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She began the night, as she began all nights, atop the partially constructed office tower at the corner of Forty-third and Fifth Avenue The air was blustery, with a hint of warmth; stars bedecked the heavens, thick as dust The shapes of great buildings crenellated the sky in silhouettes of perfect blackness The Enificent Chrysler Building, Fanning’s favorite, soaring above everything around it with its graceful art deco crown The hours after ht were the ones Alicia liked best The quiet was richer sos, the world’s rich chroh her, a coursing in the blood She breathed it in and out A darkness indomitable, suprean to cli’s upper floors, it soared another hundred feet above the roof There were stairs, but Alicia never bothered, stairs being a thing of the past, a quaint feature of a life she barely recalled The boo, was positioned parallel with the building’s west face She made her way down the catwalk to the booled in the darkness Alicia winched it up, released the brake, and drew the hook backward along the boom Where the boom met the mast was a small platform She laid the hook there, returned to the tip, and reset the chain’s brake Then, back to the platforer about to be slaked Standing erect, head held high, she gripped the hook in her fists

And stepped off

She plunged down and away The trick was to release the hook at just the right moment, when her speed and upward hly two-thirds up the back side of the hook’s arc She swung through the bottohts--all were attuned, at one with speed and space

She released the hook Her body inverted; she tucked her knees to her chest Three aerial rolls and she uncoiled The flat-topped roof across the street: that was the target It rose in greeting Welcome, Alicia

Touchdown

Her powers had expanded It was as if, in the presence of her creator, some powerful mechanism within her had been fully unleashed The aerial spaces of the city were trivial; she could vault vast distances, alight on the narrowest ledges, cling to the tiniest cracks Gravity was a toy to her; she ranged above Manhattan like a bird In the glass faces of skyscrapers her reflected ied and swooped

She found herself, sometime later, above Third Avenue, near the demarcation between land and sea; a few blocks south of Astor Place, the encroaching waters began, bubbling up fro between buildings, to the street Broken shells lay everywhere aes She knelt and pressed her ear to the pave

The grate pulled away easily; she dropped into the tunnel, lit her torch, and began to walk south A ribbon of dark water sloshed at her feet Fanning’s Many had been eating Their droppings were everywhere, rank, ureic, as were the skeletal re--mice, rats, the small creatures of the city’s clas were fresh, a few days old at the h the Astor Place station Now she could feel it: the sea The great bulge of it, always pressing, seeking to enlarge its doht Her heart had quickened; the hairs stood up along her arms It’s only water, she told herself Only water…

The bulkhead appeared A thin spray of water, ales She stepped toward it A moid face On the other side, untold tons of pressure lay in stasis, stale had explained the history The entire Manhattan subway syste to happen After Hurricane Wilma had flooded the tunnels, the city fathers had constructed a series of heavy doors to hold the water in check In the throes of the epidemic, when the electricity had failed, a fail-safe mechanism had sealed the the encroaching ocean at bay

Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid…

She heard a skittering behind her She spun, raising her torch At the edge of the darkness, a pair of orange eyes flared A large ; he squatted, froglike, between the tracks, a rat gripped in his mouth with the very tips of his teeth The rat squir