The silence stayed with them like a dog at heel. It breathed the same air, shared the same floor, learned the same rules. Nobody spoke. Nobody slept. They lay on the cots with boots on and counted the slow turns of their own blood while the brick radios exhaled their seawash.
Grant traced a string on the map with one finger, then another, making lanes out of thread. The boy with the headphones—Grant called him Owen when he lifted one cup to scratch—held very still, lips moving to a count only he could hear. Every few minutes he wrote a number on an index card, set it in a neat pile, and slid the top card to the bottom. It looked like shuffling patience.
Gavin kept watching Margo. She stood with her back to the metal door, weight on the balls of her feet, hands open at her sides as if the room might hand her a new command at any moment. The drawn ear on her palm had half-faded; she'd have to redraw it later, or she wouldn't—the kind of choice that told you what day it was now.
"Two hours," Grant said again without looking up, voice a gravel road traveled by the same truck for years. "We move you on the roof line. Tower to tower. If one of you breaks stride, the rope crews pull your belt and you become a shadow we remember fondly."
"Belts?" Madison rasped.
Grant pointed to a cluster of climbing harnesses hung on a peg. "Clipped to a safety line. We carpeted the runs, but wood still talks when it's tired. The line saves you from a bad board and saves us from explaining you to ourselves after."
Margo nodded once. "We go before the first bird. Street tone changes at light. People get hopeful and hope makes noise."
Riley pushed herself up on an elbow. "How far?"
"Three rooftops to the water office," Margo said. "From there, three choices: north treeline to the reservoir road, west to the feed mill, or east along Main to the depot. I vote north. You'll want water and distance."
"Distance," Gavin said.
"North," Madison agreed.
Owen's pencil ticked. He didn't look up. "Four minutes," he whispered. "Then the floor."
Margo crossed and bent to the boy's height. "Four?" she asked. Owen nodded, eyes far away but steady. Margo turned to the room. "Up."
They rose. Grant handed each of them a belt and clipped them in one by one, tugging twice to test the lock. He cinched Madison hard enough to make the big man grunt. "Don't be brave," Grant said, not unkind. "Be correct."
Riley slung the bag of static bricks and checked her pockets: knife, tape, a flat wooden whistle Margo had given her and told her never to blow. "What's the whistle for if we don't use it?" Riley had asked. "Reminding yourself you aren't going to," Margo had said.
"Thirty seconds," Owen murmured, pencil ticking faster. The brick radios swelled a breath and settled. Somewhere under the house or under the idea of house, the rope hallway remembered the weight of footfalls.
Margo palmed the door latch, looked at Gavin. "Quarterbacks go second," she said. "You look forward but remember angles. I go first. Riley third, bag stays with the middle. Madison last—big men catch small mistakes."
"Nods," Madison said, because nodding would move air.
They slipped into the alley. It had learned a new trick—fog had gathered low, hugging concrete, deadening even the small sounds. Margo pointed up. A ladder ran to a flat roof where two-by-fours bridged the gap to the next building, covered in carpet and anchored in place with sandbags and rebar ties. A black rope drooped along the path like a cat's tail.
Margo climbed and swept an arm across the roofline. The world up there was a set of dark geometry problems drawn in felt: rectangles of tar paper, squares of plywood, trapezoids made by vent stacks. The church sat two blocks away, just visible as a darker shape against lighter dark, and beyond that the water tower loomed with its crescent collar of catwalk. Past the tower, the treeline hunched like a tired army.
Gavin crested the ladder and felt the town under his boots—old boards, old nails, a skin of gravel embedded in tar. He knelt and let his palm ride the carpeted bridge. The fabric felt damp and cold; something had crawled across it earlier and left no track he could see. Margo clipped him to the roof line and pointed to the next anchor. "Stand in your feet," she whispered. "Don't try to be quiet. Be even. Even is quieter than trying."
The brick radios on the cots breathed their surf through the wall, steady as a mother's hand on a fever. Out in the street, the fog muffled the tripwire foil so well that the lines looked like simple string. A moth battered itself against a bulb somewhere and made a rhythm the night could use for practice if it wanted to.
They crossed the first bridge. Boards flexed and remembered every other weight they had carried. Margo's silhouette hunched at the far side, hand on the rope, guiding their clips through in order: click, click, click. They crouched behind a vent stack, then moved to the next swell of roof.
Below, something tried the alley door they had left—a turn of a knob without conviction, a patient test. Then, the soft, precise measure at the seam: tap—tap, tap—tap. The room they'd left answered with nothing. Silence had learned its own choreography here.
The second bridge was longer, a thirty-foot pass between the bakery and the insurance office. Someone had laid second boards beneath the first like a false bottom, and the carpet had been stitched seam to seam with fishing line. A line of child-sized sneakers hung on a clothesline at the far end, toe to heel, weighted with bolts. "Why the shoes?" Madison breathed. Margo flicked her eyes at the sky. "Crows had opinions. We decided to decorate their arguments."
Halfway across, the carpet made a sigh like a book closing. Gavin didn't speed. He made himself even. The sigh didn't happen again.
A shape moved on the street below. Riley froze with one knee bent, body becoming geometry again. The shape wasn't running. It drifted to stand beneath a lamp and waited with its face tilted up, like a plant recalculating the sun. The lamp hummed and the air stuttered with bugs. The shape lifted one hand and traced a circle. Then another. It looked pleased by its own repetition, as if it had matched a hymn and wanted to be praised.
"Eyes forward," Margo breathed. "It learns better when we let it."
They reached the far roof. The water office sat squat with a caged ladder bolted to its side. The cage looked like a ribcage welded around a spine. A bolt cutter hung from a nail beside the bottom rung, wrapped in rubber the way Madison's cutter had been. Someone had written PUT ME BACK on the handle. Under that, different handwriting: THANK YOU, FUTURE IDIOT.
Riley smiled without showing her teeth. Madison cut the first tie and caught the chain with his hand. Margo lifted the cage door and held it while Gavin stepped inside and started up, the clip on his belt ringing once and then behaving as if it remembered the rule. The ladder climbed through shadows into a dome of cable and rivet, up to the catwalk that ringed the water tank like an idea of safety.
They clustered at the rail and looked north. Past the last houses, past the tree line, a thin county road curled away, pale and empty. Far beyond that, a rectangular dark lay against the lighter land—reservoir water absorbing a sky that hadn't decided to be anything yet.
"North," Margo repeated. "A mile through trees to the service gate. It hangs on one hinge. We cut the chain last week and pretend the lock is still honest."
"Any patrols?" Gavin asked.
"The only patrols we trust wear feathers," Margo said. "Which means we trust them until first bird and not a second longer."
"Why 'first bird'?" Madison asked.
"Because the ones that used to be people don't hunt on rhythm at night—they hunt on motion," Margo said. "At light, motion multiplies. Clouds, leaves, reflections, us. Humans see the world again and think it sees them back. We get sloppy. Sloppy gets found."
Riley licked her lips. "They hunt the flicker."
"They hunt whatever makes the world look like it's thinking," Margo said. "So we give the world nothing to think about."
Grant's rope line reached them from two roofs back: a tug, then another, then two quick tugs close together—a pattern like safe, safe, wait. Margo flicked her wrist in acknowledgment. The line went slack, then tightened, then settled.
"Time," Owen's voice whispered from Margo's radio, quiet as lint. "Floor says three."
Margo keyed the mic once—click—and let go. She didn't answer with words. She had written the rules herself.
They took the next span, then another, moving around a square of skylights that had been painted black but still wanted to glow. Riley set a static brick under an overhang where wind made a small hymn. The brick added its ocean to the wind's song. Together they sounded like an empty house.
The last roof before the tower had a low parapet and a garden someone had tried to keep alive—black buckets full of dead tomato vines, a broken trellis, a watering can dented as if kicked for telling the truth. In the dirt, someone had written with a stick: WE HEAR YOU. The stick lay nearby, its end chewed.
"Almost makes me mad," Madison whispered.
"To die?" Margo asked.
"To keep trying to make things grow," he said. "But we will anyway."
"We will," Margo said.
A sound drifted up from the east—two notes close together, the second slightly higher, like a question asked by a small throat. Margo's head snapped toward it, eyes narrowing. "That's not a bird," she said. "That's a recorder."
"Someone playing?" Riley whispered.
"Someone practicing," Margo said, and they all knew who she meant.
Another two-note phrase, this time placed farther apart, as if the mouth had adjusted, correcting distance. The roof line seemed to hold its breath. On Main, a shape stepped into a pool of light and lifted a child's recorder to its mouth. It put fingers down in a clumsy pattern and blew. The sound wobbled, ugly and earnest, exactly like a third grader. When it stopped, it tilted its head, waiting to hear if it matched a noise in its memory.
Margo looked like she might rip the railing out of the roof. Instead she pressed her palm to the catwalk until her knuckles went white. "We move now," she said. "Before it finds a song."
They took the last bridge to the tower's base. The cage door yawned like a jaw on rusted teeth. Gavin led them up, hands steady on rungs polished by years of bored maintenance crews who never imagined the ladder would become a lifeline. The tank's curved flank rose at his shoulder, cool and beaded with dew. From this height, the town looked like a set of models built by a careful child who loved right angles and had been interrupted mid-game.
At the north side, a narrow stair dropped from the catwalk into a stand of trees that should have been ornamental and had become strategy. Carpet strips had been stapled to each tread. Leaves lay clotted on the steps in a way that said someone had arranged them on purpose.
Margo went first, then Gavin. The trees swallowed them in a smell of sap and iron-rich soil. Twigs whispered under their boots. Somewhere close, a raccoon snuffled in a dumpster and then decided against whatever it had hoped to find. The rope line ran ahead through the foliage, dark on dark, tied off to rebar spikes hammered into earth.
"Belts," Margo murmured, more to the trees than to them. "Even, even."
The path turned at a cinderblock shed and followed a fence topped with barbed wire that had gone red with old weather. The gate hung half-open, chain through the links but no lock, a pantomime of security. Margo touched the chain with two fingers and then let it go, as if to reassure it that its lie mattered.
"Beyond the gate," she said, "the road runs along the reservoir embankment. You don't walk on the crest. You walk on the water side where the grass is thick. The earth hides you from the highway. The grass eats your footfalls. The water takes what's left."
"Then where?" Gavin asked.
"Three miles and a crossroads," Margo said. "Left takes you toward a subdivision that never survived its first open house; right takes you toward county road nineteen and a gas co-op we raided for carbide lamps. If it's quiet, the co-op still has shelves you can trust. If it's not, you improvise."
Madison huffed a humorless breath. "I've been improvising since noon."
"Now you do it quieter," Margo said.
Riley reached the gate and eased the chain aside. The links made a soft complaint and then fell against each other with a small, surprised kiss. Everyone froze. The kiss did not echo. The trees kept their own counsel.
They slipped through into grass heavy with dew. The reservoir lay to their left, a rectangle of water so still it seemed like glass had been poured over the land. The far shore showed a black stripe of trees and a few pinpricks of orange where small fires had refused to be told no. A frog coughed. Something large rolled over near the bank and sank—carp, maybe, or a tree limb remembering how to be a log.
Behind them, Emmett breathed. The radio in the church hissed. Somewhere near Main, the recorder found its two-note phrase again and put the notes in the right order. The second note held a fraction too long—pride, if machines could have pride. The sound drifted out over the roofs and into the trees, thin and asking.
Margo didn't look back. "No speeches," she said. "Walk."
They walked, belts clicking on the rope where the path demanded it, unclipping where the trees widened and the ground thickened. The sky in the east had paled one shade, not light yet, not exactly, but something like the thought of light. Their breath smoked faintly. Riley adjusted the strap of the brick bag and kept her feet even on the slope.
"Why the ear on your hand?" she asked, voice hardly a voice.
"So I remember what I'm for when somebody begs me to be something else," Margo said. "Humans are politeness machines. They'd open the ark because a knock sounded like their neighbor."
"Did you ever open?" Madison asked.
"Yes," Margo said. "And I drew the ear because of it."
No one asked what had happened after yes. The grass whispered. The water accepted a leaf and made no comment. The sky thinned another hair.
A rustle in the brush to their right, then a series of clicks—eyes, not human. Three deer stepped onto the slope, looked at them, and did the thing deer do when they haven't decided what world you belong to: they chewed, they blinked, they let you be. One flicked an ear and walked on, light as a rumor. The others followed, their hooves making hardly a point.
The rope line ended at a stake set into an old concrete block. Margo unclipped and tied off the tail so it wouldn't move and make the grass talk about them after they'd gone. She touched the stake as if telling it a secret, then straightened.
"From here you're just bodies on ground," she said. "No net, no line. Only even feet and the respect you give to edges."
Gavin nodded. The team feeling rose in him the way it had in locker rooms: that electric stillness before the first snap, the knowledge that ten other hearts would beat in time with his if he earned it. He checked Madison's eyes. He checked Riley's hands. He looked at Margo, who wasn't his but had made herself their rule for the span of a night.
Somewhere behind them, far off through the trees and roofs and beams and bowls of water, a sound lifted. It was small and clean and real, two notes not on any recorder, separated by morning itself: a bird clearing its throat of dark and trying out a line.
"First bird," Margo said.
Nobody moved.
The bird tried again and found its melody, a simple thing that did not want an answer. The light behind it accepted the attempt.
Gavin shifted his weight forward—exactly the weight of a choice—and the grass bent without complaint. He looked north along the embankment where the path curved out of sight, then back once at Emmett, which had given them a rule and a road.
"Even," he whispered.
They stepped, one and then one and then one, not faster, not slower, in the same breath they had taught themselves in the room with the brick radios and the map. The water held its reflections steady. The grass held their noise. The morning, patient as rain, waited to see if men could be as quiet as it was asking them to be.