It had been one of the grandest skyscrapers before the Jubilee, which meant it had been quickly looted afterward. What remained, however, still impressed. Its curved steel frame twirled from the base of its own plaza, and the building seemed to corkscrew into the polluted haze. Maes had ringed the plaza with a barricade of concrete and razor wire, and he used a horde of hangers-on as guards. His own enforcers strolled the perimeter and took what they wanted from the squalid encampment. He had transformed the skyscraper itself into a vertical farm, growing food for himself and his followers up and down its exterior. In the early days of the revolution, slave labor had been easy to come by. When the Guardians were no longer able to work, he started using regular people for the dangerous sky-high planting and harvesting. Entire ecosystems developed in the smog and he’d quickly found that some of the strange mutations that occurred in his crops caused euphoria and hallucination when ingested.
