The roof access door swung shut behind them.
The air up here was different from inside.
Colder. Cleaner.
It moved across the rooftop in steady slow waves that had nothing stopping them, the kind of cold that found the gaps in your clothes and settled there.
The city spread out below and around them in every direction, lights in windows and streetlights and the distant movement of cars on roads that looked small from up here.
Above all of it the sky was clear and dark and full of stars, more of them visible than you ever noticed at street level, sitting in clusters and scattered individually across the black.
The sound up here was the city at a distance.
Not the immediate noise of it but the ambient version, car sounds and sirens somewhere far off and the low continuous hum of a place that never fully went quiet.
Kelly was standing near the center of the roof.
She was wearing a long coat, dark, falling past her knees, the belt tied loosely at her waist.
