Rae stood on the lip of the old warehouse roof with two coils of webbing over one shoulder and a coffee that had gone from hot to stubbornly warm. Skyline Bloom meant a hundred tiny ecosystems on the city's topmost platforms: rooftop gardens smelling of lemon basil and seared fish, a patchwork of stage lights, and vendors whose entire livelihoods depended on a rope or two holding the world together. Today the sky had that brittle clarity that promised everything and then, without warning, a wind with a mind of its own would roll through an alley. A gull wheeled, unimpressed by human schedules, and a vendor across the street coaxed a parade of pigeons into formation—they were wearing tiny safety vests as a local prank, part of the festival’s eccentric pet fashion scene.
Rae liked the city from up here. The skyline’s noise translated into weather for a rigger to read: a tram bell, a distant argument—people making their lives below—and the city’s rooftop culture that had nothing to do with engineering. There were rooftop beehives on building thirty-two, a late-night noodle stall famous for broth that somehow tasted like both cloud and charcoal, and a municipal ordinance that declared impromptu yoga classes on scaffolding a public hazard. None of that would help if an anchor failed, but it made the work feel like it belonged to a living organism rather than a calculus problem.
Nico appeared, grinning like they'd just stolen a sunrise. They were a courier, all elbows and optimism, and the last person Rae would admit to mentoring. They carried a canvas backpack with a mismatched set of carabiners clipped to the strap and an impossible playlist playing through one earbud. "You're late," Nico said, which in rooftop terms meant Rae had arrived before the first rehearsal of the falcon-themed aerial troupe.
"Five minutes," Rae answered. "Traffic was a headache. Also the sky owed me one for the rain last Thursday."
Nico snorted. "You'd blame the sky for everything."
Rae nudged a small hardware case with their boot and checked a line: a tensioned walkway web had been threaded through a stainless anchor—good grades, clean bolts—but the webbing on the anchor loop had a shiny abrasion near the splice.
It caught Rae's eye because splices read like handwriting to people who spent their lives tying load-bearing knots. This one had a thumbprint of craft in the wrong place. A minute later, Asha arrived with a clipboard and a smile that could sell tickets and convince a bureaucrat to wear glitter. "Rae, we need the vendor platform solid by noon. The mayor's going to do a ribbon thing if the weather behaves."
Rae looked at the abrasion again and muttered, "Then we better make the sky keep its mouth shut." They hung the coffee on a hook and stepped closer to the webbing to run a fingertip along the fray, feeling the hairs of the fabric catch like a memory of past loads. The festival's soundtrack rose faintly—someone tuning a guitar on a distant roof—and a vendor somewhere shouted, advertising gravity-proof pastries in a voice that was half brag, half joke. Rae allowed a very small smile. Everything about this morning smelled like potential and trouble in equal measure.