She caught him watching her and she winked. “Don’t worry. I won’t go for a climb without you.”

“Stairs?” Houjin asked, keeping his chatter to a minimum for once.

“Stairs. Spirals of them, bottom to top. There’s two ways in, I believe. The one you see right in front of us, and one on the other side.” She was still thinking about it. Rector knew the look of someone weighing a bad idea, and knowing it was a bad idea, and thinking maybe it wasn’t the worst idea in the world—all evidence to the contrary.

But she was as good as her wink and her word. Maintaining their best efforts at utter quiet, the four of them edged back behind the tower, between it and the wall.

There, the shadows were thicker than the fog, and it felt like night.

Rector shivered, but hid it by adjusting his satchel. “Now what do we do?” he asked. In truth, he wanted to go back to the Vaults. Badly. He itched all over, gloves and long sleeves and tall socks be damned; and his ribs were on fire from the stress of breathing so hard through such sturdy filters as the ones he now kept in his mask.

“I just want to watch. Just a few minutes,” she told them.

From their new vantage point, they could see both entrances. They were closer to the “front,” but it’d be difficult for anyone to leave the tower via the other door without walking past them, so Rector felt like they had everything covered. Apparently Miss Angeline did, too. She crouched down and urged them all to do likewise, squatting behind the detritus of old gardening equipment and the rubble of decorative benches that had never been assembled.

Soon the clang of footsteps on metal echoed through the tower and oozed out with the fog-diffused light. Then they heard a crunch and a loud stream of profanity, followed by, “We need to fix these goddamn stairs!”

“What do you expect? They’re metal. The gas is hard on metal.”

“So we should replace ’em, or repair ’em.”

“Or you should be more careful.”

“Go to hell.”

“This isn’t it?”

The front gate slammed open, ricocheting against the tower and kicking up a puff of dust that might have been brick and might’ve been rust. A man emerged, stomping and waving his right leg as though it was hurt and he was trying to shake off the pain. The gate’s metal bars cracked and creaked on their hinges, and as the portal slowly rocked shut, a second man pushed it open again.

“You all right?”

“I’ll survive. Went straight through the stairs, did you see that?”

“You did it right in front of me.”