CHAPTER 11 – SOFT STEPS
The stairwell makes everything louder.
Every step, every cough from the floors above, every door slam turns into a metal throat clearing its complaints. The concrete walls throw the sounds back at you like they're annoyed you walked through.
I stand on the second-floor landing and just listen for a minute.
Two flights below: someone laughing too hard at something on their phone. Above: a distant thump of bass leaking through cheap drywall. Somewhere, a pipe ticks as it cools. The usual shelter mix.
And under all of it, close and sharp, is the sound I care about: the plastic slap of my own shoes on painted stairs.
I shift my weight forward and walk down a step.
Rubber hits metal-painted concrete. There's a little squeak, a hollow echo, the faint clack where my heel lands a fraction too hard.
Yeah. There it is. The sound that climbed that fire escape with me yesterday and rattled all the way up the ladder. The sound that said here I am to anyone with ears.
I go back up. Slow. Heel first, then midfoot. I try different angles, transfer my weight differently. The noise changes, but it never really goes away.
Ground level is too visible. I knew that already. Yesterday just slapped it into my bones.
Up there is better. Fewer eyes. But if every metal rung sings my name, that's not better, just different.
I stop on the landing and lean my shoulder into the wall. Cold concrete, paint rough under the fabric. I stand there a moment, feeling the building breathe around me.
Loose tools used to rattle like this in my pockets. Every step an announcement: stolen screwdriver here, stolen pliers there. I fixed that. Wrapped them. Built a kit. Quieted them down.
Feet should be the same. Part of the rig, not the problem.
A kid walks by at the bottom of the stairs in socks, sprinting for the bathroom. His steps barely make a sound. Just a soft whisper on the floor, the swish of his too-long pajama pants.
I listen to that, file it away next to the squeak of my soles.
Okay. Problem statement's clear enough.
Tools are quiet.
Feet aren't.
Stupid.
I steal thirty minutes in the basement.
Not the boiler room this time—Harris is in and out of there too much, and staff have started treating it like "the place where the heater works again," which means it's alive now. Too much traffic.
I pick a smaller space. Storage corner off the laundry room, where the concrete's cracked, and a shelf with folded blankets hides most of the wall. Someone stacked three busted plastic bins there months ago and never came back for them.
Good. The city likes leaving dead things in corners. Makes it easier to work.
I sit on the floor with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out, feet bare. My shoes sit between my knees like two dumb problems.
The soles are worn slick in the center, little bald ovals where the pattern's been chewed off by stairs and asphalt. Around the edges, there's still some tread left. The heels are flat and shiny.
I pick one up, flex it in my hands. Thin rubber bends with a soft creak. Light, but not silent.
Beside me on the concrete, I lay out what I have:
A strip of towel I scavenged from the laundry rejects—too frayed to keep upstairs, perfect for me.A shredded T-shirt sleeve.A roll of duct tape with just enough left on it to be worth hiding in my hoodie.Scissor blade wrapped in cloth.Screwdriver shaft.Needle and thread.
Everything lined in a row, edges parallel, tools heads up. The little geometry of control.
I tap the bare shoe sole against the floor three times. Slap, slap, slap. The sound jumps off the walls.
Then I put the towel strip down and tap that with my knuckle.
Thump. Softer. Sound dies where it hits.
I slide the shoe over it and press down. The rubber squeaks on cloth, but the floor doesn't answer back as much.
Better.
I tear the towel strip in half, then again, until I have rounded shapes roughly the size of my heel and the ball of my foot. One by one, I place them on the sole, adjusting where the pressure lands when I walk.
Heels hit here. Ball lands here. Toes curl here, but that's less of a problem; they don't slam as much.
It's like placing padding under pipes to stop them rattling. Same logic. Different interface.
The T-shirt sleeve becomes smaller pieces. Longer, thin strips. These are for tying everything together.
I rough up the rubber where the cloth will sit, scraping it with the scissor blade until the surface goes from shiny to dull. Dust flecks off. It's a small thing, but smooth-on-smooth never holds well. You want teeth.
Finally, I peel a length of tape off the roll. The sound rips through the basement, sharp and accusing. I wince and pause, listening for footsteps above.
Nothing. Washing machines thrum. Someone bangs a dryer door closed and curses at it.
Okay.
I press cloth to sole, then tape over it, wrapping around the sides, pulling tight so there are no wrinkles to catch on anything. Tape bites down, shiny silver against matte black, towel peeking through in places.
Heel first. Then the ball of the foot. A second, thinner layer just at the front edge, angled so it'll grab metal better.
The shoe looks worse when I'm done. Bulkier, uneven, tape lines not quite straight. But when I set it down and tap the heel on the concrete, the sound is more of a muted thud than a clack.
I do the second one faster, muscle memory already forming. Scrape, lay, wrap, smooth, press.
When both are done, they sit side by side like they're half-dressed. Frankenstein sneakers.
I pull them on and stand up slowly.
First step: careful, weight over the midfoot. Cloth compresses and the tape creaks softly, but the impact doesn't bounce back into the room like before.
I walk a short loop around the storage nook: wall to shelf, shelf to doorway, then back. Steps are lower, swallowed by the hum of the machines.
Not invisible. Just… less.
That's good enough for v0.1.
I take another pass, this time exaggerating the bad behavior—heel strike hard, roll forward too fast. The sound spikes but still comes out duller than before, like someone turned the city down by a notch.
On a whim, I hop in place. Both feet up, both down.
The soles kiss the concrete with a soft thump, the tape and cloth catching the worst of it.
"Okay," I murmur, more to the shoes than myself. "You can stay."
I crouch again, re-tie the laces so the loose ends are shorter and tuck them under the crossed section. Loose laces slap. Slap is noise. Noise is information. Information gets people killed.
Not if I can help it.
By the time I stand up again, the washing machines have moved into their spin cycles. The whole room vibrates a little. The building makes its usual mechanical groans.
Inside that, my steps vanish further.
It's still not enough.
But it's better than yesterday.
Night in Gotham never really arrives. It just gets… thicker.
Clouds press low over the Marrow, reflecting dirty orange light back down. Steam breathes from vents. Streetlamps flicker, one in three buzzing with that high, insect hum.
I slip out the shelter's side door in the gap between bed checks. Nobody's watching except the cameras—and those are old, half-blind, and pointed at the wrong things.
The alley is narrow and damp, brick weeping slow moisture. Trash bags slouch against the wall. Somewhere down the block, someone yells at someone else, then laughs like it's all a joke.
I adjust my hood, tuck hands into my pockets, and walk toward the fire escape I already know by feel.
The first rung of the ladder is still just out of reach unless you jump. Yesterday, I used stacked crates. Today, I use a different trick: I grab the drainpipe beside it where it bolts close to the wall and put my foot on a discolored patch of brick, the one I tested three times in daylight.
Weight, push, fingers brush cold metal, then close.
This time, when I pull, the ladder rattles—but quieter. Cloth-wrapped heels, softer soles. The metal still complains in old building groans instead of startled shrieks.
I climb.
Each step is a little test. Ball of the foot first, roll up, keep the weight smooth. The tape hisses against the rung instead of squealing. The cloth layers soak up the impact.
From below, it probably still sounds like someone going up a fire escape. But not someone running. Not someone panicking.
At the first landing, I stop and let my arms hang loose, breath steaming. My skin prickles with cold; fingers feel clumsy even inside gloves. I put one hand on the rail and give it a small shake.
Rattle. Echo. But my shoes stay mostly quiet when I shift my stance.
Not bad for trash-pile engineering.
I keep going.
Up another flight. Past a window where thin light slices through blinds and cuts a stripe across my chest. A TV mutters inside, some late-night show laughter warped by dirty glass.
I pause just out of the beam, making sure my shadow doesn't cross it.
People don't look up here unless something moves in their line of sight. I'm not giving them that.
At the top of the last ladder, I brace myself, then push the roof access bar. It sticks for a second, metal grinding on metal, then pops with a grudging clank. I catch it with my foot before it can swing and slam.
The shoes help. The padded soles muffle the contact. The door's complaint dies quicker.
Small wins.
The roof greets me with that smell I'm starting to recognize: cold tar, damp gravel, and whatever the wind has been dragging over the city all day. There's a thin dusting of frost on the edges where ponds of meltwater froze, slick and treacherous.
I step out carefully, staying away from the shiny patches. My heels find rougher zones where the grit bites back.
From here, St. Mary's cross peeks over the nearby rooftops, lit from below by tired spotlights. In the other direction, I can see the market street where I stole bread. The awnings are folded now, signs dark, but the ghosts of yesterday's crowd are still there if I blink.
Too many eyes on the ground. Less up here.
I walk to the far edge of the roof, keeping my weight low, knees soft. The tape crinkles now and then, but it's mostly swallowed by the general hum of the city.
Another building sits a few feet away, slightly lower, with a parapet chipped along the top. I checked this jump in my head during the day and once in reality when adrenaline was yelling in my ears.
This time I do it on purpose.
I crouch and test the grip with one foot—push forward, pull back. The cloth catches on tar, gets a little more friction than bare rubber alone. I mark the best launch spot—just off-center, where the roof isn't bowed.
"Don't be stupid," I tell myself quietly. "But don't stay stuck."
Two steps back. One breath in. I move.
The gap is wider when your feet leave something solid. For half a second there's only air and the tight twist in my stomach. Then my soles hit the opposite roof.
The sound is a low whuff and a gritty slide. Cloth drags, tape scrapes, but the grip holds before I go over.
I end up with one hand on the parapet, heartbeat in my throat. My legs are steady. Mostly.
Okay.
v0.1 passes the test.
I straighten slowly, listening.
Cars rumble on the street below. A train in the distance screeches on old tracks. Somewhere, a dog barks itself hoarse. No one shouts about a kid on the roof. No spotlight swings up to paint me in white.
I move along the parapet, staying in the shadows cast by chimneys and vents.
The city opens up around me in layers. Rooflines stacked like crooked shelves. Fire escapes zig-zagging down brick faces. Alleys slicing between, thin dark veins.
Down there, corners are traps. Up here, corners are cover.
I cross another short gap, this one onto a lower building where the tar is cracked into a mosaic and someone abandoned an air-conditioning unit too heavy to bother stealing.
The shoes whisper instead of shout. On bare gravel they make a soft shush. On metal they sound like a hand lightly brushing instead of a hammer.
The difference isn't just noise; it's how my body reacts. Shoulders lower a fraction. Steps get smoother. Movements feel less like flinching and more like… choosing.
At the far edge of this rooftop, I stop again.
There it is: the dark stack.
From here, I can see the building that's been bothering me since I first climbed high enough to notice it. A tall brick block a few streets over, one column of windows black all the way down. No lamp glow behind curtains. No shifting shadows. Just dead glass.
Everything around it has life. A lit strip of windows in one building where people are eating late dinners. Off-blue TV glare from another. The steady blink of a neon sign trying to pretend it's not half burned out.
But that stack stays blank.
In daylight, it looked like old neglect. Up here, at this angle, it looks like a missing piece.
I lean my forearms on the parapet, keeping low, my hood casting shadow over my face in case anyone happens to look up from the street.
That building has:
Fire escape ladders on two sides.A roof door, or what looks like one, a little raised box on top.No obvious cameras on the external walls, at least not old-school dome types.
It's set back half a block from the main road, with a decent alley on one side and a cramped courtyard on the other. If it's empty—or mostly empty—it's almost… ideal.
The word lodges like a splinter.
"Don't get ahead of yourself," I mutter. "You saw one side of it from a distance. That's not data. That's wishful thinking."
Still. The thought won't fully go away.
A place like that, high and mostly ignored, with multiple exits… If the floors aren't going to fall out from under you, if the roof isn't about to cave in, if no one worse already claimed it—
You could do a lot with a place like that.
All I actually know right now is that the windows are dark and no one's yelling from inside.
Not enough.
I pull myself back from the parapet and cross to the other side of the roof where a lower building connects, nothing special about it except that it leads me back toward the shelter and away from temptation.
Feet first. One rooftop at a time. One problem at a time.
The return route goes faster. Silent Shoes v0.1 do their job: tape flexing, cloth padding, each step a little more controlled. I sync my movements to other noises when I can—bus brakes, a passing train, a gust of wind that whistles between two towers.
If the city wants to stay noisy, I might as well hide inside it.
At the last fire escape before the shelter's block, I pause for a moment on the landing.
From here I can see the back of St. Mary's, windows throwing pale light onto the alley. One of the kids darts out of the side door, chased by another, both in socks, both too loud. The door monitor yells for them to keep it down. Their laughter echoes off brick.
I watch until they disappear back inside.
Then I climb down.
The ladder rattles, but not as much. My soles land on the alley concrete with a dull, soft thump. No one shouts. No dogs bark in my direction.
For once, the city doesn't immediately announce that I moved.
I slide my hands deeper into my pockets and feel the shape of the rig press against my ribs, familiar and solid. Tools, quiet. Feet, quieter.
It's a small thing. Tape and cloth and a little bit of thought.
But as I walk back toward the shelter door, the streets above me mapped in my head and that dark building sitting there like an unanswered question, it feels like more than just a shoe fix.
It feels like the first time the city took one step toward shutting up when I told it to.
I like that more than I want to.
So I file it under movement optimization and push everything else down where it belongs.