The rain turned from a light drizzle to a soundless curtain beyond cover, to noise like hail was falling on deck. Each drop shattered into pieces that splashed at their feet and left invisible ripples in the air, or flowed as invisible serpents in the grooves of the wood essence.

Some people enjoyed it, some got their jackets or umbrellas out, others bought them at the kiosk below. The rest huddled up to wait it out, but it seemed like they were moving into the heart of the storm.

It wasn’t really something that ruined their day—at least, not for most of them. There were few people who turned sour. Micah wasn’t one of them as he hung out with the others. It was still warm enough and the view wasn’t ruined; if anything the rain added something to it. Who could say they had seen the countryside from a riverboat under a downpour?

But the river and rain did bring up bad memories, ones that made his pulse quicken and his body alert. That his breathing didn’t join in helped as much as it hurt. It created a dichotomy that was found again in his thoughts. His body felt ready for a fight, expecting a monster to burst out of the river or fall from the sky; or maybe another passenger would freak out and start attacking people and have to be put down. He knew it wasn’t true, but it left him feeling restless, like he had to enjoy every second because any second could be the last.

It was stupid. And it made Micah want for something to burst out of the river or fall from the sky so he could just kill it already, reconquer the day, and get on with it. The feeling drained him and eventually, he gave up. He ducked out of the wet, sat down next to Ryan’s family and switched to [Affinity Sight] to enjoy the sounds and rest as his delayed exhaustion caught up to him.

He must have taken a nap. Noelle shook him awake. David stood away and pointed at something for Hannah.

“Micah, look.”

Huh?

He got up and checked over the railing. At the side of the murky river, the sailboat he had seen this morning had been dragged halfway onto land and moored with a dozen stakes. Sailors stood on deck in soaked jackets and waved at them with self-deprecating smiles. A few raised beer bottles in salute.

They were stuck until the weather passed? Would they be fine in this dangerous weather?

As they continued against the stream, he spotted someone at the edge of the deck waving over the water. Every time they moved, their influence extended and a branch or bit of debris would pass their boat by. [Shape Water]? That seemed useful.

They looked like they knew what they were doing so Micah put on a smile and waved with the rest of the passengers to empathize with their poor luck.

“We aren’t that far off from Cairn, too,” Noelle said next to him.

He looked over. “We’re not?”

“No. I’ve been there before to check out the apartment. It shouldn’t be long. An hour or two, at most … I hope.”

Micah turned to the other two to see if they had heard that, excitement welling up inside him again. He saw the same look in their expressions, stepped forward to look up, and let the rain wash away some of his after nap exhaustion. He wanted to be awake when they got there.

Then he frowned and checked Noelle’s expression. Her tone hadn’t been clear. “‘I hope’?”

It turned out to be a little over three hours due to delays. Apparently, they had been lucky to make it without any more issues at all. But while the rain had let up, its dark clouds still hung overhead and shrouded the evening in near-nighttime darkness.

That sucked, because added onto his exhaustion it meant he barely saw anything of the city at all. Cairn either didn’t have as many lanterns as Hadica or they weren’t lit yet. Because of the schedule or the lighters didn’t want to go out in the rain? Either way, the silhouettes looked large in width, but not in height.

There were gaps between each, too, and no walls. Were those all gardens, roads, and open spaces?

He tried to see as much as he could, but the shape of the city eluded him. They neared the pier and another sailor explained the departure plan on the hull below, but Micah could barely listen.

Again, he felt an unease that was worse than last time because he didn’t know why he did. He pushed up onto his tip-toes to see further and tried to make out any details in the distance, but felt like he was missing something. Just … what?

If only he could see—

Better.

“Oh.” He chuckled at himself and felt stupid. “[Lens: Nature Sight],” he said to switch back, relying on the Skill itself because he couldn’t be bothered to do the mental gymnastics required to get it to work otherwise. Even if those gymnastics were like a child’s somersault, Path-wise.

The city got a little clearer as essence filled in, especially the rain he had found so beautiful earlier. But not by much, and his heart sank again. That’s when he realized what was wrong, what he should have been able to see even with [Affinity Sight], or noticed right away.

There was barely any Tower essence around them at all, nothing there to guide him through the darkness. It left the world in undefined blobs of murky color with no order, rhyme, or reason to it all.

And they were outside of the Tower.

Micah immediately liked this place a little less, but focused on the one wisp of Tower essence he could spot close, this far out. He waved when its eyeball swiveled around to look at them. Once it noticed, the silver eyeball grew two fingers to wave back, then sped off after a muddy twig floating down the river.

It was reassuring.

They gathered up their scattered belongings and drank something before gathering near the stairs, but had to wait for everywhere else to clear out before they could head down themselves.

The boat moved into a small artificial basin with a narrow opening and stopped at a dock not much smaller than Hadica’s. Or at least, it wasn’t as small as he had expected it to be.

There were wide roads and open spaces—for handling goods, he assumed—large buildings that looked almost like guilds but could just as easily have been warehouses, and arches every few meters along some of the docks. The carved designs made him think of forests lodges.

He was a little shaky as he stepped off the ramp and said goodbye to the sailors, but had no idea where to go. At least here, the lanterns had been turned on to give them some light.

The area seemed so … open. There were no tall buildings or walls in the distance that cut off his sight. Only the dark haze of the rain clouds. And the space that was there wasn’t in such high demand. He could probably run around here for ages without having to worry about bumping into someone.

Noelle spoke to the same cargo sailor from earlier and came back looking … less than happy.

“Is something wrong?” Ryan asked. He must have noticed it as well and got there before him.

“They’re going to unload our luggage as per the deal, despite the rain, and move it to the small storehouse for temporary storage over there”—she pointed—“but we have to hire a wagon to get it to our house.”

So she was just worried about the rain? Micah wondered if they could get enough jackets and umbrellas together to cover it up, or if maybe Lisa could cobble together a spell for that.

But really, a little bit of wet wouldn’t ruin things, right? They could dry it off right after and all things not furniture were in crates or boxes.

“Wasn’t that the plan?” David asked with a slight furrow. He glowed yellow due to the rain jacket Ryan had lent him and Hannah stared up at the light and passing drops with giant eyes.

She made wordless, murmuring sounds and tried to grab the raindrops out of the air; like a cat slapping at a window with the difference that she could actually succeed if David let her reach far enough.

“Well, yes. But we were supposed to be here over an hour ago. We missed our reservation and I don’t know if we can hire a new one this late.”

Micah felt a spike of anxiety at the mention of the missed appointment. It was something his parents had put a lot of value in, but also something he wasn’t very familiar with yet as a teen. What now?

David rocked back in understanding and looked around until his eyes settled on them. “Uh, Ryan and you two, can you stick around and keep an eye on things while they carry our stuff to the warehouse?”

“Uhm—” Micah started.

“Yes, sir,” Ryan finished for him.

David smiled. “No need to ‘sir’ me. We’ll just go on to the office to check if we can get some movers or not.”

They ran off, a glow in the distance, and the rest of them idled around while they waited for the crew to move the cargo. Some workers from the harbor met up with them to help out and he didn’t know if they were co-workers or if it was some kind of contract or agreement between them.

They lifted the luggage out one section at a time, carried them down the walkway, and put them on platform trolleys to ferry over to where the passengers would wait to pick them up. If a piece of luggage missed the cut, someone would carry it themselves to make sure each section stayed together … usually. By the ease of how they lifted it all, they must have had Skills for it.

And the three of them kept watch to make sure there would be no funny business … or rather, to lament how there wasn’t a spare trolley they could use to push each other around.

His bedroll was getting wet. Micah opened his jacket to hide it underneath one of his arms.

When Ryan’s parents came back, they didn’t look any more happy than they had before.

“No?” Ryan asked.

“No,” his mom grumbled. “Everything’s either booked, was stolen away from us at the last second by other passengers, or they don’t want to drive in case the weather gets worse when it gets darker.”

“So then—”

“We had to rent overnight storage for our things and we’ll have to come back to get them tomorrow morning.”

“I want to get some things first before we leave,” David said. “Ryan, Micah, ‘want to help me out?”

They did, of course, and got some stuff out of the boxes, mainly towels, saw the rest of their belongings off, then headed away from the harbor further into Cairn. The street they reached was easily twice as big as a normal street in Hadica, but not as big as the main trading roads. The houses really were bigger, too, and most of them seemed to have either lawns out front, along the side, or gardens in the back. Or all three. They reminded Micah of his parents’ house.

And still, there was so much more space. The only downside he could see in the dark was that the street lamps were set further apart. Streaks of rain showed in their warm, yellow glows and it seemed as if they dragged the light down.

It took them nearly twenty minutes through the wet to find the house and Micah spotted more and more wisps of silver Tower essence along the way. Did they need to travel all the way out here first? But it was by the glow of David’s jacket that Noelle unlocked the door.

She still struggled with finding the lock in the dark.

“So much for perception,” David said.

His wife shot him a glare, but it was tempered by the obvious excitement on her face and in her posture just as much as it was by the wet dragging her down.

“No running away once we go inside,” she cautioned them. “We can barely see and we don’t want to drag water and mud everywhere. Change and then you can run off to explore everything.”

That last bit was all Micah had wanted to hear and he swayed into Ryan like a metronome to share in the excitement. In the darkness, the other guy looked anxious instead.

Then his mom opened the door and they saw a mirror of the vacant apartment they had left behind, this morning. But if it was, then it was one from a carnival that distorted reflections around the midriff to make people look fat.

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The bottom floor didn’t really have hallways. The rooms were connected by large, doorless openings. One led to their immediate left while stairs led up from their right along a square curve. He supposed the stretch leading up to the back door could have been called a hallway, but then again, not really because part of it was almost undivided from the kitchen in the back right.

The four parts were unequally divided. Micah only had to lean to the side to see the third room in the back left as he folded his jacket onto a towel. The food cupboard would be partially underneath the stairs, he knew from stories, and they had a sheltered back patio nearly half the width of the house along the outer kitchen wall. The sink window overlooked it similar to the setup they’d had at their old place.

Hopefully, the little bit of familiarity would help with the adjustment period as they moved in.

The shutters covering the glass windows were cracked, letting a bit of light into the near darkness as well as actual light on the street-side of the house from the street lamps outside.

David was their only other source of illumination, but the glow of his jacket began to fade as he stood in the dry. He lit the lantern Ryan had bought for his camping trip to replace it.

He had to have had the hardest time seeing anything, as he stood so close to the light and the rest of them all had Skills to aid them … and Lisa was Lisa.

When they began to dry their hair and pat themselves dry in their impatience to go exploring, she frowned, opened the door, and stepped back outside. She bundled her hair up into a ponytail, tilted her head to the side, and ran a fist down with a squeeze. The water poured out. When she stepped back inside, her hair was barely damp. She didn’t seem to mind the damage something like that would no doubt cause, or the slight curls that formed afterward.

Micah took off his wet clothes and switched into something more comfortable the older guys in the dorms also liked to wear in the evening—basically, their version of pajamas, though you weren’t allowed to call them that without being called lame or getting condemning eye rolls.

They laid out their clothes to dry and walked the bottom floor, but the left-side spaces were completely empty and the kitchen only had an empty stove, a few cupboards, and the sink in it. There wasn’t much to see.

The food cupboard was also empty, but not their packs. They had brought some loose supplies for their first night here. Everything else, they had wanted to buy in the town tomorrow. Shopping.

The basement was tiny in comparison. It wasn’t as broad as the entire house, but had two small windows looking out the garden on the left side of the house—the non-patio side—and a door to a bathroom that was basically just a cramped toilet and a sink.

They opened the shutters to check the green, but could barely make out anything except a thin fence surrounding the property. There seemed to be a small lawn between their house and the next one back. He wondered if that could be used as a community space or something.

The moment they got the all-clear, Micah raced up the stairs to check the second floor which did have a hallway. It also had the only bathroom and three rooms. One on either side and one at the back.

“Dibs,” Micah reminded Ryan the moment he made his way upstairs.

“Huh?”

“You need to call dibs on one of the rooms. Before your sister does it.”

“Uh—”

“She’ll steal the better one away from you and never let you forget it.”

Finally, Ryan put on a smile. “She’s four months old. She can’t talk.”

“I wouldn’t be sure about that. Have you seen her eyes?” he asked in a conspiratorial tone. "And those sounds she make are obviously some kind of code ..."

Ryan shook his head at his antics and checked the rooms, mumbling, “I won’t be here most of the time anyway. I’m practically a visitor …”

Micah didn’t know which room he would recommend him to take, but the one down the hall was the largest and had a small walk-in closet. That one was obviously reserved for his parents.

He checked the one opposite the stairs.

“Pro,” he said when Ryan joined him, “it faces the garden so people can climb in from there. Con, the patio takes up some of the climbing space. Pro, the edge might help with climbing up. Con, the window is right there.” He pointed out the window and down at the, for now, ‘living room’ window facing the garden below. “What if someone’s foot slips and cracks it?”

“Why are the pros and cons of climbability part of the consideration again?” Ryan asked.

“Because climbing houses is cool,” Micah said. Ryan had started that tradition. “And pro … you would have a tiny roof just outside your window. You could hang around out there or— Oh, you could climb up to the actual roof!”

“Con,” Ryan said. “What I slip, fall off, or damage either of them? Can they even hold my weight?”

“What?” Lisa asked as she finished her circuit through the dark rooms. She held a light over her hand.

Micah turned on her. “Lisa, do you think we could ferry Mave all the way out here to tell us if that tiny roof is stable enough for sitting on?” He might be able to eliminate that con, in that case.

“No climbing on the roof!” David called.

“Con,” Micah realized as he saw the smiling man climb up the stairs through the open door, “the stairs are right there. So that reduces privacy. People are more likely to just barge on in.” He leaned over. “Trust me, I’m speaking from experience.”

The innocuous comment made him frown. Thankfully, David joked, “Why would you ever need privacy?” He gave the room a curious glance before he headed down the hallway, Hannah missing from his arms.

“Con,” Lisa said, “I think this room is smaller than the other. The bathroom narrows it in.”

“That could be a good thing,” Ryan said. “If I’m not here most of the time, shouldn’t Hannah get the extra space? For like, toys and stuff? Room for activities?”

Lisa nodded without argument and stepped outside. Micah followed her to inspect option number two, their shadows dancing on the walls as she led them through the dark and empty home.

Micah only needed to take one look to his left to pick up on two ‘pros’ he had spotted earlier.

“Pro, you would have an awesome elevated space back there.” He pointed. Part of the room hung over the staircase and the corner floor had been raised one step up, just big enough for a mattress with some walking room. Something about the simple elevation made the space so much cooler than the rest of the room, and the house by extension. It was a cool place.

“Con, street lamps,” Ryan said, getting into the game now. The shine of the lamps slipped through the shutters.

“That might actually help Hannah sleep if she has nightmares or is afraid of the dark,” David commented again. Then, he asked, “What are you even doing; choosing rooms?”

Micah nodded.

He smiled. “Shouldn’t we get a say?”

He shook his head vehemently; Ryan glanced at him and then shrugged in support for himself.

“We’ll see.” He headed back downstairs, still smiling. The house was easily more than twice as big as their last home had been after all. He had reason to smile, despite the rain.

Micah awkwardly waited until he was gone before he said in a low voice, “Con, the room is right next to your parents’ closet, so that might not offer as much privacy as the bathroom. But, pro, your door would be around the corner from the stairs and you would have this awesome side window.”

He raised his hand up to present it. “People could climb in through there, too, and it would be on the opposite side of the house from your parents’ room, so they wouldn’t notice as easily.”

Ryan sighed and shook his head. “Again, why is that important?”

Micah shrugged and deflected, “I know, it’s not as cool as climbing in through the backyard—”

“No, not—”

“But this way, people can also throw pebbles at your window from the street outside to get your attention.”

“Do not throw pebbles at my window,” Ryan suddenly switched topics, previous issue forgotten, according to plan, “If they scratch the glass—”

He didn’t finish.

“Is that something people do?” Lisa asked, sounding bemused. She checked the street from the window.

Micah nodded. “Well, guys normally do it for serenades, but girls can throw pebbles, too. Nothing wrong with that, right?” He turned to Ryan and nudged him with his elbow in the side. “Eh, eh?”

He got a scowl in return.

“Ah,” Lisa said as if she had only just caught on, and chuckled. “I just remembered what a serenade was. Cool, so you want this room?”

“No,” Ryan said and headed for the door. “I don’t care. I’ll let my parents decide what they want.”

He had sounded a little too vehement, that he didn’t care. Did he really think he could possibly only be a visitor here?

Then they’d just have to make it as homely as possible for him before they had to leave in a few days. Micah followed him out and headed downstairs, where Noelle had lit a few of the wall lamps.

David had put the rest of the fire potion can on the stove and lit it to cook over the fire. He already got the small net of potatoes out that they had brought with them and turned to Micah to say, “Hey, Mr. Knife Proficiency. You want to help me peel these?”

He smiled, “Sure.”

“And the rest of you can get to helping out as well,” he called out. “Ryan and Lisa, you think you can manage a second cooking flame?”

They ate their first dinner in the new and empty home of the Payne family sitting on the ground around a camping lantern while the rain pitter-pattered overhead and street light spilled in through the windows.

It wasn’t much, it was cooked on cans and summoned flames with barely enough ingredients and cutlery, and there wasn’t enough for seconds, but it was home cooked with friends and family and that made it great. Especially since it reminded Micah of the Tower exam.

Even with the rain and rough floor, these were clearly the better conditions to spend the night in than that opressive heat and rock, and nothing against the other four, but the people here were clearly the people he would rather spend time with.

“This reminds me of our expedition,” he commented between bites and David pushed his eyebrows up with a smile.

“Oh, yah’?” he asked with a mouth half-full.

Noelle looked over, too. She had a single jar of baby food out and fed Hannah with a tiny spoon. It looked like apple sauce or something similar.

Micah nodded eagerly and tried to find some fun stories he could tell about the trip that they hadn’t heard yet.

Ryan even joined in and Lisa told them about her exam. They all came out of their shells a little, after the long trip, rain, and exhaustion. The room empty of both furniture and day-to-day expectations made it easy to find other ways to pass the time.

This was actually shaping up to be one of his favorite Spring Cleaning weeks he had ever spent, up there with the times his brother or sister had come to visit and he’d gotten to annoy them, or William.

“But this is better?” David asked after a comment. About the Tower, not those family events.

Micah nodded eagerly.

“Really?” Noelle asked. “I wouldn’t have expected that, Micah rather being here than in the Tower …”

It was obvious bait and Micah took it. “Well, I mean, of course, I would love to be in the Tower right now—”

“Careful,” she teased him.

“Being locked out sucks,” he went on. “But this is a different kind of awesome, right? Ryan?”

He turned to the other guy, who stopped his fork halfway to his mouth and slowly, and very reluctantly, shrugged, then nodded in confirmation. By the awkwardness of the gesture, Micah knew it was genuine.

His mom beamed. “I’m glad. I mean, nothing against our old place and you can’t really see now, but this is a much better place to live, and especially to raise a child in.”

Micah still had his eyes half on Ryan. He looked personally insulted by the comment and his expression shifted to sulking.

His father caught it, too. “What, you disagree? Isn’t this place better?”

Ryan shrugged.

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer right away.

“You’re just being jealous,” Noelle said with a smile. “Of course, we’ll always love our old place but isn’t this exciting?”

Hannah, for one, flapped her arms, Lisa chuckled and covered her mouth at the sight, and Micah was smiling anyway.

Ryan gave in with another nod and swallowed. “It is,” he said. “I guess I’ll just miss the old place …”

And …? Micah thought. He waited, but the guy didn’t say anything more. It felt like there should have been more there. ‘The old place and … you,’ maybe? Whatever it was, his parents didn’t push him to say. Some things were obvious, even if they were left unspoken.

“Of course, we will too,” David started, “but—”

“The fireplace is gone,” Ryan interrupted him.

“Huh?”

He hesitated and twisted his body around to gesture at the room around them. “There’s no fireplace, not in the wall or a metal one like you had.”

“Oh,” David said and the silence that followed that made it clear his parents had no immediate counterargument. Not that there was anything to counterargument; if there was none, there was none.

Micah only noticed then, too. “Won’t it get cold in the winter?”

Noelle finally smiled and shook her head. “We have your rocking chair for that. And Hannah has her cot, too.”

“And we can wrap ourselves in lots of blankets and huddle for warmth,” David added. “Or, y’know, we could just buy a new one?”

“Eventually,” she added.

They couldn’t afford anything they wanted right away, she meant. This place already was a stretch until their new jobs started up. David would only be working part-time until the train station was finished. Pros were, he could get the hang of things until then and had more time for Hannah. Con, he wouldn’t earn as much.

“We won’t freeze,” he rephrased.

Ryan seemed to accept that, but his expression remained neutral at best until his dad nudged him.

“And think about it, tomorrow we’ll get to move all our stuff in and make this place our own. That goes for you, too.”

Ryan put on a small smile.

“I’ve already been thinking about how we will set things up,” Noelle said, looking around as if she could imagine it. “We’ll probably have to move things around a few times before the day is over to be sure.”

“You say that like it’s a problem. But we’re strong and we don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill up the house. We’ll have plenty of space to move.”

“Plenty of space to put new things …” Lisa commented. It almost sounded like a question, as if she was unsure if she was allowed to butt into the couple’s conversation.

But they nodded.

“Groceries first, though,” Noelle reminded them. “Tomorrow. After we get our things from the dock. We’ll have a long day ahead of ourselves.”

“Apropos long day, one of the first things I want to buy is a proper grill. Look out there, we have our own garden now.” Sitting there with his legs crossed on the floor and a plate in hand instead of a table, David’s smile looked almost child-like. “We could fire it up whenever we want.”

“In the summer,” his wife mused.

“With a few beers on the patio, enjoying the heat …” he went on and smiled at Ryan. “You’ll come to visit us for a few weeks during the summer break, after all. We’ll have to get one by then.”

“And you can come visit us going up the river like we did today on any of the lesser holidays that make extended weekends,” his mom added and looked at Lisa and him. “You two, too.”

Ryan glanced at them and finally shook off whatever jealousy or trepidations he still hung onto. He smiled, and Micah watched it to make sure that one was genuine as well. It was.

He looked away. Already, he couldn’t wait for that promise of summer. Or the promise of a long day of work tomorrow, either.