Looking down gives him vertigo. In his peripheral vision there is a fluttering at the base of an imbricated tin structure, near a rusted series of pipes that looks like a church organ’s mouth. It’s a feather, the fluffy white smaller tufts of stripped plumage. Kierk crouches down and as it is tussled by the wind and he picks it up, rolling it in his fingers, and then looks farther into the small corner—wind whips behind him, but this place is secluded and protected amid the rubble of brick and copper wire. In the dark, pressed up against brick and concrete there is a small ritualistic gathering of tiny bones—bird bones. Kierk sees the fine spread of a wing, and the skulls, some intact, others chipped or malformed or crushed, picked at, bones almost all separated out, discolored, some white and fresh and others older and yellow, a little nest all laid out. None are full skeletons, rather they are disjointed, taken apart, such that given this jumble of bones it is impossible to tell how many birds—pigeons, these must be pigeons—actually contributed to the mortuary. Or perhaps this is some sort of a nest? Kierk takes a piece of rusted wire from the ground and uses it to poke and disturb the collection, noticing as he’s digging around the bones that there seems to be an implicit order in their layout, as if certain types of bones, skulls, wings, have been sorted independently and grouped together as sets. He is thinking of the ethology of octopuses, that they and humans are the only kind of predator who arrange the bones of their prey in geometric patterns, the only hyper-intelligent predators—maybe the first true intelligence that ever existed was in a carnivore playing with the bones of its food. Kierk stands back up, holding the wire at his side, looks around at the empty gray roof. Across the street from him a lower roof is thick with pigeons, sitting on structures, flying from one post to another, and on the neighboring roof in the other direction he sees even more rounded forms dart from one pipe to another. Here, nothing moves except the wind.

“Huh.”