Many lives.
One union.

A future New Orleans: a city of pumped bowls, left behind when the Mississippi changed course. The local calendar is in its Year 19.

The bowls: seventy-five wards, tiered A to F, below the ridge. People ask what ward you are really from.

The old ridge estates and the decks above the Mud. Dry, filtered, and silent by design.

The slope between ridge and bowls: clerks, token exchanges, wellness arcades.

Wards 41 to 75, the half-drowned outer bowls.

The tidal salt arm the river left at the city, beyond the ring walls.

The Anvil’s ward; Janelle’s repair row with its old pump station; the neighboring row that floods.

The stretch of ring wall above Cistern Row where the wall turns toward the Lake.

The facility where Étienne is kept.

Laveau’s house of reject glass on the roof of the Basin’s oldest refinery.

Authorizes large programs and issues the orders that arrive as notices.

Tokens, distribution, tithe lines and tiers.

Levees, pumps, gates and treatment.

Purifiers, checkpoints, relay monitoring and continuance.

Supply, credit, routes and glassworks labor.

Consortium security in gray, with sealed boots.

Ward-rooted protection and logistics, run from the Anvil.

Feray’s organization. A shallow V cut in a bench or a doorframe means they have been and will come again.

An addictive residue of reject red glass.

Each ward’s music keeps the rate of its pump.

The Mid Strata’s emitters broadcast a calming tone, and people buy tone boxes to hear it at home. Some boxes keep ringing after the power is cut; nobody has explained why.

The strip between the old northeastern cities. Three Strongholds grew up around it, and they are at war.

Once New York. A raised spine, a lower city and an underground, with wards built around lifts and risers.

Once New Jersey. Freight yards, work-linked housing, and the Pit, which fills in cloudbursts.

Once Boston. Clock rooms, correction desks, consent forms and witness circles.

Inland of Liberty, between Crown and Reed. Founded on the memory of the Three Dry Weeks.

A junction under the river crossing where the Gotham line, the Garden line and the old shore line meet.

A fifty-two-floor ward tower in Gotham’s fourth borough. The kitchen is on forty-one.

Nine granite courses below the fourth borough. The bottom three are under water at high tide.

Gotham’s ward kitchens, which feed people by count.

Gotham’s ward keepers. They carry people when the lifts fail, and they hold seals that open doors.

Garden’s freight yards in the Pit, south of Three-Line.

A Garden town at the edge of the pine forest, with a machine-shop hall.

A tidal creek below a Garden orchard belt.

A Liberty harbor quay.

Breakfast, readings and the seed exchange.

A steep district fed by the lower intake.

The unpowered gap at the Liberty junction where Gotham’s supply ends and Liberty’s begins.

The corridor’s way of checking before trusting: where a thing came from and who is included; whether the person receiving it understood; and what state the thing is in, whose hand it is in, what may be done with it and what comes next.

In some rooms a tone continues after the machinery stops. It has never been explained. It is what lets Ayida stay long enough to tell.