They didn’t stop. They kept going, her ankle folding until the arch of her foot wrapped the stone like a hand. Full contact. Full control.
She released the fire escape entirely. Both hands on the wall now, both feet on stone, her body flattened against the building’s face three stories above the empty street.
She started down.
The descent required her whole body, just like the ascent had. Not just hands and feet—shoulders, hips, spine, every joint working in concert, each one extending past the range that anatomy textbooks said was the limit.
She reached a handhold two feet to her left and her shoulder opened like a door swinging wide, the humeral head gliding forward in its socket until her arm was behind her at an angle that would have torn a rotator cuff in anyone else. Her fingers closed on the ledge. She pulled, pivoted, and her foot found a crack in the mortar eighteen inches below.
A gap between the second and third floor required her to bridge two architectural features separated by four feet of flat brick. No handhold between them. She stretched—arms wide, fingers hooked on opposite ledges, her body suspended in a horizontal line across the wall. Her sternum pressed against the cold brick. Her torso undulated to shift her center of gravity from left to right without releasing either grip.
Somewhere in Austin, a man was waiting for a phone call she was never going to make.
She crossed the gap faster than she should have. From there, eroded mortar joints offered finger-width cracks every eight inches down to the second floor.
She was pushing harder than usual. Faster. Less careful.
The recklessness had been building all week. It lived in the same place as the phone in her pocket—a hot, restless energy that made her want to move, to climb, to throw her body at something physical because the alternative was sitting still with the ache behind her sternum and seventeen messages she couldn’t answer.
Isaac was gone. She was never going to see him again.
She took a route she’d normally have assessed more carefully. Moved too quickly along it, but didn’t care.
What did it matter? Who was she being careful for?
The mission used to be enough of a reason. But now she just wasn’t sure.
She swung her weight onto a bracket and felt the first twinge in her right wrist. A small, sharp flare at the base of her thumb—a warning. The joint telling her it was working harder than it wanted to, that the tendon was under load it didn’t like.
She adjusted her grip and kept moving. Faster. Reckless.
She ignored it, found the next handhold, and pulled.
The second-floor ledge was narrower than the third. She eased onto it, her toes curled over the lip, her back pressed against the window behind her. From here she could see the street below—empty, dark, the streetlight throwing its useless circle twenty feet from the building’s base.
Her left knee was stiff. She noticed it when she bent to lower herself toward the next handhold. The joint resisted for a half second before releasing—a tiny hitch. She’d been crouching on the fire escape for too long before starting down, reading seventeen messages she should have deleted a week ago, and the cold had settled into the joint.
She filed it. Kept going.
She lowered herself off the ledge, reaching for a narrow lip of stone below the window line. Her right wrist stopped.
The joint that had been sending her small signals for the last two minutes simply quit. The tendons that had been stretching and compensating and holding her weight went slack, and the wrist collapsed inward, and her right hand came off the wall, useless.
Fuck.
She caught herself with her left hand. Her body swung, one-handed, her feet scrambling against the brick. She found a foothold. Braced. Reached up with her right hand to re-grip.
Her fingers wouldn’t close properly. The wrist was wrong—the bones had shifted in their housing, not dislocated butmisaligned, and the signals from her brain weren’t reaching her fingertips the way they should.
She could feel her hand trying to grip. She could see her fingers curling toward the stone. But the strength wasn’t there.
She redistributed her weight onto her left hand and her feet. The left hand held, but her left knee buckled.
It wasn’t a full collapse. The kneecap tracked wrong for one second—sliding laterally, the ligaments that should have held it in place stretching past their functional limit—and in that second her leg stopped being a load-bearing structure.
She sagged against the wall, her left hand white-knuckled on the ledge, her right hand clawing uselessly at brick, her left leg folded beneath her at an angle that sent pain radiating from her kneecap to her hip.
She forced the kneecap into alignment with a flex of her quad forcing out a sound she couldn’t hold in—a sharp hiss through clenched teeth as fire roared through her leg. The joint held. Barely. She closed her eyes against the brick and breathed.
