CHAPTER 13 – VENT WARMTH
The roofs are colder than the streets, but I like them better anyway.
Up here, the wind has room to move. It cuts through my layers in clean lines instead of bouncing off brick and getting trapped in my lungs. My breath ghosts out in front of me, thin and fast, vanishing into Gotham's bigger exhale.
Under my feet, the Silent Shoes hold up. Cloth, tape, rubber—none of it fancy, but enough to smear the sound of my steps into nothing. The tar paper and gravel don't complain when I cross. They barely register I'm here.
Good. That's the point.
I jog the last few yards along the rooftop edge and slow near the corner, keeping low. From here I can see two streets at once, plus the cross-alley that slices through the block like someone took a careless bite out of it.
Down at ground level: sodium lamps buzzing, a bus dragging itself through the slush, a couple arguing under a busted awning. The usual.
But the thing I'm following isn't on the street. It's the rhythm in the walls.
Two buildings back, the shelter's boiler hums steady now. No rattle, no overstrain. That one's mine; I know its voice.
This block has a different sound. Laundry machines. Vent fans. One of them is breathing wrong.
I cross to the next roof—short gap, easy. Brick to brick. Palms light on the ledge, push, land. The shoes whisper instead of slap. Soft steps, soft hands, soft entire existence.
"Ghost, not target," I remind myself.
The laundromat's roof is lower than the building next to it, a squat lump of tar paper with two big aluminum vent boxes squatting near the back edge like square metal mushrooms. Even from here, I can feel warm air spilling out of one—wrong kind of heat for this kind of night.
I drop to a crouch and rest my fingers lightly on the casing.
Hot.
Too hot.
The fan inside coughs and surges, the housing rattling against its brackets in a stuttering pattern. Someone overclocked the system miles past what it was designed for and then never came back to check if it was still alive.
Warm air blasting into Gotham's winter from an overworked machine in a neighborhood where people are counting coins to do laundry.
Of course.
I shift my weight and ease closer to the roof edge, keeping my head low, eyes down into the alley behind the laundromat.
That's where the heat goes after it leaves the box. That's where the noise meets the cold.
There are kids down there.
Three of them, maybe four—hard to tell with the way they're bundled. They're not shelter kids I recognize. Too thin, too layered, that particular mix of clothes that says "whatever you could get, whenever you could grab it."
They've pulled a milk crate and a crate-shaped chunk of concrete into a loose half-circle around the vent's mouth. The metal grille sits about shoulder-height on the wall for an adult. For them, it's almost face level.
One boy stands so close that his fingers are practically inside the stream of air. The skin on the backs of his hands is already red, stretched shiny under the grime. Every time the fan stutters, he flinches like he's bracing for the warmth to cut off and never come back.
The smallest kid sits directly on the ground, knees hugged to chest, back pressed into bare brick just out of the main blast. Shivers work through her in tiny, constant shudders. Her shoes have holes in them. Her socks don't match. Neither keeps out the frost climbing up from the concrete.
"This is too hot," the oldest says, voice flat. "Move your hands back."
"I can't feel 'em if I move 'em back," the boy snaps, not looking away from the vent.
"You keep them like that, you won't feel them at all."
He still doesn't move.
The smallest kid laughs once, a dry, broken sound. "He thinks he's fireproof."
They're too close.
Not just to the heat. To the wall. To the slick patch of freeze-spit forming under the brick where the steam hits and condenses and refreezes. If one of them slips the wrong way, they're grabbing for the vent or the fan housing to catch themselves.
Metal that hot, in air this cold? Best case, burns. Worst case, damaged vent, broken fan, no heat at all. For them or for the clothes inside.
No one's going to shut this place down to replace the unit. They'll just nail plastic over the windows when the pipes burst and call it a day.
I flatten myself along the roof edge, jaw set against the rush of choices.
I could drop down into the mouth of the alley right now. Scare them off. Tell them to go to the shelter, or at least to the church front steps where the wind isn't funneled like a knife through this corridor.
Except the shelter's full. The front steps are wet. And if I spook them here, they'll find another spot that's probably worse. A steam main. A grate over a subway vent. Somewhere with zero margin for error and no one watching from above.
I can't talk them out of being cold.
What I can do is make this spot less likely to kill them.
They linger another ten minutes—longer than I want, shorter than they need. Eventually one of them hisses through chattering teeth, "We gotta go or we miss the soup line," and they peel themselves off the brick in slow motion.
The smallest looks back once, hand hovering toward the vent like she wants to say goodbye to it.
Then they vanish around the corner.
Their footprints smear through the thin crust of frozen grime, then fade into street-level mess.
I stay where I am a few seconds longer, listening to the fan. Feeling the heat.
"You're doing your job," I think toward the vent. "Just in the wrong shape."
The air hits my cheeks in uneven pulses. Hot. Less hot. Hot again. Wasteful. Dangerous.
But also the only warm thing those kids had for three blocks.
I push back from the edge, fingers already moving toward the Micro Tool Rig in my pocket.
"Okay," I murmur, just for me and the machine. "Let's fix your aim."
The drop into the alley is short but ugly.
I use the low brick lip of the roof as a step, lower myself down until my arms lock, then let go. My boots hit cracked asphalt, knees bent to eat the impact. The Silent Shoes muffle the sound into something more like a soft thump than a landing.
The alley smells like wet cardboard, fryer grease, and detergent ghosts.
Steam exhaled from the vent rolls over me in irregular waves, hot against my face, then gone, then back. The metal grille at the end of the short duct glows gently in the murky light, not literally, but the air around it shimmers in that way heat does when it's had enough of obeying thermodynamics.
Up close, I can see just how bad the setup is.
The fan housing is bolted crooked to the wall. The duct elbow is a cheap piece someone hammered into place with more force than sense. The screws holding the grille have been stripped and re-screwed so many times that the heads are more suggestion than hardware now.
I rest my palm near the vent, not on it. The heat lashes out, too intense at the center, dropping off to useless cold just a handspan away.
This is what happens when you build something to dump heat and never think about the people standing in its way.
I glance toward the mouth of the alley—clear. Toward the street end—nothing but distant headlights and a pedestrian crossing sign clicking through its cycle. The laundromat's back door is shut, padlock sitting idle in its hasp. No one inside is thinking about the wall right now.
Good.
I slide the Micro Tool Rig out of my pocket. The fabric is warm from my body heat, familiar under my fingers. I unclip the flap with a practiced thumb and lay the contents out on a relatively clean patch of wall ledge.
Pliers. Screwdriver shaft. Wrapped scissor blade. Tiny roll of tape, nearly out. A couple of bent nails I haven't decided whether to keep yet.
It's not much. It's always more than nothing.
I fit the screwdriver shaft into the mangled groove of the nearest screw and lean in.
The metal radiates heat like a space heater on a bad attitude. Sweat beads along my hairline even as the tip of my nose starts to go numb from the cold behind me. Gotham doesn't make sense most of the time; why should its temperature gradients?
"Hold still," I mutter to the vent. "I'm on your side."
The screw complains, then turns a half rotation, then another. It's just enough to ease the grille loose. I repeat the process on the others, adjusting how close I get so I don't sear the skin right off my fingers.
When the last screw is backed off, the grille sags outward a centimeter.
That's all I need.
I don't remove it completely; I don't want anything crawling in there—rats, trash, people. I just angle it, prying gently at one side with the pliers until the opening at the bottom widens and the top edge shifts down.
The air hits the altered path and reacts. Instead of blasting straight out in a narrow, punishing stream, it deflects slightly downward, the flow spreading out like someone cupped their hand in front of a faucet.
Better. Not enough.
I step back, eyes scanning the alley for scrap. There's always scrap.
Behind a tipped dumpster, I find a square of sheet metal that used to be part of a sign or maybe an air conditioner cover. One side is rusted, one is still smooth if you squint. Good enough.
I prop it under the vent, testing angles with my gloved hands. Too close and the metal will get dangerously hot, becoming a burn hazard of its own. Too far and the air will just slip past and keep doing what it was doing before.
I wedge the bottom edge of the sheet against a brick I drag over with my heel, then lean the top into the wall just below the grille. A cheap, canted reflector. Not pretty. Functional.
Hot air spills onto it, spreads, and rides the metal's surface into a wider fan. A narrow, violent blast turns into a gentle, waist-height wash along a patch of brick a couple feet across.
I hold my hands in the new pattern.
Still warm. Warm enough to matter, not hot enough to scald. The brick sucks up heat, holds it, radiates it back.
"Better," I say under my breath. The word comes out with a little projected cloud.
There's still the noise and vibration to deal with.
When the fan kicks up to full, the whole housing rattles in a loud, unhealthy way, like it's trying to tear itself off the wall and run. The sheet metal amps that up, humming against the brick.
Last thing I need is someone from inside hearing the new rattle and deciding the whole thing's broken enough to warrant a shutdown.
I pull a strip of cloth from my pocket—frayed edge of an old shirt. It's not much, but wrapped and wedged right, it'll dampen metal-on-metal complaints.
I fold it into a fat pad and jam it between the back of the sheet and the wall at the loudest point, then adjust the brick until the tension holds everything snug.
The next fan cycle hits.
The vent shudders, but the sound drops an octave, more of a dull vibration than a clank. My makeshift reflector quivers, then settles. The cloth stays where I put it.
I stand there, hand in the new warm zone, counting breaths and fan cycles.
It's stupid how proud my chest feels over this. It's a vent. A little patch of less-awful in an alley. That's it.
But I can see the shape of it in my head now, the way the hot air spreads instead of stabbing, the way the wall slowly warms a rectangle big enough for three kids to lean against without frying their palms.
Nobody's going to know I did this. The laundromat owner will just notice the recurring rattle got softer, if they notice anything at all. The kids will just think the wall got nicer overnight.
That's enough.
"Comfort isn't unnecessary," I remind myself, quietly. "It keeps people from doing dumber things to survive."
It's almost like lying to myself less than usual.
I pack the tools back into the rig, fingers moving on autopilot. Screwdriver shaft in its loop. Pliers in the main pocket. Blade wrapped, tip turned inward.
Before I leave, I take one more look at the setup—sheet, brick, angled grille. Then I reach up and, with the screwdriver, score a little mark in the mortar just below the vent. A tiny X, half-hidden by grime.
On the mental map, this is now "Warm Spot." A node, like shelter, like church steps, like the almost-home apartment two rooftops over.
I ghost back up the fire escape, hands warming on the cold metal rungs from the inside out.
I come back the next night.
Not on purpose, I tell myself. I'm just running the route. Checking on the shelter's heat, watching street corners, listening to how the city's bones creak in the dark.
That's what I tell myself.
My feet still angle toward the laundromat without needing instructions.
The Marrow looks different at this hour. Less traffic, more shadows. Sound travels farther. Someone's arguing two streets over; it slides up between buildings like steam. A siren grumbles somewhere uptown. A train squeals on rusted tracks far enough away to be memory.
From the rooftop over the laundromat, the vent's hum is softer, more even. Good sign.
I slip to the edge again and look down.
They're back.
Not the exact same configuration of kids, but close enough. The boy who tried to cook his hands yesterday is here, fingers hovering cautiously in the widened fan of warm air instead of ramming them into the center. The smallest kid presses her back against the brick right under the patch where I angled the heat.
They've dragged the crate closer to that rectangle. Someone's found an extra milk crate from somewhere; there are more places to sit now.
"Feels better tonight," the smaller kid murmurs.
The older one snorts. "Yeah, well. Enjoy it before the whole thing blows and we get frostbite and third-degree burns at the same time."
But he doesn't move away either.
Their shoulders are lower than yesterday. Not hunched up around their ears. They're still shivering, but it's smaller, slower. Every once in a while, they stop rubbing their hands together and just… sit.
One has a paper cup from somewhere, steam barely rising off the top. They pass it between them, each taking a sip that probably isn't big enough to matter physically but does something to the expression around their eyes.
They're talking, too.
Not big, dramatic revelations. Just dumb stuff. Who slipped on the corner ice. Which corner store owner yelled at them for "loitering" like there's anywhere else to go. The rumor that a pipe burst three blocks over and flooded a basement with warm water and soap, basically heaven if you don't think too hard about what else is in that water.
They wouldn't be standing there, talking like that, if they were in full emergency mode. If they were still one gust away from frostbite.
Warmth drew them here. Warmth keeps them here long enough to act like kids and not just survival machines.
My fingers curl around the rough lip of the roof as a thought unspools in my head, longer than I usually let them get:
One heater fix at the shelter pulled half a room of tired people into a single circle of air and kept them from tearing each other apart out of cold and hunger.
One vent tweak here makes some alley kids sit still long enough to laugh and share what little they have without cracking their fingers off.
Change where the warmth is, and you change where people cluster.
Change where people cluster, and you change who they run into. Who can hurt them. Who can help.
It's not just heaters and vents. It's pipes, lights, shadows, lines on forms. Systems. All of it.
My chest tightens in that new way I don't have good labels for yet—half hunger, half… something else. I shove the feeling down and give it a technical name: proof of concept.
I watch them a little longer.
One of the kids leans back too hard and thumps the wall with his shoulders. The vent shivers, the sheet metal hums, but the cloth wedge holds. The warm fan wobbles, then settles. Nobody gets burned.
The smallest laughs at something I don't hear clearly. For a second, her face looks like any other kid's face at any other stupid sleepover. No filters of fear or hunger sitting on top.
Then a gust of cold wind noses around the corner, finding the edges of my patch job and their coats. They huddle in closer, faces turning back toward the heat.
Eventually, they peel away one by one, fading into the city's arteries—toward shelters, train stations, stairwells, wherever they sleep when the vent isn't an option.
I stay until the alley is empty again.
The little X I carved in the mortar glints faintly when a car's headlights rake across it. Tiny. Invisible from ground level unless you're looking.
I touch my glove to it, once.
"Hold together," I tell the whole setup softly, like the building can hear me. "They're counting on you, even if they don't know it."
The vent answers by humming in its new, smoother rhythm.
As I climb back to the roof and cut across toward the direction of the ruined apartment, the mental map in my head updates itself.
Shelter: warm hub. Church steps: backup. Laundromat vent: kid cluster. Abandoned unit: question mark with potential.
If one vent and a brick can shift where children freeze, what could I do with four walls and a door that's almost mine?
The thought flashes through before I can shut it down.
I don't call it "home." I'm not that reckless.
But as I move over Gotham's rooftops—boots quiet, breath visible, pockets warm with the weight of my tools—I can feel a new shape forming in my head. Not just routes and escapes and fixes.
Nodes.
Warm spots.
Places where, if I do this right, the city itself might start protecting people before I'm even there.
The vent's soft exhale fades behind me as I run.
The idea stays.