The tower wasn’t precisely imprisoning Meloria, not in her mind, at least. It was, as she described it to herself (and to the single very disinterested pigeon she occasionally fed crumbs), “a marvelously convenient workspace.” The stone walls were thick enough to muffle explosions—an important feature given her line of work—but drafty enough to let the acrid tang of singed copper drift freely. The spiral staircase doubled as a vertical storage system for gears, springs, and several lopsided attempts at perpetual motion machines. The single window was stuffed with enough lenses and prisms to blind any bird foolish enough to fly by on a sunny afternoon.

Meloria had been placed there—secured, as Queen Loredana insisted—because of an incident involving her latest invention, the Girasole Perpetuo. It had been designed to capture sunlight and power irrigation systems, a marvel of engineering that would have revolutionized farming. But the device occasionally (well, frequently) redirected sunlight in concentrated beams that could, for instance, set the Queen's prized olive orchard ablaze. She had declared Meloria a menace, though the inventor preferred “visionary unappreciated in her time.”

Despite her less-than-voluntary residence, she hardly felt trapped. The tower’s height made it perfect for testing her collapsible glider prototype, and she had successfully rigged a pulley system to lift supplies—though her attempts to train the delivery boy to discuss metaphysics during drop-offs had been less successful. And while most inventors would consider isolation a burden, Meloria found it freed her from distractions, like polite conversation or the tedious moralizing of the guildmaster who had strongly objected to her clockwork automaton with a penchant for poetry and petty theft.