Iris looks toward the silver needle puncturing the mustard-colored clouds. “You need a ticket and reservations for the elevator.” She has never been above the clouds, and they have never once cleared off in all her sixteen years. It’s been overcast in the city for nearly three decades.

“You don’t need an elevator. You’ve got me.”

She catches in place. “What malarkey is this?”

“If I can carry a four-hundred-kilo wheel, I’m sure I can carry a forty-two-kilogram girl up a few stairs.”

“It’s not a few. It’s three thousand.”

“Three thousand and eighteen. I will need nine minutes from the bottom step. A Drop Bubble is eighty-three credits, a glass of Sparklefroth is eleven, a table is only by reservation—but the gallery in the Sun Parlor is free to all, Iris.”

Her respiration has quickened. Rapid eye movements between himself and the Spoke telegraph her excitement.

“I . . . well . . . when I imagined it, I always thought I’d have a friend along.”

“You will,” he said. “What do you think you paid for?”

6.

The lobby is almost a quarter of a mile high, a dizzying cathedral of green glass. The air is cool and smells corporate. The glass barrels of the elevators vanish into pale clouds. The Spoke is so large it has its own climate.

They queue to pass through the scanners. The Clockwork guards might’ve been carved from soap, uniformed figures with featureless white heads and smooth white hands: a squad of living mannequins. Iris steps through the Profiler, which scans for weapons, biological agents, drugs, chemicals, threatening intentions, and debt. A low, discordant pulse sounds. A security Clockwork gestures for her to go through again. On her second pass, she clears the scanner without incident. A moment later Chip follows.

“Any idea why you tripped the Profiler?” Chip asks. “Debt? Or a desire to harm others?”

“If you’ve got debt, you can imagine doing harm to others,” she says. She raises the aquaball she still carries under one arm. “Probably it caught me thinking about what I want to do with my mermaid. I was remembering how we planned to eat sushi at my birthday party.”

“It’s a pet, not a snack. Try to be good.”

When Iris tilts her head back, she sees iridescent bubbles with people in them, hundreds of feet above her, floating here and there, pulling free of the clouds and drifting to earth. The sight of them—gleaming like ornaments on some impossibly huge Christmas tree—gives her an ache. She always thought someday she would ride in one herself.

Hammered-bronze doors open into the stairwell. Flights of black glass plates climb the walls, around and around, in a spiral that goes on into infinity.

“Get on my back,” Chip says, sinking to one knee.

“The last time someone gave me a piggyback, I was probably six,” she says, “someone” being her father.