drop into a crouch: he fell forward, caught himself with his leg, and pressing off the ground he fell and caught himself again, tumbling more than sprinting after her.
Mal reached the roof’s edge first, and leapt to an outbuilding a story lower than the warehouse. She landed with a roll as Caleb launched himself into the yawning gulf.
12
The world opened beneath Caleb, six stories’ drop onto solid gray asphalt. Emptiness and wind tore at his mind, but he landed on the neighboring roof, and rolled. His knee throbbed. Adrenaline dulled the pain, and he staggered to his feet and ran again.
Mal had already reached the outbuilding’s edge and leapt, this time across a twelve-foot chasm toward a stockhouse that supplied the Rakesblight Center with victims. Caleb gaped in disbelief. The distance was too great. Not even Mal could make such a jump—nor did she.
She struck the wall feet-first, caught the ledge overhead by her fingertips, and pulled herself onto the roof. How had she learned that? If her first try had not been perfect, she would not have survived for a second.
No time to speculate. Caleb jumped, and closed his eyes.
Dresediel Lex was built of stone, glass, and contracts—promises stronger than steel, tying the city together by pledge and payment. Bonds of contract were invisible, unless you looked at the world as Craftsmen learned to look, with eyes closed and mind open.
The black behind Caleb’s eyes came alive with blue-white webs, strands several feet thick, as if woven by pyramid-sized spiders. The contract lines stretched to the horizon. They bound building to building, tied skyspires to the earth, lit streetlamps, pumped water through subterranean pipes, cooled hallways and made the desert city livable. Ahead, these lines converged on the nova palace of North Station.
Falling, Caleb grabbed a silver cord.
Scars all over his body burned as they woke and drew on the cord’s power. He shot forward, dragged by a line of lightning. Cold fangs sank into his arm. His eyes snapped open from the speed, and the visible world resolved blue around him again. The contract cord had carried him almost a hundred feet; he flew over the stockhouse’s rooftop. With a shout of triumph, he released the cord and fell to the gravel, landing with knees bent. The chemical stench of close-kept pigs enveloped him; wards burned off most of the stink, but not all.
Mal sprinted ahead of him, toward North Station. With eyes open, Caleb could no longer see the station’s burning soul, the blaze of contracts—only its colossal physical form, a sprawling complex of cooling towers and thick pipe, lit by ghostlight and gas flame, and surrounded by a barbed wire fence.
Once Mal crossed that fence, alarms would sound, and Wardens would arrive. She’d be caught, and his work to find her, to learn what she knew and keep her free of the Wardens’ hands, would be meaningless.
He could not let that happen.
Bloodstained aprons, sheets, towels fluttered on clotheslines at the far end of the roof. Mal left a wake in sanguine cloth. He followed her, reached the roof’s edge steps behind, jumped.
Lava coursed in his veins and melted his muscles. Every exhalation broke upon a rushing indrawn breath. He gripped the reins of Dresediel Lex and they scorched him with their chill. Already his hand felt frozen. His flight, like everything, had a price. These cords took his soul as they carried him. Soon they would drain him completely and he would fall.
Mal landed on the fence, climbed without apparent concern for the barbed wire—another cliff runner’s trick, maybe, or else enchanted gloves—and dropped to a service shed on the other side. As she landed into North Station, the sky erupted in red light. A banshee shrieked, and others around the station perimeter cried out in answering alarm. Mal paused atop the shed like a locust on a blade of grass, then sprang onto a thick conduit and ran toward a cyclopean cooling tower at the station’s heart.
He landed on the conduit behind her. The noise of his impact caused her to glance back. Her eyes widened; she fled, and he followed. As they ran through the forest of vents and ducts and pipes, he called to her, panting: “We need to talk.”
“You’re persistent.” Her voice was even, conversational.
“It’s a virtue.”
“How are you flying?”
“I made a gamble.”
“I hope you didn’t risk anything valuable.” She ducked under a chest-height conduit; he vaulted over it and struck his shin on a jutting metal bar. His pants tore.
“Only my soul.” He grabbed for her, but she sprinted ahead, reached the coolant tower, and began to climb.
From the pipe she leapt to the lowest rung of an access ladder, climbed that and jumped again, this time to a duct that ivied around the tower. She moved from handhold to handhold easily as a guitar player changing chords.
Groping blind, he found a line of Craft that spiraled up the tower, and gripped it with both hands. Chill fingers clawed at him as he rose. His heart beat to burst the cage of his ribs and rain blood on the city.
More banshee cries shivered through North Station as other cliff runners crossed the fence. Wardens would come soon, Couatl mounts beating terror through the night sky. A Couatl could outpace Caleb in the air, read a newspaper three miles away in the dark, track a rat in its nest or a man in a mob. Even if Mal could evade them, he would not.
Red warning flares cast a hellish pattern on the balloon of an airbus approaching the tower—lower, and nearer to North Station, than an airbus should fly. Irrelevant. The world was an incandescent maze. Chest heaving, brain blood-battered, Caleb approached the lip of the cooling tower.
He let go of the line, and, for a moment, flew.
Momentum thrust him skyward. He tumbled toward stars and skyspires, and at the apex of his flight let out a whoop of triumph that turned to fear as he began to fall.
There was no time to think. The stone tower thrust at him, a sword point with the world’s weight behind it.
Rock struck him hard in the chest, in the legs, and everywhere else. After a few seconds, he realized he was still alive, prone on the lip of the tower, boiling steam to his left and void to his right. Hot air and sulfurous fumes engulfed him. Arms splayed, he embraced the stone.
He was alone.
He sat up, teetered, and nearly fell into seething smoke.
A gloved hand crested the tower, followed by the rest of Mal. Her hair was a black nimbus, her face and arms sweat-slick. Fierce eyes stared at him through smoke.
“Hi,” he said.
“Couldn’t think up a better line”—she gasped for air—“on the way up?”
Caleb couldn’t think of anything to say, and anyway he could not speak for his lungs’ heaving. He edged toward her around the precipice.
“So what happens now,” he said when he drew near.
“Now.” She stood, and fixed him with a broken glass grin. “We see how much farther you’re willing to go.”
He lunged, too late. She dove off the tower’s edge.
The force of her leap carried her clear of ducts and ladders and platforms. She fell, spun, tumbled—and landed, on the balloon of the airbus passing below. Gray silk dimpled around her body.
Sirens wailed. A fresh breeze feathered Caleb’s brow.
He jumped after her.
Sharp wind buffeted him. Falling, he strained with fingers, arms, and tortured shoulders for the contract- cords that guided the airbus. Cold talons tightened around his heart.
He clutched at nothing.
Blue fire tore through his arms and chest.
