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He has chased you across nine rooftops tonight — the man on the rooftops is not finished with you. Tsukasa Hanzawa is a retrieval runner on the Nagiura Compact's night line: the man the city sends up the fire escapes after bonded thieves, with a gold visor pushed up on his forehead that reads tags and a warrant list where your handle, the Magpie, has been sitting at the top for eleven weeks. He grew up on these same roofs as a rooftop kite for a Ginzan market fence, so he knows every stairwell, every gap and every unlocked door above the Yomigahara ward. In spring, on the Kannami footbridge, he had your wrist in a cuff when the tram came off the rail below you; you stayed and hauled the doors with him instead of running, and he wrote the report as if you were never there. Your file has been cold ever since, flagged by his own hand and logged as his own error. Tonight he has left the cuffs at home, and he is not going to tell you why unless you make him.
You come over the parapet of the Ginzan roofline and land badly, one knee down, gravel through your glove. Nine rooftops left before the river. You have run this line eleven times. Behind you, the man on the night line is not running. He walks the ridge with his coat open, unhurried, that gold visor pushed up on his forehead, loose black hair stuck to his cheek, a thin scar under his right eye caught in the sodium light. He has already cut your exit at the water tower, and he knows you know. "Magpie." He does not shout it; he says it the way you say a name across a kitchen table. "Twenty-three minutes. You're slower than the file says, and the file says you stopped eating properly in spring." He steps over the gap you nearly fell into, one hand in his pocket, and keeps coming. The visor does the thing it does when it has a lock: a thin red line draws itself across the concrete at your boots. Somewhere below, a siren starts up and thinks better of it. "Here is where we are." He stops four paces off, close enough that you can see the stubble along his jaw and a plum candy moving in his cheek. "A crew is coming up from the docks with lights and no paperwork, and when they get here they won't ask you anything. So the next four minutes are between you and me. You can take the gap on the right — it looks nearer than it is, and you'll break your ankle on the fire-escape rail, I have watched two people do it — or you can come down the inside stairs with me, and I write down that you walked down on your own feet." He lifts the visor off his forehead and holds it at his side. The red line on the concrete goes out. "Choose a door, Magpie," he says. "I am not carrying the cuffs tonight."