Butterfly Stomp Waltz

Chapter 2

2

It’s easy to trust equipment when I’m five or ten feet off the ground. Ten, twenty, thirty floors, no problem. Forty-one floors, though, and my trust gets a little shaky. I wear skin-tight jumpsuits on climbing gigs because the wind can’t whistle up inside them, not because they showcase my great big butt. (Okay, people tell me it’s tiny, but when you’re in a skin-tight jumpsuit, your butt is huge.) At that height the wind, without any trees or all those pesky buildings to slow it down, feels pretty vicious and carries all these nasty smells of exhaust and smoke and diesel and burned jet fuel. The smells come and go, so when I get used to one reek another flavor digs in. Up here, even the air feels like it wants to slap me down like a leaf, especially when there’s nothing whatsoever under that aforementioned butt and I’m carrying a forty-pound pack.

I’m wearing traction pads on my knees and elbows, bootlegged from a nonexistent Special Forces unit returning from an Unnamed Friendly Country. The pads hold the glass like they’ve been nailed there, until I work the toggle strapped to my left palm. Detach one pad, raise one limb, lock it back down. Right leg, left hand, left leg, right hand. Lift with your legs, never your arms.

Repeat.

I’d stretched for an hour before starting this climb, and my hips and shoulders and elbows still grind and pull like frayed belts on dying machines.

In Georgia’s July heat, this glass almost sweats. This high-tech stuff was supposed to clean itself every time it rains, but pollution and condensation still make it greasy and gritty. It isn’t supposed to bother the traction pads. I’d never seen the faintest hint of anything bothering the traction pads.

Maybe slick glass doesn’t bother the traction pads, but it sure bothers me.

The Embassy Building’s way outside Atlanta, in this chunk of green space and private homes and convenience stores and dentist offices. Atlanta looks like a tangle of Christmas lights, mostly white but with reds and blues and greens all mixed up in there. Christmas is the wrong holiday, though. The fireworks for the Fourth ended a couple hours ago, except for the occasional low sparkle across the countryside where some drunk good old boy has decided it’s okay to piss off the neighbors after midnight. The eight-lane highways run out, individual headlights invisible from up there but all together giving this subliminal impression of slow-flowing light.

For just a moment, looking out at those inverted constellations, I feel even farther above everyone.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not worth more than anyone else. I’m smarter, yeah. Faster. Stronger. The right side of the bell curve is this itty-bitty little dot receding in my rear view mirror. But that’s all genetics.

I’m not worth more than anyone.

Except the scumbags pillaging the planet, of course.

The sky is clear, moonless, but the city’s light pollution eats all the stars except Sirius.

What with slithering around the lit windows I’d crawled the equivalent of maybe forty-eight, forty-nine floors to get to the forty-first. But I needed this window right here. I uncouple my right hand from the traction pad, cautiously shake my arm to loosen that elbow and wrist and knuckles without losing my three points on, and pull out the cutting tool. Each generation of glass gets harder to cut, yes, but the cutting tools get better too. There’s tools to lift a whole big window pane out of its frame, gentle as brushing a baby’s hair, and put it back in so smooth nobody knows how you got in. But they’re slow and annoying.

Truth to tell, I don’t give a damn if they figure out how I’d got in. I only care that the alarms on this floor aren’t active.

Attach the palm-sized disk of the cutter to the glass, right in the center of the hole I want.

Extend the cutting arm and the two anchor arms.

Touch cutter to glass.

Push the button.

The anchors glomp onto the glass. The cutter rotates on its own, making one pass to score the glass, then digging deep. I feel this faint vibration through the pads, not enough to shake my teeth but enough to set up a resonance in my spine. My chiropractor’s gonna love this.

Glass turns back to sand and skitters out of the cut, the wind whipping sand and smell away before they can add to the irritation in my sinuses. Yes, I have allergies—thank God for steroid nose spray, or people would call me Snots instead of Beaks.

The sight of the turning cutter suddenly tightens my heart, and under my goggles I have to blink away tears.

Dammit, not now, I told myself. Not the time.

I’d taken the cutter from Deke’s gear. After Newcastle.

You got hammered. You mourned him. Moving on.

He would have wanted me to.

Risks of the job. He knew it.

I grit my teeth. There’s better things to think of. Like sickle cell anemia cures, and the bastards who don’t want you to have them.

I moved a couple feet to the left while the cutter turned. The glass wasn’t going to fall towards me—even if I wasn’t ethical, having a three-foot disk of glass plunge five hundred feet out of the sky onto the sidewalk or some bastard’s Tesla or just half-bury itself edge-on in a little stretch of starving grass imprisoned in concrete would attract attention up here. It’s not going to fall, but I didn’t get here by taking stupid chances (Deke) that might get me killed.

I force myself to breathe deeply and concentrate on a spot between and just above my eyebrows. Any amateur can meditate on a cushion, but it takes real discipline to hold the thought with forty-one stories of open air between your butt and the cushion.

It’s a long five minutes before the window ripples with this “pop” that I feel through the pads more than I hear, and a gust of cool dry air hisses past me from the paper-thin cut. The cutter arm rotates once more and the whole window vibrates as a three-foot wide disk of glass snaps free.

The sturdy glass stands in place, balanced on its two-inch edge. The cutter’s super-suction braces won’t let it fall out, but it can’t topple in until the air pressure equalizes a little more. It’s maybe thirty seconds until the hissing stops and I can reach out and tap the last button on the cutter’s central unit.

The disk of glass leans inward in exaggerated slow motion, then hits the tipping point and thuds into the dark interior.

With the ingress right there, my strained shoulders and hip are screaming for me to slip through the hole and use some other muscle, any other muscle. I free my right arm again to meticulously retract the cutter’s cutting arm, then hit a button to detach the anchor on the far side of the hole. I retract the whole cutter to the anchor right next to me, where I can easily pull all its arms in and snap it to my belt before detaching the last anchor.

I am not losing this cutter. Not ever. Even if better comes out.

Only once I have everything snugged back onto my belt do I slide over to the window. I turn the infra-red vision in my goggles up to ten percent and peer in.

Nobody’s there.

I flip the goggles back to normal vision.

The hole is exactly wide enough for my pack and I to slither into the building’s darkness.