"What answer?" I asked.

"Take me up the hill and I'll show you."

The top of Patriarch Hill was a patchwork of bare limestone ledges alternating with scrubby clumps of brush and buttercups. Paper birch and poplar ringed the area, like hair around a man's bald patch; the trees even had a distinct lean to them, as if the prevailing westerlies had tried to comb them over to hide the bareness.

The antenna squatted on limestone in the center of the open area, with three wrist-thick guy wires strung out and anchored into other sections of rock. Kids occasionally climbed a short way up those wires, going hand over hand until they got high enough to scare themselves; but I couldn't remember anyone climbing the antenna itself. Its base was enclosed by a rusty chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and big signs showing pictures of lightning bolts. That meant you'd get hit by lightning if you touched the tower itself… and heaven knows, the antenna must have had enough lightning to discharge because it got hit a dozen times in every summer thunderstorm.

Neither the fence nor the signs fazed Rashid. In fact, he gave the chain-link a quick look-over, then turned back to me with a gloating expression on his face. "When you were a young boy, didn't you ever go places you weren't supposed to?"

"Sure," I answered, "there was one time we found this garbage dump—"

"But," the Spark Lord interrupted, "I've never seen an OldTech fence in this perfect condition." He threaded his fingers through the links and gave a yank; the fence barely yielded. "With any other fence," Rashid said, "local kids would have pulled up the bottom to crawl under, or made dents crawling over."

I pointed to the nearest lightning sign. "We didn't want to get zapped."

"Come on," Rashid scoffed. "In four hundred years, kids never dared each other to give it a try? And what about wild animals? You'd think a bear would have pushed in a section while using it as a scratching post, or maybe a big deer hit the fence in the dark."

"Tober Cove prides itself on its hunting," Steck told him. "Bear and deer know better than to come this close to town."

"Still," Rashid answered, "OldTech fences don't survive this well." He gave it another tug; no response but a small rattle. "Proof it's not OldTech at all."

"If it isn't OldTech," I said, "what is it? We Tobers didn't build it."

"No," Rashid agreed, craning his neck back to stare at the arrangement of gadgets high up the aerial. "You probably don't need a maser array that can squirt several hundred terabits of data every millisecond." He waved his hand to stop me before I could ask what he meant. "The details aren't important. Just trust me: the OldTechs never reached the technical sophistication of those dishes up there. They've got more bandwidth for sending and receiving than the communication systems for an entire OldTech city."

I turned to Steck and whispered, "Bandwidth?"

She patted my arm soothingly. "Most of this is going over my head too."

I didn't believe her. Rashid shouldn't have either, but he was too excited to pay attention. "We won't learn anything standing out here. In we go."

He reached toward the hip of his armor. As he did, a section of the green plastic slid back and a small holster pushed out of the armor's thigh. The holster held a green plastic pistol: very flat and compact, with none of the chunky menace of the Beretta he'd given to Bonnakkut.

"Laser," Rashid said, drawing the gun.

"Heat ray," Steck explained, pulling me away from the line of fire.

Rashid aimed the gun's muzzle at the fence and made an easy sweeping motion, starting high, ending low. The air filled with the tangy smell of metal, and billows of smoke drifted up into the hot summer day. Rashid put his glove against the chain-link to give it a tentative push; when he did, a whole section moved inward, severed from the adjoining links along a sharp-cut line. "At least the wire's not laser-proof," he muttered. The gun swept across the fencing two more times, shooting no visible bullets or beams… but when Rashid planted his foot against the wire and shoved, a door-shaped section of chain-link fell away, sliced off precisely where the gun had pointed.

He turned back to Steck. "After you, my dear." Steck gave a mock curtsy and slipped through the gap. A moment later, Rashid and I followed.

Rashid bent in close to examine the antenna's metal frame. It looked like normal rusted steel, with red-orange corrosion dusted like thick powder over every metal strut. After a moment, the Spark Lord huffed out a single heavy breath, the way you do when you want to fog a mirror. He watched the metal a few more seconds, then murmured, "Very convincing."

"Why do you keep talking like the tower's not real?" I asked.

"Oh, it's real," Rashid replied. He tapped one of the tower's struts with his gloved finger; the metal tink-tinked exactly the way you'd expect. "It's just not what it appears to be."

He pointed his green pistol at the strut he'd just tapped. With two quick pulls of his trigger finger, he sliced out a small section of metal, leaving a gap about as wide as my thumb. "Now watch," he said. "See if this is an ordinary OldTech tower."

I waited a few seconds. "I don't see anything."

"Patience," he said. He bent and picked up a small twig that had blown off one of the nearby trees. Carefully, Rashid slipped the twig into the gap he'd just cut in the steel.

The process was almost too slow to see; but gradually, the gap in the metal began to narrow… as if the two freshly-cut ends were steel teeth closing in on the twig. Soon Rashid could let go of the little stick — the gap had closed enough to clamp the twig in place. As I watched, the teeth continued to bite into the wood. The twig bent… then broke… then dropped in two pieces as the antenna completely closed over the cut Rashid made.

"The metal is self-repairing," he said. "And it would have to be, wouldn't it, to survive four centuries."

"I don't understand," I told him, trying not to sound unsettled by what I'd just seen.

"This antenna isn't OldTech steel," Rashid replied. "The whole damned tower must be solid nano. Smart metal camouflaged to look rusty."

I stared at him blankly.

"Think of it as a machine," he answered with the air of a man who doesn't want to explain himself to a country bumpkin. "Solar powered. Probably can store energy from lightning strikes too… or get power beamed down from orbital collectors. It must need a lot of juice."

He glanced back over his shoulder. "The fence must be nano too. That's why it's still in such good shape. Let's leave before our way out seals itself shut."

Steck looked up at the collection of dishes on top of the tower. "Don't you want to check out the transmitter array?"

"How?" Rashid asked. "If we try to climb this tower, I bet it has defenses… like struts that break off while we're standing on them. It may even get mad at us for just hanging around here. We'd better leave."

He gave my shoulder a nudge to start me moving toward the gap in the fence. I rolled away from him. "No."

"No? No, what?"

"No, I'm not leaving until you explain what's going on." I reached out and grabbed one of the metal struts, just to let him know I wouldn't be moved.

With a cry, Steck leapt forward and knocked my hand clear of the tower. "Don't touch that, you idiot!"

I looked at her in astonishment. Rashid gave a thin smile. "Fullin," he said, "I think your mother has a better understanding of this antenna than she'd like to let on."

"If it's nano, it's dangerous," Steck said sullenly. "I don't know any more about the tower than you do."

"Will someone please explain…" I started.

"Yes," Rashid interrupted. "Once we're safe. Come on."