And on the other side they saw more dead things—larger dead things. Trees that had once been mighty were now reduced to crumbling trunks, and the odd monument or piece of statuary had gone streaked and pitted from prolonged exposure to the gas. To the left they saw curving walkways with seams that had succumbed to rubble, and a large round pond with nothing inside it but a yellow-black muck. They noticed signs that had gone unreadable, the paint blistered to illegibility and the colors bleached to an ugly gold. Running through all this wreckage were paths that were once graceful, veering prettily between patches of manicured lawns and gardens, and were now uniform in their unkempt ugliness—though they retained their expensive, precise shapes. Nothing could grow in the Blight gas, and therefore nothing became overgrown. It could only rot where once it had thrived.

In the center of all this cheerless, colorless misery, a tremendous structure jutted from the center of a circular path. At first glance it blended into the wall, which ran a few yards behind it. “What’s that?” Zeke asked.

He was too loud, and Angeline shushed him. But she answered as she gathered them to her like a mother hen. “This way, boys. Stay close to the wall. Zeke, that’s the old water tower they was building when the Blight came. It’d look bigger if it weren’t standing in front of the wall.”

The tower looked plenty big enough. Perhaps half the wall’s height, the water tower was a cylindrical, very tall turret made of bricks and capped with a metal roof like a boy’s hat. The roof was rusting, and red-rimmed holes both large and small were eating their way through the original material, but Rector could see that someone had tied flaps of canvas down over one pitted segment. Another large sheet hung loose, having lost its moorings. It flapped against the building like a ghost clapping slowly.

From within the smooth brick tower came the noises of men at work.

Rector picked out snippets of conversation and the occasional hoot of laughter. He heard heavy things being lugged and lighter things being thrown, or hit. He detected metal on metal, and the scrape and whine of wooden crates being shoved about and pried open, their nails squeaking against the wood that held them.

Spiraling up the tower ran a series of tall windows, too narrow for a man to crawl through but big enough to let light inside. Now they let light out, and beneath the rust-ragged cone that topped the structure, the brilliant electric buzz of man-made bulbs and high-powered lanterns made the top floor glow.

At the tower’s base, a white-painted gate had been left unfastened.

Rector watched Angeline out of the corner of his visor. She was eyeing that gate, and he knew she was probably calculating the value versus the trouble of pulling it open and investigating.