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He doesn't take me to the security office. He takes me to the roof.

"They need you downstairs," I say, on the stairs. "The Club opens in half an hour."

He stops, two steps above me, and looks down. "Pell has the scene. Lenart has the Club. You've been in a sealed room. You need air."

The door at the top of the stairs opens onto the roof, and the night hits me in the face.

It's huge up here. After the vault, after that dead, close dark, it's so big and open that I stand in the doorway and just breathe. The air's cool and smells like rain coming and the river. The roof is flat and wide, tar and gravel, with old brick chimneys and a water tower on iron legs at one corner, and a low brick parapet running around the edge. Past it, in every direction, there's Portland.

The last blue is just going out of the sky in the west. The river is a dark ribbon to the east with the bridges strung across it, lit up white and gold, and downtown is a wall of windows, and down below, on the streets, the traffic moves in slow lines of red and white.

I walk to the parapet and put both hands on the brick, and then I can't stand still, so I walk along it, and then back.

"Somebody cut the release," I say. "In the freezer, and now this. And somebody cut the bolts on that frame. Somebody can get anywhere in this building they want. They can get to doors, and air, and the emergency boxes, and the lights." I turn around. "How? How is anybody getting into all of this?"

William stands in the middle of the roof with his wings folded and his hands at his sides, and lets me yell.

"I don't know yet," he says.

"Can you promise me it won't happen again?"

"No."

I stop pacing. I look at him.

"I'd be lying," he says. "I'm going to find out how."

I sit down on the parapet, which is wide and flat and warm from the day. After a while, he comes and sits down next to me. Not close. A foot away. He looks out at the city, and I watch him look at it, and I realize he's different up here. His shoulders have come down. His hands are loose on his knees. He's sitting like a man in his own living room.

"You come up here a lot," I say.

"Yes."

"Why?"

He thinks about it. "Inside, everything is built for somebody smaller. Every door, every chair, every ceiling." He tips his head back and looks up. "Up here, I can see everything. Nothing's over my head. I think better." He's quiet. "When the Club's too loud, I come up here. When something's wrong, I come up here and watch until I know what to do about it."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight," he says, "I wanted to show you."

He stands up and walks to the middle of the roof, away from the chimneys and the water tower. Then he turns, and looks at me, and opens his wings.

I've only ever seen them folded, tight against his back, the tips rising above his shoulders. I didn't understand how much of them there was.

They go out, and out. His shoulders shift, and the muscles all down his back move under the gray skin, and the wings unfold in long sections, like something being unrolled, until they're wider than the water tower, wider than any room in the Club. They're dark and leathery and strong, a charcoal membrane stretched between heavy bones, and the surface of them isn't smooth. It's faintly textured, like weathered stone. The wind off the river catches them, and I watch the whole huge span of them take it, and flex, and hold.

"Holy shit, William," I say.

"Twenty-two feet," he says. "Tip to tip."

He looks at me across the roof. "Would you like to see the city from up there?"

It takes me a second.

"You mean fly. You mean you want to fly with me."

"If you want to."