It was an abysmal day, black and raining, and the whole city felt as if it teetered on the edge of a precipice. Men and women walked through the concrete canyons with malfunctioning umbrellas, waiting for trains and buses that never arrived.

Zichen stood on a corner, the brim of his hat wilting under the downpour. He wasn’t sure why he came to this place, or even why he created it. If his bosses knew of it, that he had stepped outside of their carefully managed bureaucracy to craft it, their wrath would be swift and certain. He was powerless against that as surely as the people walking his streets were impotent against the deprivation Zichen had created for all of them.

So in his office hours he would submerge himself here, like a crocodile resting in the water, only its eyes exposed. He waited there in the murk and the misery for an opportunity to strike.

See the author’s published work here.

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