The lamp in his hand was a rusty contraption left over from when the city was walled off, but it gave far better light than his candle stub and Rector was delighted to have it. Emboldened by the great, glowing halo of the swinging lantern, he surveyed the room and settled on the stairwell as the most obvious path out.

Into the stairwell he stomped, taking strange pleasure in the feel of ordinary stairs beneath his feet. No peculiar boards, beams, or wobbling improvisations to support him—just the regular rhythm of evenly spaced steps leading down in the usual fashion.

The jostling lantern filled the space with a bonfire glow that shook his shadow as he descended.

One story, two stories. Three.

He was on the ground level now; he sensed it before he knew it as a fact.

It wasn’t merely the long hike from the roof, and it wasn’t simply the wider passage or the paths in the dust swept clean by the regular intrusion of feet. It was the way the windows had all been covered. They were sealed with sheets of wood, planks, corrugated tin, and a hundred other scraps of building material that had been scavenged from the city.

Rector exited the stairwell, and held his lantern up and forward. He investigated the nearest amalgam of reinforcement, and was convinced that yes, this had all been accomplished from the inside. Big nail heads jutted from piles of sturdy trash, and braided steel cables were lashed from corner to corner.

Not keeping anything in. Keeping everything out.

Rector spoke quietly to himself, since there was no one else to hear him. “They shore up the first floors to keep out the rotters. I get it.” So the rotters couldn’t climb. It was good to know.

He couldn’t tell what the building had been in its original incarnation. A hotel? A bank? A boardinghouse, or other residence? He scanned the scene for some hint but didn’t see one. Every identifying piece of furniture or signage, every useful scrap had been stripped and repurposed from elsewhere.

He stood still and listened, but heard nothing except the lantern’s sizzling wick and his own raspy, warm breath straining through his filters. He ducked back into the stairwell and shoved his lantern out in front of himself as if it were a sword. It led the way farther down, one more flight, and it stopped in a basement.

The basement wasn’t anything more complex than a freshly excavated root cellar. The timbers that held up the weaker points looked like railroad ties, and there were tracks laid down in the mud.