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“We tried to replicate the wires the way they hang over the city,” he said. “Those heavy black cables—those are the power lines the cars run on. Most of them have a weave of smaller wire cables that run along them on either side, so there’s a mesh a couple feet wide with the cable running down the middle. The weave is pretty open, though—if you’re not careful, your foot will slip through, and then your whole leg will go through, and it’s hard to pull yourself up and regain your balance. At that point, it’s usually better to free your leg and drop to the street.”
“How often does that happen?”
“When you first start doing it, all the time. After your first year or two, hardly ever.”
“So you run along the mesh, not the cable.”
“Mostly. But sometimes, especially on the narrower routes, there’s no mesh. Just the cable. That’s a lot trickier because you have to go slower and you have to be a lot more careful about your balance.”
She glanced over at him. “That’s what you did when you crossed the canyon. When the bridge came down.”
He nodded. “I like walking the wire. I practice almost every day. But it’s not really that useful. If you’re carrying a message all the way across the city, it’s usually just as fast to follow the streets or hop a transport. But if you’re taking something from one edge of the Quatrefoil to another, or out to Council Row, and traffic is heavy, overhead is the way to go.”
“How do you get up to the mesh?”
He gestured toward the corner of the room with the ladders and netting. That was when Jayla spotted a sturdy pole with a T-shaped crossing at the top. “All along the roads, there are poles that support the cables. You pull yourself up one of those, then swing onto the web. It’s not easy, so it’s better to practice here first.”
“I bet,” she said. “I’m pretty coordinated and I’m not sure I could do it.”
“Harder to walk the wires,” he said. “If you can’t master that, no point in climbing the pole.”
She nodded. “All right. What do I need to do?”
“I’m going to start you on the cable, just because it will give you a sense of how good your balance is. If you can master the slow walk on the cable, you should find it easy to run the mesh.”
“All right. So I just—climb up there?”
“First you need different shoes. Thin soles, so you can feel the wire. So you can grip it with your feet. We’ve got a box over here.”
In a few minutes, she had donned borrowed shoes with soft leather soles and tied her hair back to keep it out of the way. Cody held her wrist as she cautiously stepped up to the cable, placing one foot in front of the other and trying not to ignominiously tumble over into the webbing.
“Two things to remember,” he said. “You want your weight to be as low to the wire as it can be. So flex your knees a little to bring you down. But keep your back straight—keep your weight dead center over the cable, or you’ll overbalance and fall. Feel the wire through the soles of your shoes. It’ll sway as you move. It might roll a little beneath your feet. You have to be aware of all those things, all the time.”
She stood there a moment, holding her pose, feeling the way her body adjusted to the slight movement in the wire. Cody still held her arm and she didn’t pull away because she could tell she was leaning into and away from him to keep her balance. She slowly shifted her weight to her front foot, slowly lifted her back foot and brought it around.
Too far, too fast. Her arms flailed and she crashed into the webbing. She felt the rough strands dig grooves into her ribs and thighs and cheek.
“Damn it,” she said, rolling to the edge and standing up.
Cody was laughing. “Everybody falls. A lot.”
“I want to be better than everybody.”
“Yeah, that’s what I like about you.”
This time she took hold of him so she could let go when she wanted. Again, she placed both feet and stood for a moment, getting her bearings. Again, she shifted her weight to her front leg, but brought her back foot around with more care. This time she didn’t fall, though her grip on Cody’s forearm tightened to a clutch.
“Better,” he said.
“Does it get easier when you have some forward momentum going?”
“Yeah. But it still doesn’t go fast.”
She took another step, feeling her feet curl around the edge of the cable. Feeling the wire sharp beneath her soles, even through the leather. If she spent too long on this exercise, her feet would be bloody. She couldn’t afford to lame herself just to prove she could acquire this spectacularly useless skill. But she could practice for a little while.
“Another step. Good,” Cody said. “And another one.”
She fell three more times before she managed to walk the length of the cable from one pillar to the other—and even at that, she never let go of Cody’s hand. But she was developing the beginnings of a sense of balance, an understanding of how the cable swayed beneath her weight. A remote idea of how she might train her body to perform this trick.
