The flesh in the furnace

and the world was a dizzying display of flakes. Twice, he struck the berm markers, tore them loose, swerved back onto safe territory as the clattering sound died away. He did not have to be warned by the puppets to know that if anything got tangled in the blades below them, they would stay here forever, freezing to death when the battery died and could no longer warm them.
        Belina and the angel both rode in the front with him, while the others curled in bundled blankets in the rear, trying to keep from being bruised as they were jounced back and forth between the walls.
        Then they passed through some invisible barrier which toned the wind down, held back three quarters of the snow and provided a haven. As the thumping windshield wipers brushed away the last flakes, they saw the city ahead of them and stopped the truck with a mixture of relief and dread.
        Many times in the past two months, running with Belina, Sebastian had driven by exit ramps that were marked with the names of small towns, hamlets, minor cities. But this was something altogether different. It rose out of the ice plain as if it were made of ice itself. Its fantastic spires tipped the bottoms of the clouds. Its walls were a brilliant, translucent blue that shone with an inner light, a beacon of welcome. The land immediately around the city was untouched by the gale and the worst of the snow. Though the ground was not bare, but hard ice, there was a less wintry feeling to the place. On the walls and towers there was no snow or ice. The severe weather seemed not to have pitted the city's grandeur.
        "Turn back," the idiot said, voicing his first inclination. He was afraid, and he wanted only to recapture the idyll of the last few hundred empty miles.
        "Wait," Belina said, studying the place.
        He waited. He had confidence in her.
        "Maybe he's right," the angel told Belina. "If he gets caught, they'll put him away and uncreate us. It might be years before anyone buys the damn Furnace. Perhaps never."
        Bitty Belina had been watching the city intently, as if it were a mirage that would vanish under a steady gaze.
        It was still there.
        "Do you see any movement?" Belina asked.
        The idiot and the angel turned to examine the city.
        Snow sifted down. A gentle breeze whisked the white stuff in eddying currents over the ice pack.
        Otherwise, all waa still and quiet.
        "Nothing," the angel said. "So what?"
        "We've been on this road for weeks. In all that time, the only thing we passed was the cargo van with the gypsy driver." She looked at Sebastian to see if he remembered the way he had handled her. She could still feel, or imagined that she could, the place where her spine had snapped in two, the pain that had fountained through her before the quick blackness of death.
        Sebastian was oblivious to her accusing scowl. He still watched the dead city.
        "I still don't see why we shouldn't get out of here before someone sees us. They can't have many visitors. You've said so yourself." The angel's wings were open. They shivered, as if he would leap into flight, as they always did when he was frightened.
        "Doesn't it seem odd?" Belina asked. "No traffic on such a marvelous road, and now it ends here-as if they built this just to reach one city. There isn't any bypass here like around other towns."
        "So what?" The angel grew more impatient.
        "Think!" She was standing on the folded blankets now, leaning forward to look at the metropolis. "They built this highway to get here, spent a fortune on it. And now no one uses the thing."
        "And we look all the more conspicuous for that," the angel insisted. "They're probably sending the police out for us now."
        She sighed, shook her head, smiling ruefully. "What I'm trying to tell you is that I think the city's empty. Understand? No one lives there any more, if anyone ever did. If it was occupied, this road would be in use:"
        "A ghost city?"
        "Exactlyť
        Sebastian looked on the place with more interest. Wind. Snow. Clouds shredding across the points of the towers. Here and there, on the few large windows in the towers, the racing clouds were reflected. Nothing else moved. It somehow calmed his nerves.
        "Why build a city and never use it?" the angel wanted to know.
        "They probably intended to use it. They thought that when