The rain hadn’t stopped in seventy-three days.
Water drummed against rooftops, slid in silver rivers down glass panes, and swallowed the streets whole. The town had become an island, its people wading through the flood like ghosts of a world half-forgotten.
Kai moved through the water, boots heavy with the weight of it. His waterproof satchel, swollen with letters, bounced against his hip. These weren’t ordinary messages. They were letters for the dead.
He stopped at Mrs. Liang’s bakery—once a warm, golden place filled with the scent of fresh bread. Now, it floated on stacked crates, a fragile raft in an endless sea.
She met him at the door, her face lined with longing. “For my husband,” she said, pressing a damp note into his palm. Her fingers trembled.
Kai nodded, slipping the letter into his bag.
“Tell him I watered his orchids.”
Her voice was barely a whisper, lost beneath the falling rain.
But then, another letter caught his eye.
Lin, 22 Harbor Road.
His breath hitched. The ink blurred as his hands shook. That was his brother’s name. His brother, who had vanished in the typhoon.
With numb fingers, he unfolded the note.
“I didn’t mean to let go.”
A chill ran through him. The address pulled him forward, guiding his steps like a tide.
Kai waded to Harbor Road, where the water deepened. At the end of a half-sunken dock, a crowd stood waiting.
They weren’t people.
Their skin was pale as moonlight, their eyes distant and hollow. Drowned souls.
A figure stepped forward, a captain’s hat tilted low over his sunken face. His voice was rough as the wind.
“You’ve been diverting letters.”
Kai stiffened. He had kept so many notes—words never sent, messages never delivered. Was that why the dead still lingered?
The satchel on his shoulder lurched. The letters inside trembled, then burst free, swirling into a watery vortex.
A voice rose from the storm.
“Let them go.”
Kai’s heart clenched. He knew that voice.
Lin.
The vortex roared, tugging at the letters, the names, the stories left unfinished.
Kai closed his eyes. Then, with shaking hands, he let them slip from his grasp.
The papers dissolved into the water, ink bleeding into the flood. The ghostly figures shimmered, their shapes breaking apart like mist.
And then—silence.
The rain stopped.
The clouds parted.
And in the thinning mist, his brother smiled.