During a violent Emeshi storm, Hadrian wanders through flooded Borosevo, starving, injured, barefoot, and desperate for shelter. He considers breaking into a grocer but rejects the idea, then is driven from a stoop by the shopkeeper and forced back into the rain.

Hadrian tries to sleep in an alley under the eaves, clutching his hidden signet ring for comfort while reflecting bitterly on how his dreamed-of adventure has become misery. A girl on a nearby roof warns him that the alley will flood because it has not been sandbagged, and she urges him to climb up before he drowns.

Weakened by fractured ribs from a recent failed theft, Hadrian struggles up the gutter until the girl helps him onto the roof. She introduces herself as Cat, a homeless local girl, and shelters with Hadrian beneath a solar panel. Their conversation reveals Hadrian’s offworld origin, his lack of money, and his growing awareness that his noble Delian speech marks him as different among Borosevo’s poor.

Hadrian explains that he was beaten after trying to steal from people with white armbands, whom Cat identifies fearfully as Rells. Exhausted and in pain, Hadrian admits he had only wanted shoes, then passes out beneath the solar panel.

When Hadrian wakes after the storm has weakened, Cat has returned with a bag of discarded medicine bottles. Hadrian finds naproxen, takes several pills, and realizes from the raised water below that Cat’s warning saved his life. As they sit overlooking the city, Cat says she helped because Hadrian was crying and because she knows what it means to be alone; she reveals her mother died of the Rot, while Hadrian says he has no family.