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hundred. Amy went first, then Emily, then me, and then Steve. There were lights along the way, all battery-powered electric lanterns, hanging on hooks mounted into the iron railings that guarded the stairwell. By them, I could see the floor beneath us gradually fall away into blackness. At the same time, the roof overhead—always assuming there was one—stayed buried in shadow.
    It was a weird effect, kind of dizzying.
    So, if only to distract my mind from the climb, I asked my sister, “So, you’re … what? A Brain now?”
    “We don’t use the old crew names,” she replied without breaking stride.
    “But you’re a gadget girl,” I said. “Those magnets you invented rock!”
    “Steve’s taught me a lot. After the first war ended, he went on to become a full professor of applied sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.”
    “Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
    “He’s a genius,” she replied.
    “I know,” I told her, though there was something in her tone that surprised me. Something that maybe went a little further than simple “respect.”
    “I call them Hugos,” she remarked suddenly.
    “Huh?”
    “My magnetic field generators. I call them Hugos.”
    “Hugos?”
    “After our step-dad.” Then she abruptly stopped and looked back at me. “Sorry. I forgot … all that happens later for you.”
    My brain tried to process what she’d just told me, but all I got was the mental version of the “blue screen of death.” My mouth tried to make words, failed, and tried again. “Um, Hugo … like in Hugo Ramirez?”
    She nodded.
    “ He’s our step-dad?”
    “He was,” she replied. Then, turning away, she started climbing again.
    For a few moments, I just stood there—while Steve waited patiently behind me.
    Hugo Ramirez was an FBI special agent, and one of the few adults we were able to convince about the Corpse War. I knew he and my mom had become—friendly. But step-dad? The very idea made me a little sick to my stomach.
    “Wait a minute!” I exclaimed, running up the metal stairs after her. “Whatdya mean, ‘he was ?’”
    “He’s gone,” she replied sadly. “Like so many others. But he was a terrific guy. To be honest, he’s the only dad I really remember. I was a lot younger than you when our father died. He was good to us both, and he was great for mom. They loved each other.”
    More processing.
    Then Emily said, “… and, when the war got bad, he helped us set up this new Haven.”
    “This?” I asked. “ This is where Haven is now?”
    She nodded. “For the past fifteen months, we’ve occupied the whole of City Hall Tower.”
    “What about the rest of the building?”
    “Abandoned shortly after Last Halloween,” she replied. “We considered reclaiming all of it, but it’s just too hard to defend. So the chief had us seal off the lower eight floors.”
    The mention of “chief” made me go quiet. It was thirty or forty steps later before I mustered the courage to ask the question that had been drilling into my brain since I’d seen the statue in the courtyard. “What exactly happened to Tom?”
    Now it was Emily’s turn to go quiet. In fact, it was twenty more steps before I got an answer—and that answer came from Steve, who walked behind me. “He died about six months into the Second Corpse War. By then, of course, the Undertakers were history. Literally. They taught about us in schools. Then, after the Last Halloween, when everything went to hell, Tom … he was a U.S. senator by then … returned to Philly and tried to rally us back together. And he managed it, to a point.
    “But by then the city was falling apart. Governments had collapsed everywhere. The police and all the city officials were dead. Tom, Jillian and their three teenage kids were holed up in their Society Hill home. A lot of people tried to do that back then. But the Corpses got in and …” He swallowed. “Tom was the only one who escaped.”
    “Oh jeez …” I muttered.
    Ahead of me,