The Six Cities

Each city wants something a different city has. That is the whole reason to get on a plane.

None of what follows is a game rule — it is what the place is like. For what a city actually pays, what is cheap there and who is taxing you at the door, read the board on the Airport and the city page itself.

Ashport — the way in

A working harbour on the western shore of Ash Bay: three piers, one coast road, a market street behind it. The smallest city on the coast and the only one nobody runs. The money does not stop here; it lands here and leaves.

Everybody in this world came through Ashport. Almost nobody stayed.

Ironholt — the works

Rail lines fan out of the yard and a slag canal cuts across the bottom of the city. Ironholt has always made things — it just changed product, and the men who used to run the furnaces run whatever replaced them. The Pit is the roughest address in the north and the best-paying corner of the city, which tells you most of what happens down there.

Redgate — the old door

South on Red Bay, two piers, awnings that have been the same awnings for forty years. The other way into the country, and the older one: every supply line through this port outlives the people working it. Ironside is the industrial spine; Little Saigon is the part of town with a community behind it rather than an industry.

Blackwell — the supply

Inland and north-east, where Fisher's Creek comes down out of the lake, with an elevated highway running clean over the middle of it. The Underpass is named for what lives beneath the road, and it is exactly what it sounds like.

Blackwell is where things are kept. Almost everything sold anywhere on this coast sat in a Blackwell warehouse first.

Sundale — the appetite

The southern shore, on the Sound: ocean, two piers, and the Strip cutting down through the middle. The richest city that is not the capital. Sundale is where the rest of the country's product gets consumed by people on holiday, sold to them by doctors who are very relaxed about prescriptions.

Meridian — the ring

The capital. A river with Old Town on one bank and the towers on the other, a highway across the top, and a park in the middle of the money.

Meridian produces nothing and consumes everything, which is the most honest description of a capital anyone has managed. The banks are here. So are the courts. So is whatever "federal" means in practice.