Locked meant nothing could come through from the inside. It also meant we had one less way down.
I moved the perimeter fast. No second fire escape. No close roof I’d risk as a jump. No utilities between buildings, nothing to cross. The access door locked from the other side. The ladder we’d come up on was now raised, with however many of them still circling below.
I stopped and pressed my hand against the back of my neck.
Stuck.
I walked back toward her, the reality of it settling into my shoulders. “We wait,” I said. “They lose focus eventually. Disperse toward sound or movement somewhere else.”
I didn’t finish the thought. What I meant was that our best outcome depended on something else in this city being worth more to them than we were.
Below, the sounds changed—less frantic now, more restless. Circling.
And like us. Waiting on opposite sides of the same problem.
I looked at her.
Her breathing was still elevated, her eyes still wide. I registered both. I noted other things, too—the way the cold brought color to her face, the particular set of her jaw that said she was holding herself together through will rather than calm—and I forced myself to stop.
I’d worked alongside trained people who came apart under less. That was the relevant fact. That was the thing worth noting.
“Stay low and out of sight,” I said, nodding toward the far side of the roof where a cluster of ventilation units sat. “Come on.”
We moved around the stair enclosure, and I stopped.
Wedged against the wall behind the ventilation units sat an old couch—sagging, the fabric sun-bleached and dotted with cigarette burns. A rooftop hideout. Probably teenagers sneaking up to smoke and look at the city, as if they owned some small part of it.
I thought briefly about who they’d been before I told her to help me move it in front of the access door—no way to know if the lock held from the inside, and I wasn’t interested in finding out.
We sat down.
The cushions gave under us with a damp, musty exhale. Libby settled beside me. I let my head tip back against the door, eyes open. But the immediate threat had passed, and the familiar, unwelcome leaching of adrenaline began—my worst liability, a crash that always followed a fight.
I opened my eyes and looked at her.
I quickly sat up, all thoughts of the adrenaline crash forgotten.
Her eyes had gone glassy—fixed on a point past the roof, past the city. I’d seen that before, in people who’d stopped processing the room they were in and started fighting the one they couldn’t escape.
I moved toward her. “Libby. Hey, look at me.”
Nothing. Her gaze held its fixed point somewhere past anything I could name or reach. Her fingers had dug into her own thighs hard enough that the fabric bunched around them. A sound was building in her throat—thin and climbing, that would keep going until something stopped it or until it reached the street below and drew more of those things.
My heart gave one hard knock against my ribs and then seemed to stop altogether.
“Libby.” Both hands on her shoulders, firm. “You’re on the roof. Nothing is up here. Breathe.”
Her eyes found mine and slid away. The sound in her throat climbed. Her breathing had gone past fast and into something erratic—jagged gulps with no exhale between them, no recovery, nowhere to go.
I didn’t deliberate. There wasn’t time for it.
I pulled her in and held on. Every tremor ran through me directly. Every stuttered breath vibrated against my chest. I kept my arms steady around all of it.
It got worse before it got better. The shaking intensified, her fingers twisting into my shirt and pulling the fabric taut against my chest, and that sound kept climbing in her throat, sharpening, almost there—
I pulled back just far enough to see her face. Eyes wild. Mouth open. The scream was one breath away from coming loose.
I kissed her.
