“Why so smug?”

“You said ‘we.’”

The carriage let them off at the base of a forty-story glass thorn unmarked by gargoyle prayers and veined with elevator shafts. The building had no door, but one opened anyway when Tara approached.

Black marble and chrome walled the lobby. There were no security guards visible, visible being the operative word. Tara noticed, while they waited for the elevator, that striations in the marble moved when she wasn’t looking.

“That one looks like a mouth,” Abelard said. “So does that one.”

She said nothing. The elevator dinged.

On the ride up, she said, “The next few days will be hard for you.”

He lit a second cigarette with the ember of the first. “I’ll do what I can. Trust in the Lord and His work. I wish I could go with you.”

There was something swollen in her throat. Lousy time to come down with a cold. “I’ll be fine. We both will. This will work.” He didn’t ask how she knew, for which she was grateful.

With a ding, the doors rolled back, and they emerged into a glass maze.

Anywhere else, Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao’s local office would reside in a skyspire floating over the city. Craftsmen drew strength from starlight and needed buildings that could rise above cloud cover and clinging smog. Alt Coulumb’s flight interdict made such crystal palaces impossible, so the firm’s interior designers adopted an aesthetic echoing the heavens they were denied.

Glass walled the foyer, and glass hallways led to glass conference rooms and offices. Some panes were smoked translucent, others matte black; employees could adjust opacity as needed. The receptionist (a suited man with thin dark hair and the thick frame of an athlete who had abandoned his sport) sat at a translucent glass desk; his lower body was a textured black blur.

Tara’s skin felt so tight she feared it might split. What was she afraid of? This was just an immensely powerful firm she’d snubbed by quitting.

“Tara Abernathy,” she said to the receptionist, “and Technician Abelard of the Church of Kos Everburning, for Elayne Kevarian.”

The receptionist rifled through a book whose writing tangled and rearranged as the pages turned. “She’s not in the office. And she’s dreaming.”

“It’s urgent. Any way you could slot us in?”

“Your name, again?”

“Abernathy.”

He flipped to the rear of the book, consulted an index, changed back, frowned, scribbled a note on a slip of paper, and slid it into a pneumatic tube.