The Handprints Came First

The handprints always came first.

Mara found the newest one on the outside of her kitchen window, six floors above the nearest scaffold.

Five long fingers rested against the glass. Rainwater gathered in the palm and climbed toward the fingertips instead of running down. Beyond it, Jayjo's upper roofs had disappeared into morning fog. Antenna masts leaned out of the white and vanished again. Bridge cables hummed somewhere below, too deep to see.

Mara did not touch the window.

Roof Nine knew Mara by the sound of her boots: quick on the stairs, uneven on the landing. She was twenty-eight, narrow-shouldered and rope-muscled, with black hair braided close so the bridge wind had nothing to seize. Children knew her pockets held barley sweets. Adults knew she came back.

An old guide-cord burn had stiffened her left hand. She earned it at fifteen, racing home with medicine that arrived too late. Wetlung took her mother while Mara was still three roofs away, reeds beneath her shirt. Since then, she had never called medicine a parcel. Parcels could wait. Breathing could not.

She set her tea on the floor, where the heat would not fog the glass, and backed into the hall. "Fresh one," she called.

Doors opened without opening all the way. An eye appeared through one crack. A horn wrapped in sleep-cloth showed through another. Across the corridor, old Sen held a piece of chalk between two black claws but did not step out.

"Inside or out?" he asked.

"Out. West window."

"Moving which way?"

"Hasn't moved yet."

Nobody corrected her. The people of Roof Nine knew what she meant. Sen put the chalk away.

At the end of the hall, someone pulled the fog line. A bell rang once above the stairwell, then once again on the next roof, and again farther off, each roof carrying the warning until the whole white morning spoke in single notes. The last answer came from Roof Twelve, where Holl's dented bell always sounded like a spoon striking a tooth.

Fresh trace.

Do not follow.

Mara went back inside and looked anywhere but the window.

Most mornings, she carried small necessities between the high roofs: dry batteries, sealed letters, starter cultures, medicine that could not be allowed to freeze or get wet. She had carried last words between feuding families and once a newborn inside her coat. People called her a courier when they had money and a favor when they did not. Mara answered to both.

On the table waited a waxed packet no larger than her palm. Inside it were two dry lung reeds and two slim vials of blue tincture. The medicine had come up from Eldenberry overnight wrapped in three layers of oilcloth and somebody's clean undershirt. It was meant for a little girl named Pella on Roof Fourteen, across the north bridges.

Pella had called her Aunt Mara since learning to speak, though no blood joined them. Mara had taught Pella's older brother, Tavi, to knot a rain cape, held Pella through her first fever, and eaten enough burnt dinners at their table to know which floorboard their mother, Miren, stepped over in the dark. Beside Pella's breathing cup stood a crooked wooden bird Holl had carved for her. Pella insisted it watch every treatment and turned its leaning beak toward anyone who coughed. Roof Fourteen was not a stop on Mara's route. It was family arranged by weather and shared walls.

Pella had spent the night breathing through a tin cup while Miren kept the steam warm. The fog had arrived before the medicine did. Mara slid the packet beneath her coat. In the hall, Sen heard the buckle close.

"No," he said.

"I didn't ask."

"Good. Saves us both the trouble of pretending this is a discussion."

He was an old crow Beastkin with one clouded eye and shoulders narrowed by years of squeezing through crawl spaces built for smaller bodies. The feathers around his throat had gone silver. Wet air made them stand up in uneven ridges.

Sen had taken Mara in after her mother's room went quiet. He taught her which cable-song meant run, how to smell lightning through rain, and why a familiar voice in the fog sometimes deserved no answer. He had never called himself her father. She had never called him anything but Sen. Roof Nine understood the rest.

"North bridges will be barred," he said.

"Then I won't use the north bridges."

"The west wall already has a print."

"A window has a print."

"Windows become walls when people stop respecting them."

Mara checked the packet through her coat. Still there. Still dry.

"Pella has maybe an hour before the reeds in her cup soften," she said.

Sen's good eye dropped. That was agreement on Roof Nine: looking at the floor so nobody could accuse kindness of making the decision.

He opened his door and returned with a coil of red guide cord.

"This was already fraying," he said, pressing it into her hands. "If you happen to leave it somewhere useful, saves me throwing it away."

"Naturally."

"And Mara?" She waited. "Don't look for the body."

Outside, the fog swallowed the roof edge two steps before it arrived.

Mara tied one end of the guide cord to the ring beside the stair door, clipped the remaining coil to her belt, and let the red line pay out behind her as she crossed. The roof garden crouched beneath patched glass, its leaves silvered by condensation. Someone had tied strips of foil above the beds to frighten ordinary birds. The foil hung still. Even the wind had lost its way.

Old prints marked the walls around her.

Three fingers over a vent, circled in yellow chalk.

A palm stretched across the water tank, ringed in stove ash.

Four narrow marks beneath the bridge crank, dated by a child who had drawn a smiling face beside them after the adults left.

Those were history. History could be walked past.

Freshness was different.

At the far end of the garden, water beaded on a railing in the shape of a hand. Mara stopped. The palm had not appeared all at once. A fingertip darkened the metal. Then another. Moisture lengthened between them. Knuckles arrived last, pressing dents into water without bending the rail beneath it.

The print pointed north. Pella was north. That was how it worked. It did not block the way. It offered one.

Mara unhooked the coil from her belt, passed it twice around the garden frame, clipped it back on, and turned east.

The gutter-walk there was hardly a path at all: a narrow lip, a leaning billboard brace, then nine iron steps descending to a roof that had once belonged to a laundry. In clear weather, Mara could cross it carrying two buckets and an argument. In fog, every surface waited until her weight touched it before deciding whether it existed.

She kept one hand on the red cord.

Below her, the city breathed through vents. Warm steam rose from kitchens, bathrooms, engine cupboards, crowded sleeping floors. It entered the fog carrying broth, soap, hot wire, wet fur, and the sharp medicinal stink of boiled mold. Thousands of lives announced themselves without becoming visible.

Halfway down the steps, she heard a shoe scrape behind her. Mara froze. Another scrape followed, small and careless.

"Tavi." Silence. "I can hear your buckle tapping."

A boy emerged one piece at a time from the fog above: boots first, then coat, then the pale curve of one horn. His other horn had been cut short years ago and capped with a brass thimble. He was twelve and believed this qualified him to survive anything that had not killed him at eleven.

Mara had known that brass cap since the winter Tavi lost the horn to a broken heating fan. He hated being watched over, remembered every promise, and went silent whenever he was afraid. The tapping buckle had belonged to a coat Mara gave him two winters ago. He had grown without asking the sleeves for permission.

"Mum said not to let you go alone," he whispered.

"Your mum is on Roof Fourteen."

"That's why she couldn't tell me herself."

"Go back."

"Pella's my sister."

There it was. Not bravery. Not disobedience. A fact with teeth. Mara pulled the cord tight between them.

"Clip on," she said. "You step where I step. If you see a wet print, you do not point. You do not name it. You do not stare long enough to decide which way it faces."

Tavi clipped his belt to the cord.

"And if I see the Ape?"

"You didn't."

They descended. The laundry roof had sagged in the middle, forming a shallow pond under the fog. Lines of abandoned clothespins clicked overhead. A family lived beneath the old sorting shed; candlelight showed around its covered door, and somebody inside was singing multiplication tables to a wakeful child.

Mara touched the shed wall twice as she passed. Occupied. Safe enough. A hand tapped twice from inside.

At the next bridge, a chain had been drawn across the entrance. No lock. Just a soup spoon tied to the center with blue thread.

Holl tied spoons like that. He knew every bridge by its groan and kept the old crank teeth slick with cooking fat when proper grease could not be found. If he chained a span, it was because he had heard a failure other people could not.

"Don't touch it," a voice called from the fog.

Holl appeared near the middle of the span, a broad man in a patched oilskin, beard beaded white with mist. One hand rested on the rail. The other held the wooden mallet he used to test rotten boards. A loose loop of bridge cable lay beside his boot. He was too far out. The fog had hidden the chain behind him.

"Holl," Tavi breathed.

Holl squinted toward them. "Your mother will peel you like a root when she sees where you've been."

Tavi almost smiled.

Behind Holl, water darkened the bridge crank.

One fingertip appeared on the iron. Then another.

Mara's stomach dropped.

"Holl," she said. "Don't turn around."

His smile died.

He turned.

His heel landed inside the loose cable loop.

The crank gave one tiny click. Holl had taught Mara that sound years ago: a holding tooth slipping out of place.

There was nothing behind him but the crank, the new handprint, and fog packed thick as wool.

Then the counterweight dropped somewhere inside the roof, and the bridge cable moved.

The cable gave no second warning. The loose loop beside Holl's boot snapped tight around his ankle and ripped his leg out from under him. He hit the boards face-first. Two of his teeth skipped across the wet planks. His mallet went over the rail without making a sound.

The sound came a breath later.

A crack like a branch breaking inside a sack.

Holl's mouth opened as he rolled, but no sound came. His right knee had bent backward. A white spear of shin pushed through his trousers and shone for an instant before blood covered it.

"Don't move!" Mara shouted.

The freed counterweight began hauling the bridge shut.

Holl clawed for the railing. His nails found iron. The cable dragged him toward the crank housing, slow enough for him to understand where he was going.

Mara ripped the coil free of its belt hook and flung it. It struck his shoulder. Holl caught it with his free hand.

For half a second, she had him.

Then the winch took his other arm.

The iron drum caught his sleeve and swallowed cloth, wrist, and forearm before Mara could let go. Bone knocked against the housing. Holl's elbow folded the wrong way. The turning cable peeled the arm up to the shoulder, drawing skin tight enough to shine before it split.

Blood struck the rail in a black fan.

The red cord burned across Mara's palms, opening the old groove in her left hand. She braced both feet against the chain and pulled until the muscles in her back tore hot.

Holl looked at her.

He was still alive when his shoulder came apart.

The winch dragged his chest against the iron mouth. His ribs broke one after another, each crack neat and separate. His body folded sideways around the drum. The rail forced his jaw open. Metal punched through his cheek. One eye filled red, then pushed outward as the pressure climbed.

Mara let go only when the cord began pulling Tavi with her.

Holl vanished into the turning iron to the waist.

The crank stopped.

What remained of him hung folded around it, boots nearly touching the back of his head. His left hand still gripped the railing. His right arm was no longer joined to him. The cable had wound it somewhere inside.

Only then did the bridge bell begin to ring.

Holl's scream came last.

It poured out of the fog after his mouth had stopped moving, long and wet and astonished. Tavi clapped both hands over his ears. The scream continued beneath them, as if Holl were falling through the roofs with no ground willing to receive him.

At the far end of the bridge, the fog thinned around something tall.

Mara saw a narrow head. One shoulder. An arm hanging down past where its knees should have been.

She blinked.

It was suddenly crouched beside Holl.

It did not touch the body. It leaned near his ruined face as if listening to the scream that had arrived too late.

Mara seized Tavi's coat and pulled him away from the chain.

"Below," she said.

He stared at the blood dripping between the bridge boards.

"Tavi. Below."

His body obeyed before his face did.

They crawled through a rusted hatch and onto the back of a dead advertisement. Rain had peeled the face from the sign years ago, leaving a white woman with no mouth promising a dry home to people who could see the sky through their floors.

A warm drop struck the white woman's empty eye.

Another landed on Tavi's cheek.

He wiped it away, looked at the red on his fingers, and made no sound at all.

The metal frame ran beneath them like a ladder laid across open air.

Mara did not look down. She watched Tavi's hands instead. Grip. Slide. Grip. His knuckles had gone pale around the steel.

Above them, something landed on the bridge.

The bridge did not shake until three breaths later.

Tavi's eyes lifted.

Mara kicked the frame.

The clang snapped his attention toward her.

"What was—"

"Nothing you saw. Keep moving."

A railing groaned overhead. Long fingers curled around its underside.

Only fingers.

They were colorless where the fog crossed them and dark where no light should have reached. Water fell upward from each nail. An arm followed, too thin and too long, extending across the bridge without revealing a shoulder.

Mara looked at the rust beneath her hands.

Grip. Slide. Grip.

The fingers let go.

Far ahead, something struck metal.

Then the handprint appeared beside Tavi's face.

Five wet marks opened across the dead advertisement. One fingertip touched the brass cap on his horn.

Tavi screamed and pulled away, Holl's last sound still living inside his own.

His boot slipped between the bars.

Mara caught the back of his coat. The packet beneath hers struck the frame. Glass clicked inside the waxed wrapping.

For one breath, all three of them hung there: Mara locked around a rusted brace, Tavi dangling over the white, and the unseen weight of the thing arriving somewhere that had already touched them.

The red guide cord pulled tight.

Not toward Roof Nine.

Sideways.

Mara stared at it.

The cord ran back through the fog, but it no longer led behind them. It crossed the sign frame and vanished toward a roof they had never walked on.

The Wisp-Ape had not moved the buildings.

It had moved what following meant.

"Mara," Tavi gasped.

She hauled him up until his chest scraped metal. His fingers found the frame. His clipped harness trembled against the cord.

"Unclip," she said.

"But the line—"

"Is lying. Unclip."

He obeyed. Mara let the red cord go.

It slipped across the steel like something alive, drawing itself into the fog. For a moment she heard it whisper through distant rings, each one sounding farther away and closer at the same time.

Then it was gone. Tavi pressed his face against the metal.

"How do we get back?"

"We don't. We get across."

"How?"

Mara closed her eyes. Roof Nine had taught her the crossings. The upper spans had taught her what familiar ways became when the weather objected. But the people below the roofs had taught her something else: the city was never silent. It only became difficult to hear.

She listened.

Behind them: multiplication tables, the child now shouting every sixth number.

Below: a vent fan with a cracked bearing, turning in a three-beat limp.

To the north: bridge cables singing under water weight.

And farther on, almost buried beneath the fog, a woman striking a pot with a wooden spoon.

Three quick. Two slow. Three quick.

"Mum," Tavi said.

Mara opened her eyes without looking beyond him.

"She's calling the whole roof home," he said. "Not us. Not by name."

"Can you hold the rhythm?" Mara asked.

Tavi nodded.

"Then lead. Nothing else."

They crawled. Wet prints appeared along the frame ahead of them. Some were human-sized. Some were broad enough to cross two beams. One formed around Mara's hand while she was still holding the steel.

Cold water filled the spaces between her fingers. She did not pull away or look for the arm that had not arrived.

Three quick. Two slow. Three quick.

Tavi breathed the rhythm through his teeth.

Behind Mara, metal bent with a soft, thoughtful sound.

The fog briefly showed a head above the sign frame. Narrow. Featureless. Two dark places where eyes might have failed to finish. Its body descended from the wrong angle, ribs suggested by strips of shadow, one shoulder absent entirely.

Mara felt her own face begin to turn. It was not curiosity. Her muscles were trying to follow before she had decided to move.

Tavi struck the brass cap of his horn against the frame.

The clang snapped her attention toward him.

"What's six times seven?" he shouted.

Mara stared at him.

"The kid back there skipped it," Tavi said. "What's six times seven?"

"Forty-two."

"Louder."

"Forty-two!"

"Six times eight?"

"Forty-eight!"

Tavi kept asking. Mara kept answering. They crawled through the questions together.

The presence behind them became dampness, then weight, then a handprint opening on a beam ahead. Mara ignored it. The pot grew louder.

At the far side of the sign frame, a roof edge emerged. Hands reached from the fog—ordinary hands, short-fingered and shaking. Miren caught Tavi first. Two neighbors took Mara beneath the arms and pulled until the sign frame gave them up.

Nobody asked what they had seen. They shut the hatch and laid an iron bar across it. Somebody pushed a folded towel into Mara's hands, though no one called that comfort.

"The medicine," she said.

The waxed packet had split at one corner. Inside, one vial remained whole.

One was enough.

Pella lay beside a kettle in the warmest room, her little horns wrapped in red cloth to stop them striking the wall when the coughing took her. Miren crushed the dry reeds into the breathing cup and added three drops of blue.

The steam changed smell.

Pella inhaled.

The room waited.

Her next breath went all the way in.

Mara counted until another breath came, then another. She had spent thirteen years remembering the three roofs between herself and her mother's last breath. This time there was no distance left. She had arrived. She did not know what to do with relief, so she kept counting.

Pella's fingers moved first. They found Holl's crooked bird beside the cup and pushed it weakly toward Mara. Mara closed the child's hand around it again.

No one cheered. Miren simply lowered her forehead to the child's and stayed there until staying became ordinary.

Mara sat on the floor beside Tavi. Fog pressed against every window. Now and then, a roof bell rang somewhere in the white and another answered.

By afternoon, the prints on Roof Fourteen had stopped appearing. By evening, the bridge cables held one direction again. At the next dawn, Mara and Sen walked the roofs together.

They found the red cord still looped around the garden frame. The end tied to the stair-door ring remained where Mara had left it. Eleven meters beyond the frame had vanished. The remaining end was wet.

It took five people to cut Holl from the crank.

The bridge gave him back in pieces. Sen wrapped each one in the same gray blanket. Nobody spoke of carelessness. Nobody said Holl should have known better. Miren scrubbed his blood from the boards with hot water she could not afford to waste, then poured the pink runoff into the roof garden so something living would take it.

Tavi did not come to the bridge. He sat beside Pella with Holl's crooked bird lying between them and counted by sixes until his voice stopped shaking.

Holl's left hand remained closed around the railing until Mara broke two fingers to free it. Beneath his palm, untouched by his blood, waited another long wet print.

They left the wet bridge print untouched.

On the dead advertisement below the closed bridge, the long print beside Tavi's horn had dried to a pale mineral stain.

Sen climbed down with a piece of yellow chalk between his claws.

He did not ask where the beast had gone.

He did not draw an arrow or write a warning. He placed the chalk in Mara's hand and waited while she made one careful ring around the dried stain.

The bridge above remained chained. Only when the circle closed did people begin using the lower route again.