The Iron Spire was a graveyard of ambition, a colossal skeleton of rusted girders and shattered glass rising like a defiant middle finger from the northern reclamation zone. Once, in the golden age before the Collapse, it had been the pinnacle of pre-war engineering—a corporate research tower meant to house fusion breakthroughs and neural-interface labs. Now, wind howled through its shattered windows like the ghosts of engineers long dead
