From his perch high on the steel overhead frame twenty arm-lengths above the square, thirteen-year-old Tavi Rusk had seen what the adults on the cobblestones had missed.
He had watched the hunter retreat into the bank row of stone pillars. But the creature had not gone down into the cellar vaults.
It had climbed.
Using Hookhold, the double had reached up with its right hand. Its fingers locked onto the square iron downspout behind the bank pillar with the crushing leverage of a heavy-duty vice. Without a running start, without a grunt of hard effort, it had hauled its entire body up thirty feet of upright brickwork with the sickening, easy speed of a spider. Its boots had found purchase on a one-inch limestone decorative molding, its left hand catching the copper roof gutter, and with a single fluid pull it had vaulted onto the slate ridge of the bank roof.
Once on the roof, it had run.
Tavi had watched it sprint across forty yards of frost-slick slate tiles with the terrifying, zero-drag agility of Burdenless Step. It didn’t slip. It didn’t dislodge a single piece of moss or rattle an iron ridge-hook. It moved with its torso angled forward, its clean coat streaming behind it. It leapt a ten-foot alley gap between the bank and the textile warehouse before dropping down an open air-flow louver that led straight into the Sump Road service hall.
