The old man sat in his leather-bound throne of an ­office chair behind his gleaming desk and smiled. “Bill. How’s the arm?”

Phipps, rueful, gestured with his right arm. He didn’t move it much; in its cast, hampered by the sling, it wasn’t very mobile and still gave him shooting pains. “Could be worse. I can’t wait to catch up to the guy who kicked me. He got his lucky shot in. Next time I kill the son of a bitch.”

“No need to curse, Bill. But, yes, you’ll get that chance. Do you have some news?”

“We found her.” Phipps set the manila folder in front of the old man. His employer flipped it open and peered at the files and photographs it contained.

“The woman is Elaine Carpenter, born Elaine Johnson, one of her friends from high school. The man is James Carpenter, her husband. She works with a suicide hotline part-time. He’s a tax lawyer. They live in Connecticut, and this Donohue girl is staying with them.”

“Good, good. How did you find out?”

“I had Costigan make up some of those instant business cards out of a machine. General Carpentry. Gave one to every apartment manager on the block and quoted nice high rates. But for the manager of the girl’s building, he had a special offer. A low, low introductory rate. And—surprise!—it turns out the manager had a door he wanted repaired. We gave it to him dirt cheap . . . and while Costigan was doing the repairs, he asked the manager how the door got broken.” Phipps smiled in rich appreciation. “The manager told him the story. Also, how he had to collect the girl’s mail and send it to her, since her keys were lost. Costigan got him alone and asked him a few questions.”

“And?”

“And then he finished fixing the door.”

“No, I mean—the manager?”

“Oh. He’s gone on a river cruise. He may pop up in a few months.”

The old man crinkled a smile at Phipps’ word-play. “Good. We’ll visit Miss Donohue again tonight, after the house is asleep. Do you have a man in place?”

“Naturally. I’ll have the device out to him within the hour.”

“Excellent.” The old man waved him away. But as Phipps reached the door, he called, “Bill?”

“Yes?”

“If you had the choice, would you lead an army, rule a nation, or retire to a life of decadent self-gratification?”

Phipps smiled. He never knew whether the old man were testing or taunting, so he always answered honestly. “I’d take the army.”

“I knew it. Go on, then. Get someone who is good at intrusion. And make yourself ready at moonrise.”

The site foreman, a squat man who waddled comically as he walked, but looked as though he could bench-press an I-beam, guided Doc and Harris to the open-faced ­elevator. He handed a pair of long-cuffed leather gloves to each of them. “Joseph’s up eighty,” he said. “My best man. He’s not in trouble?”

“No trouble,” Doc said, and put the elevator into ­motion. He donned the gloves, and Harris followed suit.

As the elevator rose, Harris watched the metal girders flash by. “These look like the ones at home. Steel I-beams and H-beams.”

“Yes.”

“They’re steel? I thought you people had a problem with that.”

Doc nodded. “That’s why he gave us gloves. You don’t need them; I do. Workers wear very heavy protective gear so they never touch the metal. Hundreds die every year from heat; and in spite of the fact that they try to hire only those with some immunity, many others die of poisoning. But if we’re to have modern towers, we have to have steel frames.” There was a melancholy light in his eye that Harris found unsettling.

Harris drew off his gloves again. “I guess when you put up all the wood and Sheetrock around the girders, it’s safe to live in.”

“Not entirely. I invented a process to bond neutral agents against the steel when it’s all erected, and that is how the Monarch Building was crafted; but not every builder uses it, as it’s costly. And when buildings that don’t use it get old, cracks open, rain leaks in, rust seeps through, and rust poisonings take place. A particular problem in the tenements, where rust poisoning makes hundreds or thousands of babies mind-damaged every year.”

“Oh.” There was not much Harris could say to that. It all sounded very familiar, and he was struck by how much things were the same between this fair world and his grim world, despite their many differences. “You helped build the Monarch Building?”

“It’s what I do. I design things. Buildings, aircraft, ­devices. But there tend to be interruptions. Such as when people try to kill me. The Monarch Building is one of mine.”

Harris heard metallic clanking and banging long ­before Doc brought the car to a halt at one of the unfinished upper levels. In front of the car was a wooden platform; beyond that, open air a long way down. Harris stepped out on the platform but stood well back from the edge; he managed to quell his stomach’s mild rebellion as he looked around.

He stood on the only flooring to be found on the whole level. But all over “up eighty” and the floor below, men worked, creating the cacophony Harris had heard.

One story down, odd metal contraptions were set up on small wooden platforms. Each device looked like a small metal cauldron on a stand; affixed to the cauldron was a crank-operated attachment. Men worked the cranks to blow air into the cauldrons, super-heating the contents to incandescence.

Harris watched one of the men take a pair of tongs, fish around in the glowing mass within the cauldron, and then expertly flick something up into the air. A man on Harris’ level caught the cherry-red flying thing in a brass bucket and immediately used tongs of his own to fish it out; Harris now saw that the thing was a big rivet. The bucket-man shoved the rivet into holes bored through a girder and the bracketlike framework it rested in. Two waiting men, one on either side of the girder, stepped into place; they carried coppery cylinders attached to firehoselike tubes stretching out of sight below. Each ­positioned his device over one protruding end of the rivet; there was an angry brrraaapp, like a short burst from a high-pitched jackhammer, and the men stepped back, satisfied.

All over the naked steelwork of the skyscraper, the same scene was being played over and over again. Other crews of men guided crane operators moving more girders into position, lowered them into place, fixed them there with temporary bolts.

These were men of all sizes, ranging from some three-quarters Harris’ height to others nearly as tall as he. Most had nut-brown or red-clay-colored skin; they were earth-toned from head to foot because of the brown leather pants, jackets, and gloves they wore. Only their cloth caps, in red, green, yellow, and other colors, and the orange-red hair some of them had, gave them any color. They walked fearlessly on precariously narrow girders as though they couldn’t see the thousand feet of open space ­between them and the ground.

And one of the men, positioned at a far corner of the building under construction, towered over the rest.

He was a freak compared to the others. If Harris gauged his size correctly, he was enormous, the height of an NBA basketball player, the build of a boxer. He was nut-brown like most of the rest, but his hair was a long blond cascade. Unlike the others, he wore only boots and a pair of lightweight tan pants. He had two partners, one catching the rivets and the other helping him drive them into place; normal sized for men of Neckerdam, they looked like midgets next to him.

Doc spotted the gigantic man and headed toward him—casually walking out onto the metal that stretched weblike over that long, long drop to the ground.

Harris froze where he was. Doc reached the first ­upright girder and began to edge around it, then realized that Harris was no longer behind him. He looked back and after a moment said, “Stay here. I’ll return in a minute.” He stepped around the upright barrier and continued onward.