Chapter 225: Rain Check, Please

DOVE’S POV

Nobody moved for a moment. Rain ticked against the porch roof, ordinary enough to make the red water below it look even worse.

Then a man near the fence held out his cup.

"Don’t drink that," Dove said.

He looked at the clear drops falling into it. "It’s the dirt making it red."

"Then you can have the dirt explain itself before you swallow it. Put the cup down."

Thorne stepped beside her, and the man lowered his hand. Dove hated that it helped. She appreciated it anyway.

She pulled their food back from the porch edge and covered the bowl. Edrik went to tell Cal while she looked at the first streak running beneath the truck. The water seemed clear until it struck the ground, then red spread through it like something had been stirred in.

"Sprout, tell me something useful."

"Keep your drinking supply sealed."

"I was hoping for something after the obvious part."

"I cannot identify an unknown environmental change from appearance alone."

That was sensible. She wanted to throw something at it.

The hardware owner came outside with two clean jars. Dove asked him to hold one under the roof edge and leave the other on a clean board away from the puddles. They watched without touching the water. The results were confusing enough that she stopped anyone from calling either jar safe.

"We don’t know what we’re looking at," she said. "That’s all we’ve learned."

A woman might be rare here, but apparently saying nobody knew something still required arguing with three men who had decided their first guess was a fact.

Dove watched the drops cling to the jar, waiting for an answer that never became clear enough to trust. She wanted to be clever about this. Being clever apparently included knowing when guessing could hurt somebody.

The owner backed her, carried the jars to an empty shelf away from the drinking cups, and hung a warning over the outdoor sink. He kept the taps supplied from his covered tank separate from the rain barrels until he could ask someone who knew more.

That was a useful decision. It did not solve the weather, and Dove was grateful he understood the difference.

Cal kept the truck in the fenced lot, checked its canvas cover, and tied a waterproof sheet over the exposed cargo before checking the road reports. The shower had made the lower turn slick, and nobody could explain what the red runoff would do in the ditches. He chose to wait. The passengers complained, then looked at the water and found quieter things to complain about.

Dove carried their sealed bottles upstairs with Thorne. Edrik brought the remaining lunch, the bags, and the radio. The room smelled warm, but the window faced the dry back lot and the floor was clean. She could work with clean.

She sat on the bed and stared at the sandwich she had stopped eating.

"I wanted rain," she said.

Thorne set down the bag. "I know."

"Not this. Just normal, boring rain. The kind you complain about because your shoes get wet."

Neither man corrected her tone. Neither told her they were lucky to have shelter, although they were, and she knew it. Sometimes being lucky was still exhausting.

Edrik sat beside her, leaving enough space that she could decide whether to close it. She leaned against him. Thorne pulled up the chair and finished dividing the fruit before passing her a piece.

She ate because she was hungry, not because feeling better had suddenly become her responsibility.

Outside, the shower ended. Heat rose from the wet parking lot, heavier than before. The air did not cool so much as become damp enough to wear. Flies gathered near the covered bins behind the diner.

"We’re going to need more netting," Dove said after a while.

"For the bed?" Thorne asked.

"For everything that currently thinks biting me is a career."

He smiled, and she was glad she had made him do it. She was not ready to laugh at the red water. The bugs were still available.

Once the rain stopped, Dove went downstairs to the owner’s clearance shelf. She asked which things he was giving away and crouched to look beneath a stack of empty boxes.

"Three useful finds stored," Sprout offered as she inspected the shelf. "Forty-eight normal coins. You still have today’s road-storage task available."

"Something I can finish without a man telling me he’s my destiny. Lovely."

They used the afternoon to check their supplies and the ordinary road conditions Cal could confirm. Dove stored sound smaller finds from the owner’s marked clearance shelf after getting permission, including two clean screens they could cut to fit a window and a sealed packet of heavy tape. Sprout credited the forty-eight coins when she stored the third find. She kept collecting after it finished, adding sound dish towels and a spare fan cord. Sleeping without insects mattered more than stopping at a neat little number.

Edrik worked with the radio for a few short attempts, stopping when the effort made him rub his temple. The book’s exercise did not let him choose what was being broadcast. When reception came through, they listened to a mechanic advertising repairs and a man trying to locate a missing dog.

Dove found that oddly comforting. Somewhere, people still cared about ordinary things.

She made a simple plan with Cal for the next morning: ask two arriving drivers about the eastern loop, inspect the nearest flooded section in daylight, and return to Base B if the road held. She did not need to find another exciting stop. She wanted her room, their pickup, and a fan that belonged to them.

That night, they ate chicken, rice, and green beans from the diner kitchen. The owner cooked the food he could keep safely and stopped selling anything that had sat too long in the heat. Dove respected him more for the smaller menu.

In the morning, Thorne brought breakfast to the porch while she stood looking at the dried red marks across the gravel. He put her mug exactly where her hand expected it to be.

"Sit," he said gently. "You can glare at it while you eat."

She sat. Edrik joined them with eggs and enough toast that nobody had to pretend a small plate suited a man his size. For a little while, she let the warm food, familiar hands, and shade be enough.

Then their radio crackled from the table.

A road worker described red puddles outside a settlement miles north. Another voice answered from the opposite direction.

Dove looked down at her breakfast, then toward the stained road beyond the gate.

Whatever this was, it had not stopped at their parking lot.