THE BODY KEEPS THE BRANCH

The span was moving under Omar before Tomas felt it in the joins, and he felt everything in the joins.

His left hand was grown into the pylon rootstock at the crossing’s near end, fingers spread into the bark seams, the union old enough by then — an hour, maybe more — that the tear at the join site had gone past pain into a hot, patient ache. Through it the rootstock lent him its stillness: not strength, exactly, but the rooted refusal to be moved, and Tomas stood the way a post stands, a line made fast around his waist and running out over the gap to where the span’s main cable sagged in its living cradle. His right hand held the second join, palm pressed to the span’s cable where it came off the pylon, lending the cable his steadiness and borrowing back its grip, so that the whole crossing ran, in a sense, through his body — rootstock behind him, span ahead of him, and Tomas Marchetti in the middle, holding.

That was the shape of him, up here near the top of the tower. Two joins, both of them holding joins. It was enough. It had been enough for floor after floor.

The wind came up the gap in cold breaths. This high, the tower’s weather ran thin and bright: glass somewhere far above, green shade far below, and between them the grown terraces stepping up toward the crown with the wind worrying every loose leaf on them. The air had a bite that found the back of his throat. Since the fever he’d had in the canopy — three days of it, months back, sweating in a ledge camp while the climb went on without him — his breath never quite came all the way back after hard work. It came most of the way. He had learned to climb on most of the way.

“Halfway,” he called.

Omar raised a hand without turning around. He was out at the span’s middle, where the crossing narrowed to a woven walk of cable and living lath, working at the junction where the second line had grown over its guide and pinched. Omar Farouk worked the way other men rested. His hands moved, paused, moved again; the wind took his sleeve and he waited for it to finish before he reached for the next hold, as if the gust were a colleague crossing in front of him with a load. Tomas had trusted that unhurriedness more than once with his weight on the line. He trusted it now.

The junction was Beatriz’s work, the splice at the guide — she had re-done it yesterday morning, brisk and neat, before she went up and out. She’d cleared before noon. The splice was holding fine. It was the rest of the span that worried him.

Through his right palm, the cable talked to him the way living things did when he was joined to them: not words, but tendency. The laths at mid-span had grown plump in the warm weeks and swollen the weave tighter than it was laid; the whole crossing was a fraction shorter than its cradle wanted, and every load on it pulled the middle stitch-work a fraction further out of true. His sense of the growth — what it could become, given weather and weight — read the span the way he would have read a graft in his own orchard back home: this union would take, that one was straining toward refusal. The middle was straining.

“Come back a length,” he called. “Just a length. The middle’s not happy.”

Omar’s hand rose again — heard — and he finished the thing his fingers were on before he moved, because leaving it half-done would have been worse than the extra moments. Then he started back along the walk, unhurried, one hand on the upper cable, boots finding the laths by feel.

The gust that took the span was not the worst of the morning. That was the trouble: it was an ordinary gust, and an ordinary gust should not have mattered. It bellied the crossing sideways, the walk swung under Omar’s feet, and Tomas felt the load arrive through both joins at once — the rootstock’s stillness answering in his left arm, the cable’s jerk tearing fresh at his right palm — and with the load came a sound from mid-span, a wet, fibrous rip, drawn out.

The middle stitch-work gave.

Not all of it. Enough. The walk dropped on one side, a body’s length and then catching, laths spilling, and Omar went down with the dropped side in a tangle of cable — not falling free, never falling free, the line at Tomas’s waist sang taut as the span’s wreckage took weight — and struck the lower netting of old growth strung beneath the crossing hard enough that the whole web shuddered up Tomas’s arms.

He held. That was what the joins were for, and he held: left hand rooted, right hand clamped on a cable that was trying to twist out of its cradle, knees braced, the rootstock’s patience running up his arm while his own body did the animal work of not being pulled off the pylon ledge. The tear in his right palm opened wider. Something in his left shoulder sang. He held until the swinging stopped, until the wreckage settled into its new, lower shape and stayed there, creaking.

Omar lay in the netting below the wrecked walk, one leg folded under the fallen laths. He wasn’t moving it. His face was up to the light, composed in a way that Tomas recognised and did not like at all: the face of a man who has taken stock and found the stock bad.

“I’m coming down,” Tomas called. “Don’t shift.”

Omar lifted one hand — slow, deliberate, palm down. Stay where you are. I’m steady. Tomas had read that hand across a year of floors. He came down anyway, but he came down as an anchor comes down: he moved the waist line to the pylon’s root collar and made it fast, parted the right-hand join in one practised tear — the cable’s bark took a strip of his palm’s skin with it, bright and stinging — and kept the left join in the rootstock while he swung out and down the pylon’s flank, hand over hand on his own line, the rootstock lending him footing through the join even as he left it. At the flank’s foot he parted the second join too, and for a moment stood in only his own body, both hands bleeding lightly at the seams, breath short in the cold.

The netting sagged under him as he worked out along it. Old growth, grey-green, springy as a trampoline left in weather — it took his weight grudgingly and complained at his knees through the give of it. He went on all fours the last stretch, because his knees preferred it and because the netting did.

Omar’s leg was pinned at the ankle by two fallen laths crossed like chopsticks, and the shin above it was laid open where a cable end had whipped across — a long gash, bleeding steadily into the netting. The ankle itself sat at an angle Tomas didn’t need a second look at. Omar watched him arrive with the air of a man watching weather approach: unavoidable, best observed accurately.

“Leg’s not moving,” Tomas said, mostly to himself, saying the trait before the feeling the way he always did. “Right. We do this in order.”

First the bleeding. He took a sap-rich shoot from the netting’s edge growth — thick-stemmed, weeping where it broke — and laid the broken stem along the gash, and joined them: his hand at the union, his own skin tearing a little as the graft took, the shoot’s sealing flow lending itself across the wound. The bleeding slowed to a seep under his palm. Not healed. Held. That was a join he knew: a holding join, like all the rest.

Then the laths. They were not heavy, either of them — that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they had fallen into a scissor with Omar’s ankle in the hinge of it, and the fine rootlets of the walk’s underside had whipped around the whole tangle when it dropped, a hundred hair-thin living threads drawn drum-tight by the wreckage’s settling. The threads wanted a delicate answer: a join fine enough to persuade them, thread by thread, to slacken and unbind, the way he had once coaxed mistimed grafts apart in the orchard with a thumbnail and patience. His power reached for that the way a hand reaches for a tool on a familiar bench — and found the bench bare. What his grafts offered him was what they always offered: hold this to that. Lend hardness. Lend grip. Borrow stillness. Nothing in him grew small enough for the threads.

So he did it with a knife and his hands, the slow way. He cut the threads he could cut without springing the laths, one by one, his scarred thumb riding the flat of the blade; he braced his shoulder under the upper lath and became the post again, unjoined, his knees taking the shifting load through the netting’s give while Omar, reading him without a word, got both hands under the lower lath and timed his push to Tomas’s heave. The scissor opened a thumb’s width, then a hand’s. Omar’s face went grey and stayed composed. The ankle came free.

It was not a leg that would bear weight. Both of them looked at it and understood the rest of the day.

“Extraction, then,” Tomas said.

Omar’s hand found his forearm and gripped once, briefly — acknowledgement, not appeal — and then let go and lay back with his hands folded on his chest, a man making himself cargo, easy to carry.

The floor was already stirring. Extraction was not something anyone summoned; it was the design doing what it was built to do with a climber who could not move. Out of the netting and up from the terrace edge below, broad leaves were unrolling, one over another, shingle-fashion, while tendrils thickened and wove themselves through the old growth toward Omar’s body — a cradle in the act of growing itself, unhurried as sap. Tomas had seen it before, on other floors, for other people. It never hurried and it never failed to arrive, and there was nothing ominous in it: it was a staircase’s handrail, a ferry’s ramp, the tower’s plain provision for exactly this.

He stayed. That was his part, and it was not a small one: he knelt in the netting with his joined hand keeping the staunch on Omar’s shin, the other hand flat beside Omar’s shoulder, and he narrated the unimportant things — the state of the splice, the weather coming up the gap, the probability that the camp below had already felt the crossing go through the tower’s growth and started water heating — in the same level voice he would have used to talk a graft through a hard wind. Omar listened with his eyes open, breathing carefully, and once, when a settling tendril jolted the cradle taking shape beneath him, his hand came up and closed on the netting until the jolt passed, and then deliberately opened again.

The cradle slid under him leaf by leaf. When it bore his full weight the netting’s sag changed, and the whole woven thing — leaves, tendrils, old growth drawn into service — began its slow haul toward the terrace edge and the stair that led down to camp, dragging gently over the wreckage. Tomas parted the staunch join as the leaves closed over the gash, the shoot’s seal holding where his hand left off, and he kept pace beside the cradle on hands and knees as far as the netting lasted, one hand trailing on its edge, until the growth thickened past his reach and took Omar on alone — steadily, at sap pace, around the terrace’s shoulder and out of sight toward the stairs.

He stayed kneeling a moment longer than he needed to. The wind moved in the wrecked span above him, and somewhere in it a loose lath tapped, tapped, tapped against a cable.

Then he gathered himself and climbed: back up the pylon’s flank on the line he’d fixed, his knees objecting at every flexion, his breath coming shorter than the climb warranted, the cold air shaving the back of his throat. At the top he hauled the waist line in hand over hand, coiled it the way Beatriz had taught the pair of them — no, the way Beatriz had always done it, and snapped at their coils until they did it her way — and let the wrecked crossing hang. The floor would have it back when the attempt ended. Floors took everything back. It was people who kept what happened on them.

The attempt ended the way attempts ended: he went back through the stair gate.

The gate stood at the head of the pylon terrace, grown pillars and a lintel of old root, and Tomas passed under it alone, with the wind dropping behind him as he crossed the threshold, the way it always did — the floor letting go of him without ceremony. His hands had stopped bleeding. His knees had not stopped anything; they ached on the flat landing with the deep, jointed complaint that had become their ordinary voice since the high floors, worse coming down than going up, worse still after a morning spent being a post. His lungs took the landing’s still air in shallow pulls and gave him back most of it.

The stair ran both ways from the landing. Down was camp, and Omar arriving there ahead of him on a bed of leaves, and the reset that would come with the attempt’s end and put Omar’s ankle and shin back to whole as if the morning had been a rumour — for Omar, filed and healable, it would be exactly that tidy.

Up was one more gate.

Tomas stood a while looking up the stair. The last floor’s gate stood at the top of the flight where the terraces gave out, framed in the same old root, with the glass of the crown somewhere beyond it catching the high light. One floor. He had known since Beatriz went out yesterday — known in his knees and in the quiet arithmetic of who was left — that the shape of the ending had narrowed to this: Omar to camp and healing, still mid-run and days from his own last floors; Beatriz out and done; and Tomas, on the landing between, with two hands full of holding joins and a body that had spent the morning proving it could still be a post.

He set his foot on the first step up. His knee considered it, complained, and bore him.

He climbed toward the last gate alone.