After the Red Rain by Barry Lyga, Robert DeFranco

on,
predate the Red Rain as a mythological construct
.
    She frowned.
    Any of them could be true. You have to decide which one you believe.
That’s what Caretaker Hullay had said to her.
    And she had said that she didn’t want to
decide
what she believed; she wanted to
know
what was true.
    And, she realized suddenly, she still did.
    There was nothing she could do, though. Nowhere to turn. The wikinets were useless: She would accomplish nothing other than a massive headache and eyestrain from flicking through them. None of them jibed with any other one, and some of them—she knew from experience—would change in an instant, having been reedited or modified from what she’d seen just minutes earlier.
    She sighed and gave up. It was nearing the end of the month, and her rations were running low again. Always. Every month, no matter how much she starved herself and no matter how parsimoniously she doled out her bandwidth, she hit the end of the month with two or three foodless days and little to no bandwidth.
    Time to scavenge. She’d been lax all month and was now paying the price. Maybe she could find something to trade for someone’s excess ration. Maybe she could find a nonblue rat out there. Maybe…
    She thought of those eggs from so long ago. Her mouth watered at the cruel perfection of her memory. She would never get
that
lucky again.
    She slipped on her poncho and her mask, as well as her threadbare, old backpack, and headed out. Between factory shifts, the streets were nearly empty. She marveled at how the Territory could be so congested, so packed with people, yet appear desolate. Staying inside was the safer course, the easier course.
    Making her way toward the Wreck, she was determined to climb the bridge today. This time nothing would stop her. And even if she found it to be picked over and barren, at least she could say she’d accomplished something.
    But by the time she made it to the Wreck, she was surprised to find Rose there, as if waiting for her. He leaned against the turned-over hulk of an old car, the hem of his long green coat nearly touching the cracked, dusty asphalt. Maskless.
    “What are you doing here?” she asked him.
    “Just waiting.”
    “No. I mean…” She broke off. She meant why was he here, waiting for her, but in that instant, she realized what she really wanted to know was something else, something more important. “Why are you
here
?” she asked. “In Ludo Territory. Why did you cross the river?”
    He shrugged. “Should we talk while we walk?”
    They began to thread their way through the Wreck. After many minutes of silence, she came to understand that he was not going to volunteer anything.
    “Why did you come here?”
    “It’s not why I came that matters,” he told her. “It’s why I stayed.”
    She considered that. “So… are you a spy, then?”
    “No.”
    She laughed. “You would be a pretty bad spy if you answered
yes
to that.”
    He paused and barked out a surprised laugh. “That’s true!” he said, as though he’d never considered it before. And something in the innocence of his answer made her believe him.
    “How come you hardly ever touch people?” she asked. “Why do you always stand away from me, like now?”
    At that, he nodded slowly, climbing atop the shell of a dead truck.He towered over her, set off in relief from the backdrop of clouds above and behind him. “I’m afraid I’ll hurt people,” he said.
    She offered him a hand. “Help me up.”
    Hesitating at first, he reached down and took her hand. She didn’t need the hand up to climb something as prosaic as a truck, but she was making a point.
    “Here I am,” she said, now standing next to him. “Not hurt.”
    “Yes, well…” Suddenly self-conscious, he withdrew his hands and stuck them back in his pockets. The truck underfoot became fascinating, and he stared down at it.
    There was something wounded and pained beneath him. “Have you done that?” she asked gently. His