Finally. In his left trouser pocket. Nolan pulled out his badge and handed it over. “I work at the Biolab.”

The guard scrutinized the I.D., examined Nolan’s face to make sure it matched, and waved him inside. Even the interior corridors were crowded, and the elevator was crammed with both indigo and gulden individuals. Nolan felt a sense of relief when he was finally able to disembark on the fourteenth floor—which, by eerie contrast, at first appeared totally deserted. Still, even the empty halls seemed electric with anticipation, and faint laughter floated to him from three rooms away.

“Hello?” he called out, trying to guess where everyone was.

“Here,” someone shouted. “Melina’s room.”

He made his way through a maze of closed offices, open labs, and storage closets to the long, narrow room where Melina worked. About twenty people were pressed against the window, heads craned down to see the street below. As in the elevator, the company here was mixed—five indigo men, five indigo women, six gulden men, and a trio of albinos. The indigo presented a range of skin tones from the darkest navy to the palest sky blue, though they all had black hair of a similar rough texture. The gulden, on the other hand, were almost uniformly the same deep gold hue, though they sported a variety of hair color that was amazing to Nolan—blond, red, orange, brown, silver, and bronze. The whitemen, who kept to themselves at the far end of the window, were harder to distinguish one from the other. Even after working with three of them for five years, Nolan sometimes had trouble telling them apart.

Only Pakt turned to greet Nolan when he walked in the door. “You’re earlier than I thought you’d be,” he said with a grin. “I’d figured you couldn’t make it for another hour.”

“I was beginning to think that myself. The Centrifuge was so crowded that people were sharing ringcars with strangers. And once I got off at the gate, all the trolleys were packed. It was quicker to walk, so I did. What’s going on?”

Pakt gestured at the window with one broad, golden palm. He was a big man, muscular, heavy-boned, and powerful; his tarnished-copper hair was long and a little wild but beginning to show gray. He radiated competence, self-confidence, health, and zest; and he was the first gulden man Nolan had ever spoken to in a real conversation. It had been quite a shock. Blueskin men were much more reserved than this.

“We’re expecting Chay Zanlan to arrive any minute,” Pakt said. “All the fools have lined up to gawk from the sidelines. You’d think there’d never been a gulden man set foot in the city before.”

“Chay Zanlan never has, has he?” asked Melina, briefly turning away from the window. “Not that I remember.”