The wind at this elevation had no opinion about what it carried.
Cang cleared the last rooftop of Clearwater's merchant district at a height that put the compound's tallest watchtower at ankle level, and both women went with him—not draped over his shoulders, not slung like cargo—but wrapped around him with the involuntary conviction of bodies that had been taught, over the course of a very long night, that this was where their equilibrium lived.
Meiling's legs had locked around his left side before the window was even fully behind them.
She didn't know when she'd done it. Her mind had still been processing the cold morning air on her face, the sudden vertigo of open sky, the outrage of being carried—and then her thighs had simply found purchase against his hip and her arms had found his shoulders and she was holding on with the specific, undignified desperation of a woman who understood, at a purely biological level, that the alternative was falling.
