Lexi turns from the rail to watch a young couple board the carriage arm in arm. They don’t belong to a Gen, but judging by the pressed appearance of their clothes they’re not meager workers. One thing Lexi can observe for certain is that they are very much in love. Rather than sit, the young man reaches for a silk loop while the girl clings to his body for support during the uneven ride.

Even Taru can read the pain in Lexi’s expression and identify its source.

“He did not abandon you, Te-Gen,” Taru assures her, resolute. “He would never do that.”

Lexi turns her head and stares out the window of the carriage, watching the rooftops roll by like parchment slowly unfurled by weak and withered hands.

“I know that,” she says a moment later. “But I almost want to believe he did. None of the alternatives find him in any kind of state I want to imagine.”

“I do not like imagining.” Taru’s distaste is obvious. “I prefer what I know is real, and what lies in front of me.”

“Taru, if no one ever imagined anything, none of this would be here. All people would still live in trees.”

“Perhaps all people would be better off.”

Lexi laughs, shaking her head. “You should’ve been the pleader and Brio should have been your man-at-arms, guarding you with a hook-end.”

Outside she watches the center of the Capitol recede and yield to smaller structures, most of them in good repair. There are other houses, however, whose clay walls rot in the afternoon sun that is also slowly searing away their thatched rooftops. They’re ruins, the last remnants of a civilization in which hovels backed up against the most opulent of palaces, no middle ground between the nobility and the penniless peasants they used as they used firewood, and treated with less reverence than their horse stock.

Eventually the old houses will be demolished and swept away, replaced like the rest of Crache by unyielding modernity and expansion.

Here there’s no trace of the single-block-of-stone construction that makes the Spectrum and its surrounding structures unmatched marvels. Modern builders have tried to replicate the look with paint and deftly concealed seams, but neither the translucent stone nor the methods that built the Spectrum have been seen in more than a thousand years. No one knows when or how they passed into legend, and not even meticulous post-Renewal recordkeeping has ever shed any light on the lost craft.

They say when the Capitol was first constructed horses and horse-drawn carriages filled every street. Now a horse is only seen clopping up or down the narrow pavement when there’s an emergency. Sky carriages ferry people and freight goods, leaving the streets uncluttered and clean. Lexi often imagines what those days must’ve smelled like, before the construction of the aqueduct and sewers, when animals overran the streets.

Like shit, her own voice always answers her.