Growing up in the country, Tara had assumed that once you built a building you were done—not the farmhouses and barns and silos back in Edgemont, of course; those always needed work, the structure’s whole life a long slow deliquescence back to dust, but surely their weakness came from poor materials and construction methods that at best nodded toward modernity. But a friend of hers at the Hidden Schools studied architecture and laughed at Tara’s naiveté. When Tara took offense, she explained: skyscrapers need more care than barns. Complicated systems require work to preserve their complexity. A barn has no air-conditioning to break; free the elementals that chill a tower and the human beings within will boil in their own sweat. The more intricate the dance, the more disastrous the stumble.

The abandoned towers in the Ash were simple things, built of mortar, stone, and arches, like Old World cathedrals. If Alt Coulumb fell tomorrow, they’d still stand in five hundred years. Their insides rotted, though. Façades broke. Shards of plate glass jutted from windowsills.

Tara approached on foot by daylight through the Hot Town. Kids loitered at alley mouths, hands in the pockets of loose sweatshirts, hoods drawn up in spite of the heat. Sidewalk sweepers stared at her, as did women smoking outside bars with dirty signs. Girls played double dodge on a cracked blacktop.

But when she reached the Ash, she was alone. Not even beggars lingered in these shadows.

The tallest tower lacked a top, and though black birds circled it, none landed.

Tara closed her eyes.

Outside her skull, it was almost noon; inside, cobweb cords shone moonlight against the black. This was the Craftswoman’s world, of bonds and obligations. She saw no traps, no new Craft in place. She opened her eyes again and approached the topless tower.

Sunlight streamed through broken windows. Jagged glass cast bright sharp shadows on the ruins within. Tara looked up, and up, and up, to the first intact structural vault seven stories overhead. The intervening floors had collapsed, and the wreckage of offices and apartments piled twenty feet tall in the tower’s center: splintered rotted wood, chunks of drywall, stone and ceramic, toilet bowls and countertops and tarnished office nameplates.

And of course she still couldn’t fly here, damn the jealous gods.

A few decades’ abandonment hadn’t weathered the walls enough to climb, even if she had equipment. She’d scaled the Tower of Art at the Hidden Schools, upside down a thousand feet in air, but she’d had spotters then, and what was falling to a woman who could fly? She considered, and rejected, prayer.

There had to be an entrance somewhere, she told herself, though she knew it wasn’t true.