Her right hand was still wrong. She tried to flex the wrist and felt the bones grind against each other. Her fingers tingled. The grip strength was maybe thirty percent of normal. Fine if you were trying to hold a pencil. Deadly from twenty feet off the ground.
She was clinging to a building with one good hand and a knee that had just betrayed her. She couldn’t go up. She couldn’t go down.
She couldn’t hold on much longer.
Her left arm was shaking. She could see the tremor in her forearm, the muscle fibers firing in desperate, irregular bursts. Her fingers ached. The stone under them was cold and her grip was failing one finger at a time—pinkie first, then ring finger, the contact points shrinking as her hand fatigued.
There was a window two feet to her left. A second-floor office window, dark behind its glass. She shuffled toward it. Inches at a time, her left hand cramping around the ledge, her feet barely holding the brick. Sweat ran into her eyes and she couldn’t wipe it. Her right arm was dead weight pulling her off the wall.
Every inch was a negotiation with gravity she was losing. If she couldn’t get in this window, she was going to fall.
She reached the window frame. Got her right hand on the sill—the wrist screamed but the flat surface let her use her palm instead of her fingers.
She pushed.
Locked. Locked from the inside, the latch visible through the glass.
She let out a sob.
Her left arm shook harder. Her right knee started to go—the same lateral slide the left had done, the kneecap drifting, the joint losing its architecture. She locked it straight and pressed her thigh against the wall to brace it in place.
Her body was done. For three years she’d been asking it to do things no body with her condition should do, three years of dislocations and subluxations and joints pushed past their limits and forced back into place.
Every credit she’d ever borrowed against her own skeleton, every promise she’d made to her joints that she’d restafter this one, every night she’d iced and wrapped and swallowed ibuprofen and told herself the math still worked?
Her body had decided it was done paying. Right here. Right now.
Her left hand slipped.
She caught herself. Barely. Two fingers on the ledge, her body swinging, her feet losing purchase on the brick. She got her right palm flat against the wall and pushed herself back into contact. The effort took everything she had left.
This was it.
Twenty feet. Concrete sidewalk. The fall wouldn’t kill her. It would break things. Paralyze her. Definitely get her caught. And there was nothing she could do. Her grip slid another half inch.
Then the window beside her opened from the inside.
Hands grabbed her. Both arms, just below the shoulders—strong, sure, immediate. She was hauled sideways through the window frame, across the sill, and onto the floor of a dark room.
The motion wrenched her right wrist and she heard herself cry out, a ragged sound she couldn’t suppress, and then she was on the floor, gasping, her back against a solid body, every joint in her body screaming at frequencies she didn’t know pain came in.
She tried to think of what she could say to the guard who’d just saved her. Any excuse she could give. But the pain erased functional thought and her ability to talk.
She hadn’t fallen, but she was still going down.
“Fallon, are you okay? Talk to me.”
She could barely hear the words through the haze of pain. Knew she was hallucinating. Knew there was no way Isaac could be here holding her.
But he was.
“How—” Her voice cracked. Her throat was dry, her lungs still working too hard. “How are you here?”
“Can you stand?” He was already reaching for her, his voice clipped and controlled. Operational mode. “We need to move. Right now.”
“Isaac. How are you?—”
“Later. Can you stand?”
