Dawn had the city turning its glass facades from gunmetal to a pale, oily gold. Riley Park moved through that light as if she belonged to the steel itself: deliberate, unhurried, keen-eyed. Her boots thudded against the service hatch and she tugged the collar of her weathered jacket up against a wind that still tasted like river spray and roasted coffee. From the street below came the regular morning chorus—trams coughing to life, a vendor hawking saffron pancakes with a practiced singsong, and someone tuning a radio to a station that played harp loops and municipal announcements. The festival flags strung across the promenade whipped softly; the city cared for spectacle as politely as a neighbor watering their rooftop basil.
Riley slung her pack over one shoulder and clicked her harness into place with a motion so economical it looked like rote ritual. Her fingers moved over buckles the way some people eased open a book: quick, precise, affectionate. She tested the belay: pull, lock, slack. The iron of the anchor plate near the parapet had a light filigree of dew; up close it smelled like rain and machine oil. She knelt, fingers tracing an old weld, feeling for hairline give the way a doctor palpates a pulse. The tool bag at her hip was a small phone booth of leather and canvas—carabiners in a tidy row, shackles like sleeping beetles, a coil of new polyester line kept for emergencies. An old coffee thermos, taped where the handle had cracked, gave off a bitter promise. "If this stuff was rope, it’d knot itself," she muttered, and the thermos seemed to agree by making that embarrassed, sloshing sound that people call dignity.
There was an economy of noises on a rooftop at this hour: the low thrum of the HVAC units, the clank of an early crew pulling up a winch, the distant laugh of two night-shift delivery drivers. A pair of rooftop yoga mats lay rolled and abandoned; someone had left a chipped ceramic mug with a hand-painted cat steaming gently in it. That was the kind of detail Riley liked—stray domesticities that reminded her the city was not just pulleys and permits but also people who brewed cardamom tea on the sly and planted chili seedlings in milk cartons. Rigging, she always said, was part weather-reading, part civic anthropology.