The gate isn’t far. It comes in view after a half hour’s walk along the base of the wall, which vanishes directly down into the soil. The wall turns away from us at a place where the land breaks, and we look out now from a crag, not too high or steep. Just below it is a tangle of collapsed derricks scabbed with rust, some of them curled up on themselves like dried worms. Bolt-shaped metal pillars that rust has roughened and bulbed over like coral are thrust up among the derricks, which crushed the building they belonged to when they fell. The ground before us carpets itself with enormous shards of glass, warped metal beams orange with rust and tossed together like twigs, and what look like great blankets flung haphazardly down, all of rust metal mesh. There are some deliberate-looking streaks on the earth to show where buildings once stood.

The crag slumps off to our left, with an easy way toward the gate, which is now only visible sidelong as a complicated bus on the shield-like wall. It turns into direct view as we go—the oblate mouth of the gate is pitch black, set into a wide winged structure emerging from the wall. The sunken ground immediately before the gate has filled with water, and the mouth is reflected in it. From the near side of the pond emerges a brown-orange streak of what had been a paved road, its surface now gathered into tiny pellets that stir a little in the wind.

The wall simply stops a hundred yards beyond the gate, the edges of the outer skin stick out in angular segments, and mammoth rusted rods, each one a man’s height or more in diameter, droop from within the epidermis like brown intestines. Blown out, somehow.

Predicanten explode from their red rookeries high over the gate and circle as we come—their beaks are closed, the shrieking is the noise their wings make against the air, and the groaning of their own rusted joints as they flap. We stand at the brink of the pool, and only now is a white coin visible deep in the gate, like the full moon reflected down a well. Without hesitation nor too long a look at the Predicanten, whose shrill noise chitters against itself in my ears, Makemin wrecks the wind-riffled surface of the pond with his boot, and we wade through to the ramped opening of the gate.

Its black arc hoods us. We are in the even darkness of the gate, in cool, dry, iron-smelling air. Sharp squeals and the sound of our feet and wheels rustling the water, hum and blend dully in the tunnel. The city’s ruins draw near, in the egg-shaped opening ahead.