There was a tall chain-link fence on the far side of the street where someone had attached a four-by-eight color poster. Despite its size, Ted couldn’t make out anything but the banner across the top: spike the spire. He waited for a break in the traffic and dashed across.

The poster was lit by streetlamps that turned every reflective surface into a mirror. It took his eyes a moment to adjust. There was a second line of letters, smaller than the first, below the main message: citizens united for sustainable growth. A few sentences of print followed. He scanned the paragraph without really reading it, taking in the stock phrases “rampant overdevelopment,” “environmental impact statement,” “community dislocation,” and others. The banner ran along the top of an artist’s rendering of the proposed LBC project.

Painted from a street point of view, the building looked menacing, stretching upward into a dark grey cloud. He stepped back for a different perspective and tried to fit the image into the skyline. One World Trade would still be taller, but there was an elegance to the varied planes of that structure. This thing, on the other hand, was to be a series of cubes set atop one another, diminishing slightly at regular intervals but overall a mass so great it would have its own gravity field. The structure wasn’t ugly—nor was it distinctive for anything other than size—but it would be an eyesore from any angle. It would be taller than everything east of Manhattan and located in a borough where the overwhelming majority of structures were one to three stories tall. Air traffic to LaGuardia was already routed away from this area, but controllers would have to take the building into account in emergency situations. The influx of vehicular traffic would make the streets impassable. The increase in number of residents would overwhelm current police, fire, sanitation, schools, and public transportation. The sheer arrogance of the project was impressive.

“Tower of Babel,” the man said in a hoarse voice, rhyming the last word with cable or label. This was a first for Ted. In his experience, native New Yorkers—and most transplants—pronounced the word to sound like rabble or babble. Or Babylon, for that matter, the last express stop on the Long Island Railroad before the Hamptons.

He looked over his shoulder. It took a moment to find the dark shape huddled against the subway pillar. The shadow emerged into the light and took form.

The man was impossibly thin, dressed in a long dark overcoat more appropriate for January than May. His skin was mottled, and his hair was covered by a ragged grey knit watch cap. A long grey beard, surprisingly well-groomed, cascaded down his chest. On his feet he wore tattered boat shoes, the toes wrapped in duct tape, the backs broken down flat so that he shuffled as though wearing slippers.

“Do you know your Bible?” the man asked.