She can’t think of the word, despite all the new ones she’s learned in her time here.

“You’ve been staring at that thing for hours, you know,” Riko observes, changing the subject.

Dyeawan looks back at the Spectrum, frowning for a different reason now.

She finally says aloud what she’s been thinking for the last hour. “It could’ve been cut and chiseled, just like any stone. Why couldn’t it have been shaped and smoothed like any stone?”

“There isn’t a single grain on the stone’s surface, outside or inside the entire Spectrum. There isn’t a mason in Crache who can polish stone like that. Besides which, there is no other stone like that.”

“It was probably a mountain,” Dyeawan muses. “No one could have moved one solid piece of rock that big from somewhere else.”

Riko nods. “That makes sense, but you know it won’t satisfy the planners, yeah? It’s not enough to know what it was before. You have to know how they turned it into what it is now.”

Dyeawan nods. Nothing she’s seen or read since coming to the Planning Cadre provides an answer to that question, and she remembers all of it, all she sees and all she reads, in every exacting detail.

Concentrating so intensely on a single problem is making her head ache. Dyeawan returns her attention to Riko, more for relief than anything.

“How did you come to be here at the Planning Cadre?” she asks.

Riko’s tongue is occupied between her teeth, its tip just barely visible at the corner of her mouth as she finishes securing the sundial to the model of the Spectrum.

“Aha!” she proclaims triumphantly.

Dyeawan hangs her head, grinning. Riko’s seemingly inexhaustible excitement and enthusiasm are the qualities she admires most in the older girl.

“I, uh, what?” Riko asks, distracted.

“I asked how you came to be here.”

“Oh! Right. Sorry. Well…”

She reaches down and takes up a lengthy wooden pole lying in the street ahead of Dyeawan. Jerking her body to the right, Riko’s harness pivots easily, turning her around. There’s a lamp hanging from the ceiling several feet above her. It’s not an ordinary lamp, however. Instead of a flame or even a luminescent insect encased in glass, it’s a series of mirrors bolted together, harnessing the rays of the sun pouring into the maps level from an open skylight.

Riko extends the wooden pole toward the lamp. There’s a short hook on the end.

“I was, uh, born in the Fourth City, which is where most of Crache’s mining is done, yeah?” she explains as she jiggers with the mirrors. “My kith-kin was part of Gen Fan. They were responsible for maintaining most of the mining equipment. So, they were very successful, yeah?”

Dyeawan nods, hearing something rueful in Riko’s voice.