The hollow bloom

Day One, Six Days Before The Outbreak, Night, Downtown District Kai's POV The rain over the city was the kind that didn't announce itself. No thunder, no warning, just a grey persistence that soaked through everything by the time I noticed it had started. I noticed most things now, out of habit rather than purpose. It was the only piece of my old life I hadn't managed to shed, the reflex of cataloguing a room the second I walked into it. Exits. Faces. Anything out of place. Three years since I'd had a badge, and the instinct still fired like a phantom limb. The convenience store was empty except for the clerk half asleep behind the counter and a couple arguing quietly over ramen flavors two aisles over. I grabbed a bottle of water, a pack of cigarettes I didn't really want, and got in line. "Wait. I know you." The voice came from behind me. I didn't turn around immediately. I'd learned not to. "You're that detective. The one from the news a few years back. The... the Ashworth case, right? That was you?" I set my items on the counter and said nothing. The clerk was watching now too, the sleepy boredom in her eyes sharpening into something more curious. "Man, you cracked that case in what, four days? I remember watching the press conference. You were like a machine." The man's grin faltered slightly as he took in my expression, flat, unreadable, tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "You alright?" "Wrong guy," I said. It wasn't a good lie. My face had been on every major news outlet for the better part of a year, first for the arrest that made me something like a celebrity, then for the scandal that unmade me just as fast. But most people had the decency not to push once you gave them an exit. This man wasn't most people. "No, no, I'm sure it's you..." I paid for my water and cigarettes, and left the change on the counter. I was out the door before the bell above it finished ringing, rain swallowing me within three steps, and I didn't look back to see if he followed. I didn't think about the Ashworth case anymore. I'd trained myself out of it, the same way I'd trained myself out of checking the news, out of flinching at cameras, out of caring what a stranger in a convenience store thought they knew about me. What I hadn't trained myself out of, what I doubted I ever would, was the particular hollow ache of being recognized for the best thing I'd ever done, by people who had no idea it was also the reason my life had ended. Three years ago, the whole world had known my name. Now I just wanted it to stop meaning anything. I lit a cigarette under the awning of a shuttered bookstore and watched the rain fall over a city that had already moved on from me. A city that, in exactly six days, would stop being ordinary at all.