Pulling on the wire hand over hand, moving away from the wall, over to the other side, she removed the wire from the place where wall met baseboard. It had been painted over, and flecks of paint came away. She formed loops, coiling it around the back of her elbow and her palm, moving into the next room.

The room was an office, and it had three windows, largely intact.

“Crisse de câlisse de sacrament de tabarnak d’osti de ciboire!” she swore.

“What happened!? Are you hurt!?”

She turned her head. “Non—No. Frustrated!”

“Don’t scare me like that!”

“Sorry!”

You like the attention. How many times today have you thought about letting yourself slip while scaling a tricky surface? Not enough to do any real harm, but enough that someone has to carry you. Take you home. Make sure you get clean. They’ll pamper you.

I won’t do that.

She loosened the first frame, then removed the glass. It was at the point where the container was getting heavy. Glass wasn’t weightless, and the glass of four medium-sized windows was a lot. Then there were the pieces of the frame itself, the coil of wire, and the winter clothing she wore.

All you have to do is let the glass cut you. It doesn’t even have to be a bad cut.

“I’ll need a hand!” she called out, as she got the last of the glass from the third window. “There’s a lot here!”

“Great! I’ll be down as soon as we have a spotter!”

“’Kay!”

She extricated herself from the strap and put the satchel of glass down on the floor, leaning it against the wall.

She finished dismantling the frames, bundling the lengths of metal together, and slid them into the tube she had slung over her back.

There was other stuff. A computer desk with a monitor but no actual computer. The owner had taken it with them. She began sorting through it, pulling out a clear plastic bag and then doing what she could to organize it inside that bag. In the process, she found a laptop, old and disused. A backup.

Picking over the bones of a city that had grown up on scavenged bones and handouts itself.

It reminds me of home, she thought, and felt sour at the notion that she still thought of the various Vasil households as home.

Everything secondhand, everything just a little bit shitty, and when it’s not shitty, it’s because it’s stolen. Nobody, whether they were family or people outside the family, ever thought we deserved nice things. Nobody thought we deserved a space of our own. Nobody thought we deserved kindness.

Pity, yes.

Disgust, absolutely.

Hate? Oh, sometimes. Especially from women.