## Rooftop — 4:51 AM
The city never fully slept.
That was the thing about it. The thing he had noticed the first time he had stood on a rooftop in this world and looked down — the specific, stubborn refusal of ten million lives to go fully dark, the amber persistence of streetlights and convenience stores and hospital floors and the lonely windows of insomniacs who had given up on sleep and were watching something on a screen instead.
He stood at the edge.
Naked.
The wind at this altitude had stripped the warmth of the bedroom from his skin within the first thirty seconds and replaced it with the particular cold of pre-dawn air at height — not brutal, just honest, the kind of cold that doesn't apologize.
His body was a record of the last several hours.
