Cass Harper liked the city after midnight because it behaved predictably then. The lights were honest—windows honest in a way they were not in daylight, when curtains pretended privacy and traffic pretended calm. At night you could read loads by the way a balcony bent a shadow or guess wind direction by the tremble in a plastic chair. The façades obeyed physics and bolts obeyed torque, and that was enough order for him.
He clipped into his routine like a harness clip into a D-ring: check harness, test belay, slack the static line, then whisper his little nonsense to the nearest bolt. He called anchors by names the way other people named playlists or dogs. “Maude,” he murmured to the roundplate near the seventeenth floor—Maude had a hairline scar from a faulty washer and a voice in his head that said, Do not trust the paint. “Henry” got his own joke about a date that had gone sideways; he laughed under his breath as he ran a carabiner through, fingers accustomed to the metal’s small betrayals. It was ridiculous and private and it made the night less empty.
Below, a dumpling stall on Mercer was still under its neon umbrella, steam pluming like a tiny weather system. A woman with a scarlet scarf sold buns to taxi drivers who had the sideways stare of people who'd won little private battles against sleep. On the rooftops, people tended herbs—basil and rosemary pots clustered like tiny conspiracies—and a municipal display of orange-slice wreaths hung in some windows because last month the council had declared November “Window Wreath Night” and tenants took to it with competitive fervor. These were not part of his job but they softened the sky.
He worked with hands that needed work: he palmed a bolt, felt grain and corrosion the way some men read paperbacks. His tools were precise, antiquated, and honest; a Munter hitch could be cruel if dressed wrong, a figure-eight follow-through could be a person’s difference between walking home and not. He moved with a kind of gravity-linguist's fluency—reading seams, translating the hum of the building into advice about which hanger would take a load and which would hiss like an unhappy animal.
On his way across Whitby Tower’s glass he heard the van cough awake: Gerald, Jonah's van, doing its usual theatrical backfire on schedule. There was a rubber chicken shoved into the passenger footwell like a memorial to some private joke. Jonah had named the van Gerald in case it needed a more dignified persona; the van hissed like a cat with asthma. He smiled, because even the city had roommates who did dumb things at night.