The Man in the Rain
770 Words
He hated the way cities smelled after midnight.
Rain did not clean them. It only pushed the stench around: wet asphalt, old smoke, cheap perfume dried into clothes, fear soaked into concrete and never fully gone.
From his place by the fence, Baran could smell all of it.
He stood just outside the the circle of the parking lot lights, where the shadows were thick enough to hide the wrongness of his posture. To any human eye – and most cameras – he was just another dark shape beside the metal bars. A man, maybe, waiting for a ride, smoking a cigarette that had gone out long ago.
He wasn’t smoking. He was counting heartbeats.
There were at least three different rhythms inside the building tonight.
One was slow and steady: someone almost asleep at their desk, probably on another floor.
One was light, fast, a little uneven: someone tired but stubborn, forcing themselves to stay awake.
Elif, he thought.
He didn’t have to see her to know. Three years was a long time to listen to the same heartbeat from different distances.
The third rhythm bothered him.
It wasn’t faster or louder than any other heart. It was too controlled. Too deliberate. Like a metronome pretending to be human.
Baran shifted his weight, boots sinking a little in the mud. Rain slid down the back of his neck. The muscles under his skin tensed in waves, answering a constant itch that never went away anymore.
Not now, he told the thing inside him. Not here.
The building sat on the hill like a bright white tooth in a dark mouth. Fences, cameras, badges, guards. Humans liked to think barriers meant something.
He had learned, painfully, how easy most barriers were to break.
Still, he stayed outside. That was the rule.
Watch. Do not enter.
He hadn’t written the rule down anywhere. It existed only in his head, tied to memories he refused to replay in full: a field in the east, a mission that was never written in any official report, blood on dry grass, a bite that should have killed him but didn’t.
Instead, it had killed something else.
Baran raised his eyes to the tall windows of the lab floor. From this angle, all he saw was his own distorted reflection, the pale glow of computer screens and, for a second, the profile of a woman leaning over a microscope.
Elif.
He knew her gait now, the way she tilted her head when she read, the way she chewed the inside of her cheek when she was anxious. He shouldn’t have known. He hadn’t planned to.
The first time he’d seen her, she had been carrying a stack of files twice too big for her arms, almost dropping them at the front gate while arguing with the guard about some missing authorization.
He’d been on the other side of the street then, just another coat in the crowd, trying to pretend his ears weren’t picking individual conversations from fifty meters away. Her voice had cut through everything else. Clear. Sharp. Angry in a way that made him want to laugh.
Now he could pick her heartbeat from a building full of strangers.
The lab cameras turned with an almost imperceptible motion, searching for movement. Baran glanced at the one above the main door and looked away before it could catch the strange yellow shimmer in his eyes.
The sky growled with distant thunder.
Inside, something changed.
He couldn’t see it, but he felt it. Like the drop in air pressure before a storm. A shift in the texture of the noise. Something in the building’s hum went out of tune.
Baran tilted his head. The itch under his skin sharpened.
For a brief moment, he smelled stone and dust and very old blood. Not the thin, bright smell of fresh wounds, but something deeper, buried. The way forgotten tombs would smell, if anyone ever opened them.
He had smelled it before.
In dreams that weren’t just dreams. In half-remembered nightmares where a king with no face stood on a burning hill, and whole villages vanished between one heartbeat and the next.
Tonight, that same ancient scent threaded through the stainless steel and antiseptic of the lab.
“How are you here?” he murmured under his breath. “You’re not supposed to be awake.”
The word for it had many shapes in many minds. In some stories it was a tyrant. In others, a demon. In the notes of certain men who thought themselves brave enough to study it, it had been given another name:
Naram.
- Writer
