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awoke from their nap to send her shuttling down to the very base of the mountain range, having her single leap move them from the heart of Utah to the edges of Nevada. As she was falling, she asked, ”Snow, which way now?” Usu, barely holding his bearings, starred deeply into the map print-outs he’d made the night before and gestured with his head westward.
    Rain landed, and the barren soil beneath her shattered all too slowly for her to notice as she instantaneously began running. This was a different beast entirely and a large reason why people had feared them enough to decorate walls with white blood and scattered circuitry, but for the time being a means to an end, or rather, a means to preventing an end. If he needed to use what condemned Rain to save her, he would a thousand times over.
    Speaking of thousands; meters and miles flew past Usu barely slower than they had in the airship, and if it wasn’t for the haunting moments in which she would pause completely, he might have come to doubt there was anything wrong with her at all. In what seemed like a blink of a rather wind-burned eye, they were already half-way through Nevada, and in another equally blistered blink, Rain froze in time just as they reached the eastern edges of Lake Tahoe.
    Usu, having shat several lifetimes worth of proverbial pants, decided it was as good a time as any to have a break. He wrestled his arms free and tore the map off of himself before examining Rain more closely. It was just like all the other times; eyes usually filled to no end with vibrancy now lay vacant instead. Nothing would wake her up, nothing he could do at least, and he’d tried an awful lot of things at that. Whatever it was that would take her from the world was the only thing that would bring her back, and he had little choice but to wait.
    Of course, 'little choice' is different than 'no choice', so on a writing technicality Usu explored his surroundings. He noted the massive lake Rain just barely had not killed him in; water more gray than blue, perhaps to mirror the shells of trees and landscape of ash which surrounded it. The distance littered itself with recreational ruins, hotels and lodges reduced to little more than rubble, and yet somehow still offering competitive rates, at least as far as rubble accommodation typically went for. A world of monochrome encapsulated them both, free from the chaos of old but further still from any joy.
    Only monoliths stood solid in the furthest distances, begging to pierce the skies for the slightest salvation. The dead that littered them found no God for that cause, nor a mortician.
    Then, for a moment it seemed as if the world fought back, and a shell-shock inducing crash of thunder shook our hero’s already wobbly foundations even further.

Human – Pride
     
    Bloodied from tip to toe, and I doubt a drop isn’t my own.
    Wounds to lick and sprains to heal.
    Spurred on by the stares of hatred and howls of disgust that marred our path.
    Am I so cruel to protect her? Am I wrong to stop those who would see her suffer?
    It didn’t matter.
    Long ago, I had already learned; gravestones do not fight back.

Chapter Seven - Stitch
    Rain’s namesake was far from a mere coincidence of poorly written fiction; instead, it was something she chose for herself shortly after the day Snow carried her out of a slightly upper-class colony scrap heap. At first, she would barely talk; a condition he soon missed. In time, a strange form of bond was born between the two, both cast out as dregs of society, yet ever intertwined in fate’s firmest clasp.
    She had wanted a name like his, a name that would bring her closer to him, she wanted to be what helped Snow become Snow.
    It was a beautiful theory, marred only by her ignorance of what rain had truly become. The days where it was little more than an excuse to claim that your vibrating umbrella was not of a sexual nature were long gone. Acid and sulfur had since made it their malevolent