Free House of Doors by Chaz Brenchley

bomber  . . .?
    It was always good to have an excuse, to disguise anxiety as anger. Bash them about a bit, exhibit some righteous indignation, keep them abashed.
    Even so, Ruth wasn’t about to erupt through the hatchway like an avenging angel, justified or otherwise. Not if the man out there was uncertain in his balance. She was horribly aware of all that glass, and the plunge beneath.
    Swiftly up the ladder, then, but slowing at the top. She could hear the colonel at her back, beneath her, hauling himself up that last turn, breathing hard. So was she, though, breathing hard: which gave her an excuse the other way, to pause at the head of the ladder, just her head pushing up through the hatchway into open air. She could look like she was blown, no more than that, while she looked about, and—
    Ah. There he was, and yes, well stowed for a man with vertigo. It was stupid, of course, being a man with vertigo, being on a rooftop at all. But young men could be stupid, and young airmen more than most. They seemed addicted to risk. If warfare didn’t or wouldn’t put their lives in danger, they’d seek it out elsewhere. Peter had been a test pilot when she first met him. War was almost a substitute for that, she had thought sometimes, not quite up to the mark.
    If you’d been through war and come out scathed – and come out with vertigo, which was odd in itself for an airman, surely something deeply significant, something to ask Aesculapius about – then of course you’d want to sit on the roof and fly kites. Even if you needed a boost from your mates to get you there, and would be stuck where you were if they abandoned you.
    Stuck where he was, he was still flying kites. A kite, at least. Probably he used to call his aeroplane a kite, back when. Now he was a man like any other here, bad face and bad hands, barely able to hold a string between them. But he sat against a convenient chimney stack with his legs spread out across the leads of the roof, and he played tug-and-come-again with both hands on his kite string, and seemed quite happy at it although his face was hard to read.
    Until Colonel Treadgold coughed heavily, significantly, on the landing below her. Too much the gentleman to be discourteous, to start up the ladder before she was safely off it – or simply too much of a man, not trusting his weight and hers to the same frail risers – and far too much the gentleman to hurry her up directly, he fell back on the audible nudge. Which was audible to kite-flying Dumpty as well as herself, because so much body of course had power and resonance beyond his reckoning.
    Which brought Dumpty’s head flying round to find the source, and finding her. And scrambling to his feet any old how, despite injuries and vertigo and all; and letting go his kite string in the process, and realizing a moment too late and making a despairing grab at it anyway; and his eyes and hers following the kite as it soared away beyond reach, beyond limit, bizarrely into the midst of a flock of starlings wheeling towards their evening roost.
    That frantic snatch had overtoppled him, so that his arms were wheeling for a balance no longer there. The fatal suck of the skylight hung below him, black-coated but still glass in all its fragility, all its threat. Ruth could see it happen in her mind’s eye, how he would fall and fall through in a terrible shatter, how he would fall and fall.
    He was falling already, except that she was there. Drawn by his need and her duty, impelled by the colonel from below, she felt almost translated from the hatchway to the rooftop all at once. Just in time, her experienced arms caught hold of him, loaned him the balance he lacked. It’s a nurse’s knack, to keep a heavy man on his feet at need.
    His head lifted to find her, perhaps to thank her. She couldn’t tell, he never came that far. For a moment his eyes looked over her shoulder, to where she could