Part 2
He wandered through the broken streets because stopping felt too much like disappearing.
Water climbed around his ankles, then his knees, cold and filthy and alive with things torn loose from the city. Power lines flickered above him like dying stars. Somewhere far away, sirens wailed and vanished beneath the roar of the storm, swallowed as quickly as every other sound that night.
Leo did not know where he was going.
He only knew he could not go back.
Then, beneath the violence of rain against metal, beneath the groaning wind and the slapping floodwater, he heard something smaller than the storm.
A cry.
At first, he thought grief had made a sound inside his own head. He stopped, trembling so hard his teeth clicked together, and listened again. The cry came once more, faint and fragile, almost buried behind an overturned trash bin near the mouth of a flooded alley.
Leo moved toward it slowly.
Behind the bin, half-submerged in rainwater, sat an old woven basket. The cloth inside was soaked through. The tiny body beneath it was shaking.
A baby.
No more than a few months old. Her lips trembled blue in the darkness. Her eyes barely opened, searching for warmth, for a face, for someone who had not left.
For one suspended moment, the whole ruined city seemed to hold its breath.
Leo looked around desperately. He expected a mother to come running. A father to shout. A neighbor to appear from the rain and say the child belonged to them, that it had all been a terrible mistake.
No one came.
The baby cried again, weaker this time.
Something in Leo changed then. It was not courage, not exactly. Courage felt too clean a word for what rose inside him. It was hurt recognizing hurt. It was loneliness seeing itself in a smaller body. It was the unbearable thought that this child might vanish from the world without even knowing she had been wanted.
With shaking hands, Leo lifted her from the basket.
“You’re okay,” he whispered, though his voice broke on the words. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”
He pulled off what remained of his jacket and wrapped it around her. The storm struck his bare arms immediately, needling his skin with cold, but he tightened the cloth around the baby and held her close to his chest.
Then Leo walked.
May you like
The city had become a maze of water and darkness. Cars floated crookedly at the curbs like broken toys. Storefront windows had caved inward, glittering beneath the flood. Emergency lights flashed somewhere ahead, blue and red smears trembling through curtains of rain.
He followed them.
