A gentle moan issued behind him, a sweet sound. He turned to see the girl stirring. She lay a few yards off, so delicate and untainted, nothing like the bitch predators that had circled him, smelling power and money.
A few long strides, and he was bending over her. She looked up at him with distant, appraising eyes. If she was afraid, she wasn’t showing it. He liked that.
Her skin was pale as lace now, with only the finest mottling, a hint of robin’s egg blue along her cheeks and brow, a porcelain tint that reminded him of a cup and saucer he had seen as a boy and coveted. Sweat fever damped her face, but it only highlighted her cheekbones and eyes.
“Excuse the rough handling. Feeling better?”
“Where. .?” She pressed herself partially up, drawing to the roof’s edge to peer at a bottomless drop. Wind caught her fine, blanched hair, whipped it with insolent abandon.
“Where you can rest. . and let it all go.”
She cried out then as blue energy sparked out of her pores, splayed across her body in a mad dance. Her back arched at the white agony of it, and he felt a swell of sympathy, knowing firsthand her pain. With an angry snap as of an electric arc, it sucked back into her body and abated.
“What’s happening to me?” Her words were gasping exhalations. “You know. . ”
“Don’t be afraid. It’s just a transition.”
“To what?”
“I don’t really have to tell you that, do I?” The girl said nothing. Stern made his earth-rumble voice as soothing as he could. “Give in to it.”
“That’s what you want.” Resistance flared in her eyes. “That’s what is.”
His words struck home, he could see it. The fire in her eyes, like the color leeching out of her skin and hair, faded to nothing, replaced by an unreadable blankness that might have been despair. “To be. . like you.”
Like him, yes, the one he had been waiting for so very long, his own self mirrored back. But gentled, with none of the scalding rage that had ravaged every waking hour of his life. She would calm him, be a balm to his soul. And thinking this, it was as if a door in him were opening, and through it he could see the black emptiness that had been his life, the terrible loneliness he had ferociously denied. Emotion surged in him; he wanted desperately to slam that door.
He feared how much he needed her.
A shudder wracked her, and she fought hard to bite back a whimper. He drew up close, knifeblade hands hovering over her, a benediction.
“Soon you’ll be past the pain. . where no one can touch you.”
Rory’s leather climbing shoes with their sticky black rubber soles were a tight fit, but Cal managed to squeeze into them. Colleen eased into her harness, the black nylon looping around her waist and thighs, then she secured Cal’s. She taped both their hands and chalked them.
As Doc and Goldie looked on, Cal craned his neck to stare at the mocking immensity of the building, water dribbling off the wild projections that made up its disturbing asymmetry.
Colleen studied him, her skillful hands loading the loops on her belt with slings, stoppers, the other vital paraphernalia. She thought of Cal back on his block, facing down that mob, driving them back with that absurd sword of his, so crazily determined that he had pulled off something that never in a million years should have worked.
Surveying this building, he had that same look.
She thought of her dad in his combat fatigues long ago, teaching her aikido and tae kwon do, telling her that practice and coordination and knowledge only got you so far. In the end, the one with the edge was the guy with the hunger, the one who needed something so badly that nothing, absolutely nothing, would make him stop.
Her dad, in his best moments, had been unstoppable. Rory had never been.
You that guy, Griffin? she wondered, and felt an old hope flare in her, which she labored to smother.
She turned to glare at the structure. Eighty-two stories straight up, with a cherry on top that breathed fire. She sighed. “Hell, if George Willig can do it. .”
“George-?”
“Climbed the World Trade Center in the seventies. But then, he was fucking crazy.”
Cal peered again at the summit, forever away. Or maybe he just needed what was on top to go on living.
“Show me what to do,” Cal said.
Colleen went first, climbing quickly and elegantly, finding purchase for her hands and feet in tiny crevices, irregularities in the slippery, pitted stone surfaces. Cal stood on the ground, paying out the rope tied to her harness. This cord wasn’t for climbing but rather for safety; every twenty feet or so, Colleen rammed spring-loaded devices-little aluminum plugs with plungers like hypodermics-into whatever crack or indentation would hold them, feeding her rope through metal cables in the cams, creating a network of braces to assure she would fall so far and no farther. A belaying device affixed to Cal’s harness would provide the friction to slow the rope in case of a drop and allow the cams to do their work. As her belaying partner, Cal had the easy part of the job-keep a grip on the rope.
After a hundred feet or so, Colleen found an outcrop, a pigeon-fouled, scowling patriarch. She clambered atop it, anchoring herself with four or five cams at different angles. Then she fed her rope through a twin belaying device, and it was Cal’s turn. He started up, tied to her rope, trying his best to replicate the hand and footholds he’d seen her use. The rain-slick surface was treacherous, and he slipped repeatedly, flailing wildly, somehow managing to find a hold and not fall.
It was a battle of inches. The sword banged against his thigh, throwing him off balance, and the banshee wind cascaded up from the corridor of buildings, snatching away his body heat. Before long, his fingers and biceps and throbbing head were shrieking protest.
“Let your legs do the work, not your arms!” Colleen shouted from above, voice nearly lost on the wind. “And try to rest your weight on your skeleton, not your muscles!”
Easy for her to say. But after a time he got the rhythm of the thing and it grew, if not easier, at least manageable. He surrendered his mind to the flow of muscle and bone, levered himself ever higher. He spied his hands, blisters coming on, bloody and raw as they slid up the rough, cold stone. He remembered how Tina’s feet had been like that when she had first gone on pointe.
He reached the outcrop, pulled himself up trembling. Colleen’s eyes gleamed in the moonlight, appraising him. “How you doing?”
“I’m doing it.”
“Are all your family this bonehead stubborn?” she called over the wail of the wind. Beneath her words he heard grudging admiration.
“My mother was. . and my sister.”
Colleen nodded.
They would rest here a moment, then continue. Another fifty feet and another and so on.
Stern could fly. . but they could climb.
The waves were coming faster now and with greater insistence, labor pains of a thing giving birth to itself. The girl lay panting at the edge of the rooftop, her breaths shallow and rapid. Cool light oozed out of her mouth and ears, trickled from the corners of her closed eyes, dripped off her fingertips like blue quicksilver.
Stern had backed some yards off, wary of impeding its progress, and squatted, watching her.
“There’s this philosopher, Hoffer,” he mused, not knowing if she could hear him. “He said, ‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were men’s faces as unfinished as their minds.’ Me, I thought, no-beautiful. Nothing more to hide. .” He caught the smell of ions wafting off her, and something like burning flowers. “I always knew I was different.”
She turned her head to him, opened her eyes against the pain, the liquid current washing over her.