Lying between us, face up, was a bent and battered postcard of a city by night. The buildings were illuminated and rich against a blue-black sky, lovely and unimaginable in their use of power. Once people had lit the outsides of skyscrapers, and turned them into sculpture and monuments when their insides were empty.

Then I recognized the pillar of glass in the middle, reflecting its sisters and the cool night sky on its flanks, crowned with a halo ring of little white lights. I was looking at my City.

No, I realized, after a glimpse of Frances’s face — I was looking at hers. The City as she’d left it, whenever she’d left it to do her nation’s bidding and ride the bodies of strangers. The city, maybe, that she’d been innocent in, blank tape herself.

“But what’s the big gold one?” I asked aloud.

“Pardon?” she said, looking up blindly.

“The one with the top lit to a fare-thee-well. That’s almost as big as—”

I realized it as I said it, but Theo answered me anyway. “Cripes. It’s the Gilded West.”

Frances laughed, just a little. “The second-tallest building in town by popular fiat; did you know? My mother always claimed, when it was lighted, that it looked like an electric shaver.”

“No,” Sherrea said, peering over Frances’s shoulder. “It looks like a skull. See? From this side, anyway. Those shadows are the eyes—”

Theo had crouched in the multicolored reef of papers and was stirring through them. “Here’s another one — and another one. Look at this! The Tent Farm with the roof still on. Cool. And that building’s not there now.”

“The Multifoods Building. And City Center,” Frances told him, her voice steady. “Both desperately ugly. They will not be mourned.” But I could see her face. I wandered over, as if to look at the postcards, and touched my fingers lightly to her shoulder.

“Here’s another one of the Gilded West after dark,” said Theo. “It looks like a toad in this one.”

“It’s the other side,” Sherrea said. “Bullshit. Where’s the toad?”

“Right here. There’s the two front legs, and the body, and the two red lights on top are the eyes.”

“Santos. It does look like a toad.”

Frances tipped her head back and met my eyes. Her expression was an unstable mix of hilarity and distress. “Thank heaven,” she said, “the Norwest board of directors are no longer with us.”

Sher had both postcards, skull and toad, in her hands and was studying them. “They’re both death symbols.”

“Oh, happy bankers,” Frances sighed. “No wonder the building’s standing empty now.”

“Noooo… Theo, hasn’t your family got it? Why’s it empty?” Sher tapped the edges of the cards and fanned them like her tarot pack, her brows drawn together.

“I’m not sure. Something about security, I think. And maybe just that they’re so close in size, and somebody didn’t like the competition. It’s not really empty. It’s got stuff stored in it.”

I sat on my heels next to Frances. “What kind of stuff?”