Sweetly
an excerpt

Later, I would wonder how they found me. As far as I knew, I was the only one who knew about the stairs leading to the apparently locked door with access to the roof of the building I had been squatting in for years.
I had been crouching in the neverending rain on the ledge of the roof, as I often did lately, letting the rain fall on my face and sing its song to me. With my net switched on, the rain sang so sweetly, almost drowning out the worst of the memories.
Something – a sigh, a rubber sole scraping against the asphalt paper – made me open my eyes and there they were. The Con was like that. Like ghosts, they came and went noiselessly.
I blinked my net down so I could focus on them. I never really blinked it off anymore. Through the haze of data, and the hum of the rain, I saw the tall one, the leader, Lenny, look me up and down with a sneer.
“Gonna jump?”
In response to his voice, and his question, the readout chattered across my vision, and told me, once again, the distance to the broken pavement below, and the shift in weight it would take to send me sailing into the night air to follow the raindrops down. Information I already knew well.