By the sixth day, the air tasted like metal. You could smell the city giving up on pretending the weather would ever turn. Umbrellas were still in the shop windows, but they looked like artifacts from another world.
Hospitals filled, tempers thinned, and I kept drinking my coffee black because milk was spoiling faster than it should. People didn't say it aloud, but everyone knew something fundamental had gone missing.
I hadn't slept right in three nights when the precinct called.
"Detective Murphy," the desk sergeant said, voice clipped. "You'd better get down to the waterfront. We got ourselves a situation. Some kind of disturbance, maybe religious."
Religious. That was new.
The docks were a fog-gray stretch of warehouses and half-sunken boats. Police lights washed everything in cold red. Beyond the barricade stood a group of maybe twenty people, barefoot, robes the color of old parchment. They weren't protesting, exactly. They were staring upward, chanting low.
One of the uniforms nodded when he saw me. "They've been at it since dawn. We told 'em to clear out, but they won't move."
At the center of the crowd stood a man with a shaved head, face streaked with ash. He was holding a rusted lantern that didn't glow. He was shouting in a voice that tore his throat raw:
"The foundation of all being — an infinite, fractal lattice of physical, mental, spiritual, conceptual, metaphysical, axiomatic, and narrative dimensions!
Each plane has its own reality laws and frameworks!
All together they form the building blocks of existence, from material atoms to divine logic!"
The crowd echoed him like scripture.
He pointed at the sky — still clouded, still dry.
"When the Gem is gone, the lattice collapses! The fundament shakes! Healing fails because its pattern has been stolen! And if the thief manipulates it—"
He never finished. A gust came off the water, sharp enough to sting, and his lantern fell. No flame, no spark, just a soft thud. The moment it hit the boards, the clouds above seemed to flicker — like film reels missing a frame. Then everything went still again.
The officers moved in, pulling people apart. The cultists didn't resist; they just whispered over and over: "He took the light that made the rain."
At the station, I questioned the ringleader — the ash-faced one. He said his name was Isaiah March. No record, no address. His wrists were rope-thin, his eyes too calm.
"You believe this gem controlled the world?" I asked.
He smiled faintly. "Not controlled. Anchored. Every truth has a stone at its heart. You remove it, the truths unravel. Healing, time, growth — all just stories bound by the same core."
I leaned forward. "You saying whoever stole that gem is rewriting reality?"
He tilted his head. "Not rewriting, Detective. Re-possessing."
That word hung in the air like smoke.
Before I could press him, the lights flickered again. The bulb above the desk glowed bright white, then dimmed to nothing — not burned out, just gone.
When the backup lamps kicked in, March was staring at his reflection in the one-way glass.
"The next to fade," he murmured, "will be water."
I left him there, still mumbling, and drove across the bridge toward downtown. The river below looked wrong — too still, like oil stretched thin. The radio was nothing but static. My hands smelled like salt though I hadn't touched the sea.
At the corner of Ninth, a crowd had gathered. They were looking up at the sky the same way the cultists had. A single droplet of rain had fallen — one — and it hung midair, glinting like glass. It didn't fall. It didn't evaporate. It just stayed.
Somebody gasped. Someone else crossed themselves. Then the drop vanished with a sound like a match being struck.
Back in my office, I poured whiskey I couldn't taste and tried to think. Notes piled up in front of me:
Gem: Solar Tear.
Effect: Absence spreads by category — healing, rainfall, reflection delay, possibly more.
Hypothesis: Theft of metaphysical anchor.
I stared at the page until the ink blurred. Outside, a siren wailed and cut short halfway through.
The hum started again — that low vibration I'd heard before. It came from the floorboards this time. A photo frame on the wall rattled, then stopped. The glass in it was blank. The picture inside — my license photo — had faded completely.
I said aloud to no one, "It's not a disease."
My voice sounded foreign, flat.
"It's a theft."
[Third-Person Cutaway]
Across the city, a fire hydrant burst. No water came out. In the hospitals, saline bags deflated without leaking. Clouds drifted across the continent, thick and heavy, carrying nothing.
Somewhere in the night sky, something glittered — not a star, but a reflection where one used to be.
I sat down, cigarette shaking in my fingers, and thought about Isaiah March's words: Every truth has a stone at its heart.
If he was right, that gem wasn't just rare — it was foundational. Someone had stolen a piece of reality itself and left the rest of us breathing in the cracks.
I opened my notebook, wrote one last line:
> If the Gem is gone and manipulated, so goes the fundamentality of the world.
Then the pen stopped writing halfway through the word world.
Ink gone dry.
And outside, the sky remained heavy, waiting for rain that would never fall.
End of Part III: The Rain That Wouldn't Fall