands outside on the patio for a minute, and as she looks out to the street below, she feels like she is on the edge of a cliff. She makes good time in barricading the door to the patio, finding pride in the feat despite having practiced barricading for years. After the patio is the barricading off the room that leads to it, and after she’s finished the first door, her mother comes and joins her. It’s a bit of a puzzle, really, to try and find exactly how to barricade all the necessary doors without being caught inside. However, Chie’s been through the process enough times in drills (information she never thought she’d have to use), so she spends the time with her thoughts. The ever-constant warnings and informational videos only ever covered the beginning of the rain coming, and the history of it coming, without ever mentioning what happened after it came with the safety measures in place. Chie had always thought it to mean that no one actually knew what to do after, but it had always been something to grimly laugh over. She didn’t feel like laughing now. However, despite the uncertainty, when her mother calls Chie her little boy and she accidentally hits her bruise on a table, she knows of two things for sure.

Her mother leaves Chie soon after they finish barricading the house, so she decides to grab a book she left in the bathroom the other day. While she’s under the room’s bright lights, Chie tries to avoid looking at her agonizingly short hair in the mirror as she moves to grab her book--a Sci-fi novel about a parched earth. For a moment, she pauses, and wonders how long the supplies inside the cabinet are going to last. As she’s exiting, she gets a text from Zara, asking is she’s okay, and after replying and inquiring the same before Zara has to go and they both sign each other a heart.

Zara always jokingly calls Chie ‘wildfire’, and while Chie usually denies it, she feels it can’t help but ring true when she un-barricades the front door and makes her way to the street with only an hour to the fall. Aside from the forthcoming rain, she doesn’t mind the cool fog and darkened skies; it’s rather nice. Nicer than the blisteringly hot days with light bright enough to give her headaches, anyway. As she walks along the city streets, any buildings she can see in the fog are barricaded, with only the teleportation entrances still open. Dimly shimmering wires run ahead, and moving closer Chie can see each building, in the typical steel and glass. The time she spends pacing along the streets almost seems endless, with the clouds rolling overhead, and she thinks she could almost make it to Zara’s one last time—and then the alarm sounds that the rain is nearly upon the city, leaving Chie to run back to to her complex. She gets to the house’s entrance with five minutes to spare, and pain sprouts in her chest as she re-barricades the door.

She enters as silently as she left, moving to one of the outer rooms on the upper floor (danger be damned) and exchanges quiet words with her friends over text as the announcer counts down the seconds. She doesn’t even notice that the timer has hit zero until she can’t reach her friends anymore and finds the announcer calmly repeating that despite recent innovations allowing for communication in the air, all systems have been taken offline in order for the government to do work in preparation for after the storm. Chie turns to the sealed window and watches the water come in though the structured ducts without end, growing and wild. It swirls around and rises, and there’s almost something comforting about the movement.

Overhead, the announcer has changed to comforting the populace, emphasizing ‘maintaining normalcy’ in the event they’re in. The announcer goes on for what feels like forever, explaining it through nuclear families, maintaining order, and who knows what else. Chie lets it all flow over her and mix with the muffled sound of rushing water, sitting on the floor numb and cold. It’s far from the first time she’s heard someone speak endlessly about what counts as normal; she just knows that she’s never been it. Her entire world of the bright and shining city has now shrunk to the confines of her steel house, and in the dim lighting of the room, it isn’t much longer that it shrinks a little bit more.

She doesn’t know if she’ll ever live to the end of the rain, or what’s going to happen now, or if she’ll ever see Zara again, or if she’ll ever be able to live in the open, or how she’ll even make it through.

She sits in the near darkness, though, and tries, and tries, and tries.