Page 17 of Graceless

It was gone. Whatever it had been — gone, or still, or far, the field flat again, and I stood at her window reading an empty street like a page torn out of a book. I turned around. She was standing at the bench with a brush in her fist and her eyes wide, and I crossed the room to her.

Too fast. Too close. I knew both and did neither differently. She had to tip her head back to hold my eyes, and this near I could hear it — her heart, picking up, the rhythm climbing, and the warmth of her rising off her skin, and the small hitch her breath made and did not recover from. Fear, or the other thing, or both. Her body could not decide. Neither could mine.

"Lock the door behind me," I said. "No one through it tonight. No one. Say it."

"It's always locked⁠—"

"Say it."

"Okay — locked, no one, Jesus." Her chin came up. The heartbeat stayed fast. "It's a painting, Barrett. It's five hundred years of wood and pigment. It is not life or death. You need to relax."

It was not about the painting.

"It's late," I said. "I have to go."

I went up the thirteen stairs and out, and heard the locks — one, two, three — and then I stopped being Barrett.

I took the perimeter at speed. The stoop, the corner, the mouth of the alley — down it, reading as I went. The gate: chained, cold, undisturbed. The fence gap —

Fresh.

Not hours old. Minutes. The trace lay along the wall under her window still warm at the edges, the way ground holds the shape of something that has just stood up, and it had been here while I was inside. While she was talking. While the light was on both of us through that glass. It had come to the gap and stood in its own silence six feet from her window and left — not because of the locks, not because of the chain.

Because of me. Or in spite of me. I could not tell which, and the not-telling had a cost I would be paying all night.

I followed the trace to the fence and lost it at the property line, where it stopped the way footprints stop at water. Nothing on the sidewalk. Nothing on the street. Whatever walked here did not walk away.

I looked up.

The roofline. Mine — I had made it mine, three nights running. I crossed the alley, set a hand on the cold brick, and went up the wall the way I have gone up walls since before walls had names for what climbed them — no ladder, no fire escape, one motion, and the parapet took me, and Bay 50th Street lay below with its gates down and its windows dark and one basement burning gold at the end of it.

If anyone had seen that, the masquerade was over. No one had seen it. I had checked before I moved, the way I check everything, and some cold voice underneath observed that a man who checks and then jumps anyway has already decided which of his rules can break.

She could never see me up here. That was the other rule, the new one, arriving already load-bearing: the watching only worked if she never knew its shape. A guard in a chair was the policy. A thing on her roofline was a reason to run, and she would be right to run, and I would watch her do it and not follow, and that outcome was not acceptable, so: invisible. Sentry rules. The oldest work, done the oldest way.

I settled on the parapet edge, coat around me, feet on the ledge, still.

I was not leaving tonight.

The phone buzzed. The broker — Red Hook, a marker, a time. I watched her window instead. It buzzed again, later, longer. No number the second time. I did not look away from the street to silence it; my thumb found the switch through the coat. Across the river, my name was being written next to a silence, and the silence would become a question, and the question would climb the way questions about the fallen always climb.

Let it climb.

Near midnight her work lamp went out. Then the warmer light, further back. Then dark, and the house held her, and I held the street.

And then — east. Past the rooftops, past the water, at the seam where the city's glow met the sky.

Something.

Not the trace. Not anything with a signature I could read. A pressure at the far edge of the field, wrong the way deep water is wrong, vast and patient and not moving — or moving so slowly that only something very old would notice, and I noticed, and everything in me that has stood watch since watches began went quiet at once.

My hands were steady on the parapet. Inside, underneath, in the place where the sound of that long-ago plain still lives, something trembled.

I have been the thing in the dark for a very long time.

I watched the horizon, and did not blink, and would not name what watched back.

CHAPTER 6