Caleb reached Sefa before the small one arrived, because he had to, because Rina's tracker said the builder's flicker was going and there might not be a second chance.
He put his hand on the cold chest of the statue looking up through its own unfinished tower, and he reached. The flicker was there, faint, a signal at the edge of range exactly as Rina had said.
A man almost all the way into the metal but not quite. One room still lit at the back of a house going dark.
The cold gray place this time was not empty and was not whole. It was a half-place, a man-shaped dimness with one small light still burning in it.
Caleb went toward the light and found Sefa the builder sitting in it as he must have sat across the road from his tower for three years, looking at a thing he'd made and been stopped from finishing.
