About

The children of the tower were, on the whole, very well-behaved — which was considered one of the tower's finest qualities, and also, depending on how you looked at it, one of its most unsettling ones.

The tower rose in levels, and the children rose with it. Through lessons and exams, classes and trials, they climbed it together — toward levels they had heard about only in the hushed and reverent way that adults speak about places they have not been and children speak about places they desperately want to go. The students who passed their exams advanced. The ones who didn't went somewhere else — though nobody had ever thought to ask where.

The thing that connected all of it was Dust — a substance that worked on every child in the tower, except one.

Jasper has been told he will never amount to much, and has no particular reason to disagree. He is, of course, only one of three children this story is about. Stella has always known something the tower never intended, and has been very careful, ever since, not to let that out. Victor is the strongest of them all, the pride of the program, exactly what the tower has been waiting for — and has been told this so many times he stopped wondering whether it might be true. For now.

They will climb the tower together, which is, in one way of looking at it, the beginning of a great friendship — and in another, the beginning of something else entirely.

The tower has been arranging this for a very long time. It is, in its warm and patient and unwavering way, very glad they are finally here.

It just hasn't told them why — not exactly.