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already had. I should forget everything I’d seen.
    Slipping my hand into my pocket and curling my fingers around Basil’s paper bird, I followed the lights.
    The corridor stretched for what felt like miles. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to have a slight slope as well as a curve, a gradual downward spiral. In the distance, a door came into view at the end of the corridor. I stopped dead for a second and the lights went still. As I stood there, they shifted once in the direction I’d been going, then ceased again.
    “Okay, okay,” I said, glancing up at the dark lightbulbs overhead.
    The door swung open soundlessly at my touch.
    The space behind the door lay shrouded in darkness at its edges, although the impression was of a huge spherical cavern of a room. At its center hung a blindingly bright mass, with streamers of light connecting it to the most complex machinery I’d ever seen, hanging above and around it. The noises of meshing gears were only rivaled by the sound of magic mated with machine twanging in my mind.
    On the other side of the door began a metal walkway that spiraled down toward the light. My feet took me down of their own accord.
    As I got closer, the light powering the machines became more distinct. It was long and slender, with the faintest suggestion at the top of something like a head. . . .
    It was a person. Though it wore no clothing, the light was too bright at this distance to make out any features or its gender. Glass filaments seemed to plug directly into its skin, stretching up into the mechanisms overhead and carrying the Resource away from it. Just as iron was an insulator of magic, glass was the best conductor of all.
    The room vibrated. Although I had never felt the Resource in such quantities, there was an undertone to it that I recognized from Basil, from my own ill-advised experiment. Barely detectable beneath the harshness of the harnessed energy rang the pure, sweet notes of raw magic. Light dazzled my eyes.
    I stopped walking and leaned closer over the railing of the catwalk, gazing at the creature. My breath stopped, and I stood transfixed, horrified.
    There was no doubt it was a living person. I could see the face more clearly now, my eyes accustomed to the light. White skin, closed eyes, wasted, delicate features, lips set in a strange, hollow O .
    While I stared, the eyes opened. I shrieked and fell backward, banging hard into the opposite railing.
    The pain brought me to my senses. I could still feel that overpowering need to run, but there was a part of me that was detached, freed from it. With a shocking clarity I realized that the need to flee was not coming from me.
    Sucking in a deep breath, I got to my feet and turned toward the gleaming-white creature suspended by glass. She—I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I was certain now it was a woman—was looking directly at me. Her irises were as white as the rest of her, the black pinpoints of her pupils fixing on mine.She opened her mouth, lips cracking. A viscous, brownish-gray liquid spilled onto her chin.
    “Run,” she gasped.
     

Chapter 4

    My thin shoes clanged painfully against the metal as I sprinted away, lungs heaving.
    I barely made it through the door before I slammed into what seemed like a red wall. I would have ricocheted back onto the walkway, except that the wall extended hands to catch me.
    Reeling backward, I saw that it was the Administrator. I’d never seen her so close. Her, short, black hair curled inward under her double chin, with a fringe cropped straight across just above her perfectly tweezed brows. Around the high collar of her red coat coiled a thick copper wire, on which hung the insignia of the architects: an ornamental drafting compass, its sharp point gleaming in the light. For an instant she gaped at me, thin lips parted in surprise, small eyes narrowing. Like she was examining me.
    Then the expression cleared. “My goodness!” she exclaimed. “You look like you’ve just had a