I go back. The hall looks unfamiliar. I return to the stairwell. These doors don’t seem to be the ones I first came through in distress, but I see no others. I return again to the hall, go halfway or so down its length, and turn around, to see if it strikes me as more familiar looking in this direction. Nothing looks familiar.

Rust and a clear, hard elastic substance run down the walls in sheets and covers the doorways; passages are blocked by huge boluses of coagulated rust or massive worms of melted window glass. Fossilized stumps spill out the elevator doors and fill the end of the hall like a petrified wave, tufted with little spurts of roots.

I search for a long time, but I can’t find my way back to the room and the Narrator.

*

I can’t find my way out; I’m blundering around in another wing of the building. Something framed in a window stops me, and the charm strikes against my chest like a door knocker.

Off in the distance a magnetic building looms against a mercury sky; it is the only undamaged building I’ve seen in the city. A huge upright half-circle, its flat diameter turned toward me, stands between two bullet-shaped buttresses on one end of a sweeping, flat foundation structure with windows and vents. The thing reminds me strongly of the Bonant’s sullen gigantism. The diameter of the half-circle is indented, and two deep, narrow grooves stand parallel to each other along its length; the grooves are angled inward, and might perhaps meet inside in a V. Squinting, I can barely make out what might be a pattern on the metal by the grooves; like a sawtooth, uniform row of black soot smudges or scorch marks.

The charm shudders in my pocket, the figure inside is rattling violently against the glass. I pull out the charm and look at it—

... The city is invaded—enemy soldiers in the streets, the buildings shine like new. The citizens have fled or taken refuge in shelters.

Enemy soldiers in the streets. They unwittingly trigger certain machineries.

A group of enemy soldiers, whoever they are, gather at the window of one of the taller buildings—this window—conduct a discussion over a map. One meanwhile surveys the town with field glasses. She sees a light appear in the window of the foundation building.

Moments later, a grating, howling alarm begins to sound from claxons on rooftops. A mottled whiteness spreads in seconds over the entire outer surface of the upright half circle as moisture in the air condenses and freezes on the metal. Flakes of frost break loose from the sides of the structure and fall crashing to the foundation below, where they hiss and bubble, mantling the hooded tower in steam. The two long grooves in its face emit a weak, fitful radiance.