"*The door of the tower opens against the sun, a quarter turn, and only by two.*"
"Against the sun?"
"Counterclockwise. A quarter turn of the star, while someone's on the plate." He looked up at her. 11:32. "There's something inside it."
She was already putting on her shoes.
III.
The clock over the elevator bank said 11:35 when they came back into the light.
The pyramid stood exactly as they had left it, glowing in the dark like something waiting politely. The snow had stopped. It lay over everything in a thin, dry layer, and their footprints from before were still in it, hers small and bare, his in leather, going away together into the dark.
"I'll have to be on the ledge too," Elliot said, looking up. The tower had lifted the star well out of reach. "It's rated for the figures, not for people. Two of us is—"
"Two of us is what it was built for," Roz said, and stepped out of her shoes for the second time that night.
They stood on the oak side by side, the carved fir forest at their knees, the nutcracker soldiers at their hips with painted mustaches and round, astonished eyes. The wood creaked and held. Up close the tower was even more beautiful: each arcade no bigger than a fingernail, the gold leaf worn soft at the edges where a long-ago hand had burnished it, a tiny clock face under the cap with its hands stopped at a quarter to twelve.
"It's the fire tower in Sopron," Elliot said quietly. "Where he was born. He used to draw it for me on napkins."
"Is it really red and gold?"
"No. Mostly white and green." He smiled a little. "I think this is how it looked to him from far away."
He reached up and took the star in both hands. Roz put her palm flat on his back between his shoulder blades — not to steady him, exactly, but because she was standing on a ledge in the dark with a man she had known for four hours in person and two months in sharp emails, and her hand wanted to be somewhere.
"A quarter turn," she said.
"Against the sun."