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assistant’s coat came hurrying down the steps toward me. “Sorry!” she called out to me, coming to a halt a few feet away. “Sorry I’m late.”
    She cradled a clipboard against her chest, face peeping at me over its top. She could have been my older sister, with hair a few shades darker than mine, looking almost black in the shade of the building. Her face was round enough to reflect the heavier rations given to the employees of the Institute. With the physical and mental labor expected of those employees, they needed the extra food.
    I gave her my best cold stare. If it protected me from embarrassment in the face of schoolyard mockery, it might help with my panic, too.
    She only glanced at her clipboard and then smiled, moving close enough to put a hand between my shoulder blades. “So you must be Lark.” She ushered me forward. “My name’s Emila. Sorry it’s just you this time. I know you must be nervous, but I promise you have nothing to worry about. You won’t feel a thing when you’re harvested.”
    She led me through the doors and into a vast hall topped by a breathtaking rotunda—the inside of the dome I’d seen from the steps. Intricate machinery lined the ceiling, a metallic gold replica of our sun disc in miniature, a tribute to the Wall. The clockwork mechanisms purred, a steady whirring punctuated at intervals by the clink of a shifting component of the masterpiece. It was morning inside the rotunda as well, but there were other tracks and gears in the process of dipping below the lip of the dome as the sun rose on the other side, carrying objects I didn’t recognize from the sky of the Wall outside: a crescent of gleaming silver, shapes picked out in precious gems that glinted in the light.
    What must this place look like at night? Emila was hurrying ahead, reading her clipboard and paying no attention to me, and I reluctantly kept moving.
    Shafts of light shone through remote skylights, illuminating the exquisite tile floors in dappled gold. The tiles radiated from the rotunda’s center like a compass, arrows pointing toward doors that led to various wings of the Institute. Bronze plaques declared the destinations of each branching corridor.
    As Emila veered toward one of these doors, the plaque told me she was headed to the Department of Harvest and Reclamation. Below it was a second plaque with arrows pointing right and left, describing the passages further along the rim of the rotunda room. The Biothaumatic Laboratory lay to the right; the Museum and Hall of Records to the left.
    I stopped walking, a shoe squeak echoing through the rotunda. I cringed, but Emila didn’t lift her head.
    We weren’t taught much history in school. We knew that the Institute had saved us from the fallout following the wars over a century ago, and that was enough. The Institute held the details of our history in trust for us, so that nothing would be lost or changed by the retelling of it. The glimpses I had in school of the world before the wars were electrifying and frightening all at once: a world full of Renewable sorcerers and vast machines operated by magic, of mechanimals, of struggles for power unlike anything we had to endure in the peaceful city today.
    “Hall of Records,” I whispered, the final sibilant echoing around the rotunda and returning distorted to my ears. Inside were all the records of the past century—including, surely, those of the only experimental exploration beyond the Wall since its creation. Somewhere in there was a piece of paper with Basil’s name on it. When would I ever have another chance?
    I took one last glance at the now distant, retreating form of Emila as she hurried down the corridor toward the harvest department. I was far enough behind now that I’d have to run to catch up. I could just as easily say I’d gotten separated while admiring the rotunda. It wouldn’t even really be a lie.
    I took a deep breath and ducked down the other corridor.
    Without the