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Chapter 6: Neon Rain

The “Paper Houses” were not a destination; they were a rumor that lived in the cracks of the city’s southern rail hub. To find them, Taeyeon had to navigate the scalo—a vast, desolate landscape where the city’s commerce met its waste.

The rain had turned into a permanent, iron-grey drizzle. It was a cold that didn’t just bite; it soaked into the brickwork and the bone, turning the air into a heavy, wet wool. Taeyeon pushed forward alone, her mental discipline now focused on the topography of the wreckage, mostly to make her ignore her fleeting thoughts about how Jessica might have struggled in this place, all this while.

“The sky is the color of a wet sidewalk today, Jess. I’m walking through a forest of rusted iron and weeds that grow through the cracks in the concrete. My head is ringing, a high, thin sound like a glass being rubbed. I think the city is trying to drown me out, but I’m listening for your voice in the middle of the rain.”

Then, across a wide expanse of rail tracks, she saw her.

Near a pile of discarded shipping pallets, a woman stood with her back turned. She was wearing a faded grey coat, the hem heavy with moisture. Even from this distance, through the veil of rain, Taeyeon saw the tilt of her head—a quiet, regal poise that seemed to defy the wreckage around her.

“Jessica!”

The name left Taeyeon’s throat as a ragged sob. The woman didn’t hear her over the roar of a passing freight train, and she began to move, disappearing behind a mountain of rusted scrap metal.

Taeyeon lunged forward. She scrambled down the gravel embankment, her boots slipping on the slick stones. Her heart was already hammering a frantic, irregular rhythm against her ribs. She hit the bottom of the slope and began the pursuit.

The chase was a descent into a labyrinth of iron and mud. Taeyeon wove through narrow gaps between abandoned rail cars, her coat snagging on jagged edges of rusted steel. The distance between them seemed to stretch and contract like a dying lung. Every time Taeyeon reached the corner where she had last seen the grey coat, the woman was already a hundred yards ahead, a flickering silhouette moving through the mist.

“Wait! Please, wait!” Taeyeon’s voice was becoming a rasp.

She ran past a row of derelict warehouses, her feet splashing through oil-slicked puddles. The air felt thick, like she was breathing through wet gauze. She climbed over a low concrete wall, the rough stone scraping her palms, but she didn’t feel the pain. She was sweating now, despite the biting cold. A hot, cloying dampness broke out across her forehead and back, her skin feeling feverish and hyper-sensitive against the icy rain.

The chase lasted for what felt like miles. They moved deeper into the industrial silence, past skeletal cranes and pyramids of crushed cars. Taeyeon’s vision began to tunnel. Her breath came in shallow, agonizing gasps that burned her throat. She pushed her legs harder, though they felt like they were made of cooling lead, each step a monumental effort of will.

As she sprinted onto a rusted iron bridge, the world “stuttered.” The rhythmic slap-slap-slap of her boots on the wet ground began to sync with a distant, mechanical hiss… hiss… hiss. The grey sky flared into a brilliant, overexposed white that made her eyes ache, and she felt a sharp, icy prick in the crook of her arm—a fleeting, biting sensation that made her entire limb feel heavy and numb. She stumbled, her vision bleeding into a pale, static-filled void for three long seconds, before the smell of wet soot slammed her back onto the iron grates.

She didn’t stop. She crawled to her feet, her chest heaving so violently it shook her entire frame. She was drenched—half from the rain, half from the cold sweat of a body at its breaking point. She saw the grey coat turn into a dark alleyway between two massive concrete pillars that supported the highway above.

“Jessica! Please!”

She burst into the alley, her vision swimming with black spots. Her heart felt too large for her chest, thudding with a violent, terrifying force that she could feel in her throat. She reached out, her fingers clawing the damp air, and finally managed to grab the sleeve of the grey coat.

“I found you,” Taeyeon gasped, her knees finally buckling. Her face was flushed, her skin slick with sweat, her hair plastered to her cheeks. “Jess… I found you. I’m here.”

The woman spun around, her eyes wide with a dull, animal fear.

She wasn’t Jessica.

She was a woman of sixty, her face a map of deep, weathered lines, her eyes milky with cataracts. She looked at Taeyeon—this gasping, sweating, rain-drenched stranger who looked like she was about to collapse—and let out a sharp, defensive cry in a dialect Taeyeon couldn’t understand. She shoved Taeyeon away with a strength born of survival and retreated into the shadows of the concrete pillars.

Taeyeon didn’t chase her. She couldn’t. She collapsed against the cold stone, her body shaking with a violent, uncontrollable tremor. The sweat on her skin turned to ice in the wind, sending a fresh wave of chills through her. She felt utterly hollow, her lungs burning as she realized she had spent the very last of her strength chasing a shadow.

To the people standing in the shadow of the overpass, Taeyeon was probably a specter of a different kind—a well-dressed ghost unraveling in real-time. Men huddled over steaming coffee and women sorting through crates of bruised produce paused, their conversations dying in their throats as she tore past them. They watched with a mixture of practiced indifference and jagged pity as this stranger, drenched in sweat and rain, collided with their world. To them, she was the embodiment of the very thing they feared most: the moment the mind finally snaps under the weight of the city. A street vendor pulled his cart back as she lied on the pavement, his eyes tracking the frantic, glassy stare of a woman who was clearly seeing a world that no longer existed, while others simply turned their heads away, unwilling to witness a heart breaking so publicly in the mud.

Taeyeon remained slumped against the cold concrete for a long time, the heat of her exertion slowly being leached away by the damp stone until she began to shiver with a deep, rhythmic violence. She forced herself to stand, her muscles screaming in protest as she pushed off the wall with palms that were still stained with the grit of the railyard. She looked down at her hands—pale, trembling, and slick with a cold sweat that wouldn’t stop—and tried to reconcile the woman she was an hour ago with the wreck standing in the mud. The professional, the consultant, the woman who lived by logic and data, had been hollowed out, replaced by a raw nerve that only knew how to pulse with one name.

She began the long, agonizing walk back toward the light of the paved streets, her mind already beginning to reassemble the fragments of her resolve. The false sighting hadn’t been a defeat; it was a calibration. If the shadow in the grey coat wasn’t Jessica, then Jessica was still out there, deeper in the scalo, closer to the tracks than even this desperate place. She would go back to the rooming house, she would scrub the indigo mud from her skin, and tomorrow, she would move her search further south, beyond the last of the warehouses to the “Paper Houses” themselves. She would stop looking for silhouettes and start looking for the heart of the smoke.

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Diary Entry: September 27th

Location: Sesto San Giovanni

“I chased a ghost today, Jess. I ran until my heart felt like it was going to burst through my skin. I was so sure. I could feel the heat of the trail, but the trail was just a mirror. I’m sitting here in the dark, and I can’t stop shaking.

The world is getting so thin now. Sometimes when I blink, the sky turns white and I hear a sound like a machine breathing for the whole world. I’m tired, Jess. My bones feel like they’re made of lead. But I can hear the trains from my room tonight. They’re calling me toward the Paper Houses. I love you. I love you.”