The Old Customs Exchange of Sector Three was a stone-built monstrosity born of the time crash.
From the outside, the eastern half was built of soot-blackened Victorian red brick, crisscrossed by rusted cast-iron gas mains and lead rainwater gutters. The western half, which had slammed into the brickwork during the dawn breach, was an ancient Sun-Crown office peristyle of pale green hard speckled rock, supported by fluted ionic columns carved with marching solar priests. Inside the great central hall, a crystal gas chandelier hung suspended ten feet from an open bronze solar skylight, its flickering white flames competing with the burning heat of the second sun.
Ren Vale sat at the long dark wood customs counter, his elbows propped on the scarred wood, his temples throbbing with a dull, sickening pulse.
His brass saturation collar hissed every fourteen seconds, puffing cool stone salt water across his chin. Beside him sat a bowl of coarse river salt and a copper pot of boiled chicory water. Every time he closed his eyes, his mind flickered between three different sets of memories. He could see the customs hall as a flooded storage barn where he had hidden stolen grain at age fourteen. He could see it as a royal treasury where tax collectors weighed bags of gold dust. And he could see it as a ruined shell choked with weeds after the plague.
