If it was the thought that counted, maybe I ought to think about buying groceries. Food was easier at home, where Mom did all the shopping and Dad did the bulk of the cooking. Living at home came with a lot of bonuses that hadn’t been visible until I moved out. The cheering in the closet rose in volume again. I winced. Bonuses like the mice having their own sound-proofed attic.

“I’m leaving for work now,” I called, unlatching the kitchen window. A week of careful oiling and counter-weighting had rendered it incapable of standing open on its own. It would slam closed as soon as I let go. “Try not to break anything else today, okay?”

Distant cheering seemed to be the only answer I was going to get.

Choosing discretion as the better part of valor, I hoisted myself onto the windowsill, careful to keep a firm grip on the edge of the window itself. It was only a three-story drop to the unlit courtyard, but I knew from studying it during the daylight that it was narrow and cluttered with a wide variety of convenient ways for me to get hurt, ranging from trash cans to the ever-popular “rusty chain-link fence.”

It was dark enough that I couldn’t even see the window of the apartment across from me. The ambient glow of the city lights illuminated the sky, but none of it seemed willing to penetrate the space between the buildings.

Sliding my legs out the window, I pushed off from the windowsill and fell into the dark.

Three

“Pass the dynamite.”

—Frances Brown

Just outside the window of a small semilegal sublet in Greenwich Village, plummeting

IT HAD ONLY TAKEN AN AFTERNOON for me to memorize the layout of the courtyard, although keeping the dimensions straight in my head had required bouncing off the fire escape twice and coming within a single missed handhold of breaking several major bones. Learning the layout of the neighborhood had taken a little longer. It had been almost three weeks before I could make a full circuit of the block without needing to remove my blackout goggles at least once, and I still wasn’t willing to cross streets when I couldn’t see the status of the light. That would come later.

“Remember, Very,” Dad used to say when I whined about the goggles, “if your opponent has night vision and you’ve never bothered to learn the local landmarks by anything but sight, you’re going to be in a bit of a pickle when it’s time to avoid getting disemboweled.”

Truer words have doubtless been spoken. If they were spoken in our household, they probably had something to do with causing—or surviving—severe bodily harm. Other kids got chores and teddy bears; we got gun safety classes and heavy weaponry. Normal’s what you make it.

I fell about four feet straight down, building momentum, and grabbed the bottom of the fire escape just before the fall could get out of my control. Swinging myself around, I hit the corner of the building with both feet and shoved off, translating the energy of the impact into a leap that carried me across the five-foot gap and onto the building across the way. I was off and running, leaving mouse holy rituals and semilegal sublets behind me as I started accelerating in the direction of work. I could make it on time if I managed to avoid any rooftop traffic jams.

None of my teachers in elementary or high school thought there was anything weird about the way I ran home after school for “lessons.” Most of the kids I knew had some sort of “lessons” to go to, although most of them were also more willing to explain what they were learning. It was probably a good thing that no one ever asked me. The early classes would have seemed normal enough—a lot of little girls take gymnastics and ballet—but they were just to determine where my specific skills were. The serious classes started when I was twelve: unarmed combat, Krav maga, and free running.

(Krav maga is an Israeli-developed fighting style centered on the idea that when I put you down, you stay down. It’s fast, it’s brutal, and I love it. Sort of like club dancing with more eye gouging and less grinding.)

I excelled in all my lessons, but the one where I really fell in love was free running. It’s a lot like parkour in that it’s a discipline that teaches you the entire city is one big obstacle course. It’s also a lot like a form of dance, and your partner is the environment you’re in. Free running takes the best elements of tumbling, gymnastics, and being a professional superhero, and mixes them in one incredibly rewarding, incredibly fun package. It’s just hard to explain. “Hello, my name is Verity Price, and I like to take the overland route whenever possible” isn’t the sort of thing you can put in a personal ad. It even confused my landlady. When I tried to explain the importance of having solidly constructed fire escapes and a variety of ways to reach the roof, she looked at me funny and asked, “Who do you think you are, Batgirl?”

The simplest answer would have been “yes.” At least “yes” didn’t require a history lesson or a copy of the family tree. Still, I would have expected a Sasquatch to understand the need to know how many escape routes I had available to me—and that there’s no better way to study an urban cryptid population than by meeting them on their own level. Half the time, that level is straight up. (The other half is usually straight down. Cryptids like to live where humans don’t, but they also like to be close enough to steal cable.)

The rooftops were anything but dark. Light poured up from the street and out the windows of a hundred high-rise buildings, leaving the night twilight-clear. I tried to focus on covering ground, rather than lingering to explore the changes sunset brought to the city. Dave was a stickler about punctuality, and “I got distracted while I was free running” would just bring on another lecture about the occasional need to take a cab. (He’s given up trying to convince me to take the subway. I’m sorry, but that method of transit is a horror movie waiting to happen.)

I hate New York cabs almost as much as I hate New York cabbies. No self-respecting cryptid would drive one, a fact which puts them comfortably outside my field of study. I was officially in New York for the sake of documenting and assisting the city’s cryptid community, and that meant I could avoid anything that didn’t actually impact my mission. Like cabs, street corner hot dog stands, and Times Square.

(Times Square probably counts as proof that tourists constitute a completely separate species. This is a theory I will never put forward at a family meeting, thank you very much. Tourism is an urban activity, which means I’d be expected to conduct any necessary studies. No way in hell.)