At 14th and Sixth, I took a doorway breather. Without the rain battering my ears, a new thought swam up, guilty as a conspirator’s whisper: maybe check out the contents before you take it home?

Not necessarily a bad idea.

Just taking the appropriate precaution, right? What if the pack was stuffed with dead rats or toxic junk?

Sure.

Guarding my interests? Like, good to assess what I had, in case the tellers tried to stiff me at the counter?

All of the above, but mostly, curiosity waylaid me. Not claiming any special intuition, and yet . . . something about the pack, the girl, the whole bizarre event, stirred up an info junkie’s need to know. Before anyone else did.

But I’d need a dry retreat before the homeward leg, to do a quick inventory. There was a spot I’d sheltered my first night out when a gale blew up. Not too far out of my way. I plotted a route.

Fourteenth was still choked with the ruins of the flood wall built after the first superstorm cluster, long before Abel. Abel was my Wave, and called the worst yet, but there’d been plenty bad ones before it. The old debris had been dozed into a flattened central mound running between Eighth and Third Avenues. No good as a wall but useful higher ground that stayed dry during most high tides. My usual route home. Often there was traffic: tonight, it was two pickers struggling with handcarts and a runner speeding by on den biz so urgent, she nearly knocked me off the edge. Sporting a bulging grab bag, I was prime meat for anyone stronger, faster, negligent of the rules. In daylight, enforcers from the closest den kept things smooth. At night, their coverage was less reliable. You were pretty much on your own.

At Sixth, I let the handcarts pass, then clambered down to the wet, cratered street. A light flared a few doors down from the corner. I dropped like a stone behind the rusted skeleton of a bus just as a guy stepped out with a lantern, hooded against the rain. He scanned the darkness and hurried east. I waited till his misted halo crossed Fifth. When nothing more stirred, I moved onward. Where I was headed, I wanted to be my secret.

At West 12th, I slipped into an air shaft between two stone five-stories, set on a brief neck of higher ground. As newer-built blocks all around crumbled and went under, this two-hundred-year-old pair had stood up to most everything sea and storm could throw at them. The next big surge might claim them, with the river already knocking at their back doors, but for now, their opposite L-shapes embraced a puddled courtyard and the small, once-lovely building hidden within.