The air pressure drops before the first crack. She registers it in her outer primaries — a slight differential, one part in ten thousand, but she's been reading weather since before she fledged. Something has changed.
Her roost: a brick throat sixty feet above Main Street, two hundred and forty bodies packed into the dark, each gripping vertical brick with four toes and a tail that works like a fifth. The chimney is older than anything that built it.
Then the pressure again, sharp — and the sound arrives with no gap, body and event a single thing. She tightens her grip. The others tighten. Two hundred and forty degrees of warmth breathe upward through the flue.
Light blooms red in the gap at the top. Her visual cortex occupies seventy percent of her skull. It does not make meaning of color. It registers: bright, moving, falling, unfamiliar. Her tail presses into the brick.
Another crack. White bloom, trailing sparks. Her wings flutter involuntarily. Six bodies nearby lose their grip and tumble into thermal, spiraling upward, calling in frequencies that don't reach the street below.
The booms run for forty minutes. She holds on.
A sleeping swift can hang dead and not fall.
When it stops, the silence is dense: metal and sulfur, ionized air, the burned smell of something that wanted to be seen. She preens one wingtip in the dark.
