When she had come back to the city six months ago, she had had no clear idea what she would do with herself. She had degrees from City College in anthropology, linguistics, and history, but she had no interest in teaching rich young indigo girls about the origins of their race and the peculiarities of their language. She could have taken a job at one of the city museums, but she was too restless to tiptoe down the quiet halls and spend all day in reverence over objects from the past. She needed to do something with meaning, something that would give her life some value. These days, it seemed to have so little.

So she went to the charity bank on the west edge of the city, outside the loop of the Centrifuge, and offered her services. They were wary of her there in the Lost City, of course—she looked every inch the blueskin heiress and she knew it—but her father’s name bought her instant recognition and a grudging tolerance. “Tell me what you need done,” she had said to the old gulden woman named Del who ran the place. “I can help you.”

And help them she had. The charity bank was multipurpose and greatly overburdened. It served as a school for the poorest children in the neighborhood, a food pantry for those who could not buy their own, a medical center for the sick, a shelter for shivering gulden women straight in from the mountains who had nowhere to go for safety and were often in fear for their lives. It was a place where there were only women and children, and even the boys, once they had begun to gain their teenage height and lose their childlike voices, were viewed with suspicion. There was a tumbledown community center a few blocks away, built for just such a troublesome group: transplanted gulden boys who did not know the ways of the city and had been ripped from the ways of Geldricht.