The sun had finally made its presence known. It shone over the surface of the endless sea of rooftops, casting the reddish light of the early morning across them. I was sitting on top of an air conditioning unit, tapping my heels slowly against it. Mr. Evanson hadn’t exactly been clear on what it was I would be doing in this “skylining class”. I gathered it had something to do with running, and from that I inferred that it must have something to do with how the people around here were able to move so effortlessly from rooftop to rooftop. That much seemed fairly straightforward. What I wasn’t so sure of was what that kind of training might entail. Would I be asked to do sprints? Somersaults? Or would they tell me to jump to a platform two stories down and hope I survived? I had no idea one way or the other.

I was on another of the multiple rooftops of the convention center, having walked across one of the bridges that connected the units of the massive structure together. Unlike the one I had been on this morning, this one was devoid of any kind of plantlife. In fact, this was probably the most boring rooftop of any of the multitude of buildings that I could see from this vantage. For many of these buildings, the upper levels seemed more like abstractionist sculpture than architecture. I saw one in particular that had a glass roof that rose, warped, and looped back into itself. The simplest ones I saw had roofs that were clearly intended for restaurants or bars. This one, however, was the picture of conventionality and practicality. Nothing was up here but the roof access door, a few air conditioning units, and a presumably empty water tower. I suspected this had something to do with why the Red Crest had settled here. The simple rooftops on the buildings of the convention center were ideal for farming. This particular one they kept bare, but I assumed that was for the purposes of whatever we were about to do.

The children of the Red Crest stood about, waiting as I was. They huddled in little groups and chatted to each other about this and that, making small talk to pass the time. Aside from me, Kyler was the only one who hadn’t joined up with one of these groups. Instead, he was standing near the edge of the roof, closer than I would have been comfortable with, gazing silently out over the cityscape. I wondered what his deal was. He wasn’t an outsider like me so, he already knew all the other children. They all seemed to be friendly with him, yet he chose isolation. It seemed he just preferred to be by himself. I supposed I could sort of relate. I was never a particularly social person myself.

My musings were interrupted by the sound of the roof access door opening up. Jason, Duncan, Craig, and the two other members of their little group walked out. Immediately all the kids stopped talking and snapped to attention. Jason wasted no time with greetings or preambles, but immediately began barking out instructions.

“Alright everybody, we’re going to be working on endurance today.” he began to a chorus of groans. “No complaining,” he reprimanded the groaning kids, “trust me, you’ll thank me when you’re older. We’re going to be doing ten miles today. Anyone who falls behind has to try again tomorrow. Except you, Aston, you’re going to be staying here today and working with Braxton. Alright people, fall in and let’s get started!”

All the kids fell in behind Jason, Duncan, Craig, and one of the other guys, leaving only one man behind with me. This, I assumed, must be Braxton. The crowd set off at a brisk jog towards the edge of the roof before picking up speed and jumping off the edge. It was a strange thing to see, even though I knew that the top of the connective bridge I had walked though to get here wasn’t all that far down. Still, it was far enough that I knew I’d probably hurt myself if I tried it. After that it would be only another short jump to the rooftop of a nearby building and I supposed they knew how to keep moving from structure to structure like this throughout the whole city.

“It’s incredible to see, isn’t it?” asked Braxton. “I remember when I saw people skylining for the first time it blew my mind. It’s amazing the things people can learn to do in an immersive culture of rigorous training. The people who were born here treat don’t really appreciate the wonder of it like you and I. to them it’s just an essential part of their daily lives.”

“You weren’t born here?” I asked

“No, I was brought here by my parents when I was about your age.” Braxton smiled.

If I had to sum Braxton up in a word, that word would be friendly. He had a smile that spread across his entire face, which had a natural roundish shape to it despite the fact that he clearly had almost no body fat. He kept his brown hair short in a simple caesar cut. When he spoke he did so softly but warmly. Somebody like Mr. Evanson might know how to make a person feel at ease, but one could tell that he was doing that consciously. Braxton, on the other hand, just had an aura about him that made him seem approachable through no effort on his part. He seemed to be an absolutely genuine human being, and I found myself liking him already.

“It’s nice to meet someone else who’s not from here.” I said.

“I think that’s probably why Jason wanted me to be the one to get your skylining training started.” he replied.

“You’re not going to ask me to jump off the roof too, are you?” I asked him.

He laughed good-naturedly, “No we won’t be doing anything like that for a while yet. First off, how much have you been told about skylining?”

“Nothing really,” I said, “I mean, I figured that it’s some kind of special running, but I don’t know much more beyond that.”

“In a sense you’re right,” Braxton told me, “but there’s a good bit more to it than that. Tell me, did you ever play lacrosse when you were back home?”

“I haven’t played it, I’ve only watched it a couple of times.” I admitted.

“Do you know the history of it?” he pursued.

“No, I don’t”

“Well, way back in Native American times, the early versions of that game were played by certain tribes as an alternative to warfare. If they had a dispute that they couldn’t resolve with words, they played lacrosse to settle it rather than resorting to killing each other.”

“That’s pretty cool!” I exclaimed. I never knew the sport had such a strange history.

“It is cool, isn’t it?” Braxton agreed, “And that leads me back to skylining. You see for us, skylining is like lacrosse. There are five different squatter groups which are basically our versions of tribes, and whenever we have an issue that we can’t work out, we resolve it with a race. Each group has a team of their five best runners that they put forward to represent them. Myself, Jason, and the others make up the Red Crest’s skylining team.”

“That sounds like a lot of fun!”

“What it really is is a lot of stress and a lot of hard work,” he laughed, “but it does have its moments. So, do you think you’re ready to get started?”

“Sure! What do we do first?” I asked.

“The first thing we’re going to learn is looking.”

“Looking? Not running?” I was confused.

“In skylining you have to look before you can run.” Braxton explained. “It isn’t like running around a track. There are obstacles and pitfalls and if you don’t pay careful attention to what you’re doing the results can be very nasty. Look out over the city in front of you. What do you see?”

“Rooftops?”

“Precisely. And that’s the first thing that needs to change. Rooftops are individual, separate things and in the grand scheme of the city they’re pretty small. If you run from one side of a rooftop to another you won’t really have gone very far, will you? Of course not. What you need to start seeing instead of rooftops are pathways. The very structure of this city will work with you to take you anywhere you want to go, you just need to find the pathways that it it offers you.”

I looked down at the buildings below me trying to identify ways to get from one to the next. I noticed that a few of the buildings, mostly the ones that had a bar or something like that on the top, had walkways between them, connecting the buildings together.

“I see a few walkways between the buildings.” I said.

“Yes, those are the most obvious example.” he replied, “Back when this city was being built several of the skyscrapers were designed to have rooftop businesses. Some of the designers realized that people might want to go from a restaurant on one building to a bar on the next without going to street level, so they put those walkways there to help out. It’s just one of the many ways that that this city is uniquely suited to skylining. Those don’t exist between most of the buildings, however, so they won’t get you very far on their own. To really get around you’ll need to do some jumping. See that one down there, the one with the anvil-shaped top?”

He pointed, and I followed the line of his finger to a building with a roof that jutted way out in one direction It looked like it was designed that way so that it could seat a lot of people facing the long point, perhaps for weddings or things like that. On the opposite end from the point was a large structure that was more or less a building on top of the building. Perhaps this might be used for receptions. I nodded at Braxton that I saw what he was looking at.

“You see how close that point gets to the building next to it? A kid your age could make that jump no problem. Then you see how tall that thing on the other side is? You can get enough altitude from climbing on top of that to make the jump to the building on the other side. In normal cities where the buildings are more or less giant rectangles with few other features skylining would be impossible. Here the buildings are packed together like sardines and built in strange ways that cause them to nearly run into each other in places. The biggest gaps you’ll find will be over roadways, but even then there will be a whole plethora of ways to get across. Because every building is different, each course you’ll run will be a completely new experience. That’s why you always have to be looking for pathways. Skylning is done with the eyes first. Learning how to run comes later.”

I looked around. He was right. Balconies, protrusions, bridges, beams, no matter where I looked I began to see ways one might use the bizarre design choices of the people who built the city as a means of getting around. There was something almost exhilarating about this realization. A whole new world of opportunities were opened to me. If I could just master a few techniques I could set out into the city and be able to run anywhere I wanted!

As I gazed out at the vast urban expanse, some motion in the distance caught my eye. It was far away, and there was some glare from the sun, but I strained my eyes to see it. I could make out that it was a runner. It wasn’t anyone from our group, they had run off in an entirely different direction. Somebody from a different squatter group? Although I couldn’t see the figure clearly I was pretty sure the runner was female, and she appeared to be wearing something on her head, although what it was I couldn’t make out. All of this I had to determine in a matter of a second or two, because almost immediately after I spotted her she ran up to what must have been a twenty-foot gap between two buildings and performed an impossible leap across it, almost appearing to fly. Then she disappeared behind a line of buildings and was gone from my sight.

A shocked noise, more a squeak than anything else, escaped from my lips. Braxton gave me an odd look.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine, I just thought I saw… never mind, it was nothing.”

I decided that what I had witnessed must be a trick of my imagination. There was no way it could have been real. Braxton would never have believed it at any rate. I decided to put it from my thoughts as best I could and return to surveying the city for running paths, but try though I might I couldn’t really focus on that anymore. The more I tried not to think about it, the more the vision of the mystery runner performing that inhuman leap lingered in my mind. It couldn’t have happened, but it seemed so real. Not for the first time since my arrival at the gate I found myself questioning my own senses. I began to wonder if I would ever get used to this strange city.