Climbs walls and tears bars

He didn’t understand her—not fully—but she preferred it that way. Ryn pried open the unbarred kitchen window and crawled into the rising moans of nighttime wind. She clung to the mortar in the wall by her fingernails. The wind snapped at her T-shirt, licked her torso, and her jeans rasped against rough bricks. She shut the window, faced the half-full moon that clouds skated across oh-so-swiftly, and scaled to the roof. Every motion warmed the tight cords of her muscles, until they were hot with anticipation.
She crested the roof and perched on its lip. The black sea of staggered rooftops stretched around her, with deep valleys lit yellow by headlights and street lamps.
The air teased her black hair. She pulled her shirt up and angled one arm behind her back. Her finger traced the faint groove of a scar that covered the six slits holding back her kanaf. They tingled beneath the moonlight and she plucked a single, loose strand and examined its knife-edge gleam. By the full moon, she would have her cloak again.
She pulled down the uncomfortable, unnatural fabric of her T-shirt. Without the kanaf against her skin, she felt naked.
She leapt off the rooftop and glided soundlessly to another. Then she sprinted, vaulted, climbed the brick and the black-iron fire escapes, savored the whip-kiss of cold wind on her chest, and with every step her heart pushed hot blood into her fingertips and toes.
She lived again beneath the limitless sky, and though her jungle was brick, concrete, asphalt, and metal, it still had a pulse and life of its own beneath her soles. She loved the city even more after dark, when people emptied the streets and she was free to roam unseen. She explored the rooftops in her block, learned the best routes, the easiest jumps—though she performed the hard ones, too, pleased that her season of near-mortal weakness had passed with something so simple as a stroke of Ms. Cross’s pen.
Only mortal laws bound her here. If she could stay free, she would only grow stronger and stronger.
When the dark gave way to deep-blue twilight, she slid down the outer wall to her bedroom window. Clutching a brick protruding a scant fraction of an inch, she took hold of black metal bars with her other hand. She braced both feet and pulled with the whole of her body.
The bars groaned, bent, then tore from the brick wall. Powdered stone puffed into the air. She dropped the bars into the alley, where they rang loud and distant. Then she rapped on the window several times until Susan woke, approached, rubbed tired eyes, and opened the window for her.


Chapter 3, Page 39-41