Before the dawn, Laython came, wrapped in a heavy furred coat, and surveyed them in the cells. He barely said two words to the jailor, but they were enough. The cells were emptied, and all of them were loaded onto Laython’s wagon behind the dungeon. He left Dyeawan behind; he only took the able-bodied.

Dyeawan never awoke to find Evie and the others missing from the unusually sweet-smelling cells. She did, however, awaken to a face mostly hidden beneath a black hood. A cloud of acrid dust, dancing in the light of the morning pouring through the window’s bars, dredged her face and lips, filling her nostrils. Somehow she knew the unnatural sleep would overtake her before she felt it begin to spread icy numbness through her arms and torso. She also knew she would indeed wake up again, but it would be someplace else, far from here.

As she’d told Evie, Dyeawan had a way of seeing things, mostly subtle truths, that wouldn’t otherwise occur to most people.

WHERE ONLY STONE STEPS ASCEND

WE ARE NOT FLOWERS. WE do not wilt.

Lexi hears her mother speak those words in her memory as she sits outside the chambers of the Gen Franchise Council. It’s here her grandparents and Brio’s grandparents came to petition to form Gen Stalbraid. They named their franchise after the steel woven together to push and pull the city’s first sky carriage.

The bench beneath Lexi is carved from the translucent white-and-blue stone of the chamber wall itself. The entire Spectrum, including most of its fixtures and even furnishings, are carved from a single mountainous piece of stone, a marvel of engineering whose secrets are lost even to the best masonry Gens in Crache. The Spectrum is the physical, intellectual, and bureaucratic center of the Capitol, making it the center of Crache itself. No structure in all the nation’s sterling ten cities rivals the scale or beauty of the Spectrum’s massive domes, sky-piecing spires, and corridors so tall and expansive they feel more like mountain halls than the arteries of a city edifice. The sculpture of the national ant in the Spectrum lobby is said to be the largest ever crafted.

Oval lamps are ensconced up and down the towering walls of every one of those corridors; the same lamps that hang from stakes curved like shepherds’ staffs along every city street and on every corner. The lamps were one of the first major innovations of the Post-Renewal Age. Each lantern houses two insects, a male and a female. They’re nocturnal creatures, hibernating in the bottom of the lanterns during the day and rising at the edge of dusk, precisely when darkness spreads through the streets. Upon rising, the two insects couple, consummating their nightly union. As they do, their small and bulbous bodies are filled with a bright luminescence that streams through the panes of their glass cage and radiates in every direction.