“Hard to say. Just keep moving. Damn, this is a lot of stairs.”

“If you had your way, there’d be elevators everywhere.”

“Damn right, there would be.”

A hazy gray glow announced the imminent conclusion of their climb. They rose toward it like night bugs swooping to a lantern, but kept their heads down low when it came time to breach the top.

Side by side, they peeked over the edge and found themselves at eye level with the floor.

They were alone.

With big sighs, they scampered up the last half-dozen steps and walked into the open.

They stood directly beneath the roof. It rose up to a point above them, like a frozen circus tent. Its weaker spots and open holes were covered with tarps, as they’d seen from outside, which flapped idly and without any vigor.

The room itself was circular. In it, eight oversized windows with ironwork grates provided a view of the city in every direction—except for the side facing the wall, which showed nothing but a big black barrier pressing close, as if it were trying to see inside.

“Would you look at all this junk!” Rector exclaimed, keeping his voice just above a whisper.

“Shhh!”

“Oh, come on. No one can hear us out there, and we’d hear anybody coming up the stairs.”

Tables of many sizes and shapes had been hauled inside, a feat that filled Rector with wonder, but not envy. (He sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to carry them up that winding passage.) Upon the tables and lying beside them were more crates and an ever-present coating of sawdust, which was already going soggy under their feet.

Houjin went to the nearest table, where a substance in a series of tubes and glass vials was cooking over a gas-jet flame. “This isn’t junk,” he observed. “This is science. And that”—he moved to another table, where a larger apparatus was simmering merrily and unattended—“is a still. Surely you’ve seen one before? They’re using it to remove the sap residue from the gas.”

“Of course I’ve seen a still before, but not one that big. Or one quite like it.” Even Harry’s oversized operation on the Outskirts paled in comparison to this beast of a thing before him.

“Maybe it’s a prototype.”

“What’s a prototype?”

“Um … it means something new.”

Rector said, “Then just say ‘something new’; otherwise you’re showing off. Hey, this over here—is this the wire they want to use to blow us up?”

Houjin joined him beside a stack of spools, each one wrapped with coiled wire that still gleamed, which meant it hadn’t been inside the city very long. “Probably,” he said.

“Then how about we just steal the wire? Make ’em go get more. It’d buy us time.”