It rained that day.
    Lae had said, 'Let's go out.' The rains never came down to this place, so they should make it count.
    Ma would have said to seize the moment. Small little snatches of moments, because that's the tiny little spark that keeps the candle burning.
    The rain was gray. It came down in sheets, like fine silver hair, all around the plate's edge. The city plates smothered the body of the lower sectors. There was no sun. There was no moon. There was just the plating and rivets of a world out of reach, that choked, and suffocated, and laughed at the squalor beneath. But it couldn't hold back the rain, and so when it fell, the dirty little runts of the sixes came out of their hovels and sardine tin rooms, turned their eyes to the sky that was only a ceiling, and smiled.
    Lae and Reno walked hand in hand. Because they did, and had always done. They stopped at the shop corner and gazed up at the sector divide, where the waterfalls streamed down in dirty, glorious torrents with a sound like thunder.
    They were so alike. Everyone in the sixes said so. Young and fresh-faced, the teenage boy and his little kid brother. Their faces marked them as derelicts of their parents' Cosmo fad, symmetrical tattoos with diamonds on the one and sickles on the other. Some idea about totems and spirits that the parents believed passionately through the glass of a syringe, or so was the rumor: the nasty, biting little rumor that didn't realize just how ill it meant. 'And where were they now, those trash heap junkies?' they all wondered; 'long gone and left two beautiful redhead babies off fending for themselves in the muck.'
    The Conway brothers had lost their mother when Lae was barely 13. She'd been swept off in a great big gale of paperwork and police tape and fake little explanations. They had lost her as though in a dream, torn away in the wind and gone screaming into the darkness, where Papa was, or maybe not. It wasn't unusual for a kid in the sixes not to know.
    So Reno and Lae held onto each other, walking through the ghetto streets, over streams and through hot acidic mist. Marveling at small miracles, because you learned to appreciate that.
    Lae said he was going to make good someday. He would get strong, and get a good job with the Company, work for the President. Everyone in the sixes would see soon enough. He'd earn enough money to take care of Reno and get them their own place up on the upper plate, where there was real rain. And snow. And maybe even the moon would wait just long enough for them to catch one tiny look.
    He was 17 now, Lae, and strapping; muscular and rudely pretty, the way one might imagine a well-used tool whose edge refuses to dull. He fought for their living. Boxing, loosely called; a real firecat in the ring. Or he did other things, the kind of dealings he couldn't tell Reno about, the ones that dragged him back to their hole in the wall at three in the morning with a bleeding lip and all the strength sucked out of his body, and a look on his face like he had sold just a little more of his soul. And Reno, dear sweet tiny Reno, with his small little hands and wide blue eyes, he'd wash him up and ease him to bed and hold on tight to Lae's arm till he woke in the morning forgetful and grateful for the fact.
    Lae Conway wanted to be the strong one so that Reno didn't have to. Because it wasn't worth it to be the strong one.
    So when it rained, they went outside to watch. To feel it on their faces, to feel invulnerable under the touch. To be grateful for this little ugly, bruised little shard of a life.
    That was the day the Heartless came.