The south and the water

Kind

Safe hub, the Commons

Combat

None

The Sunken Mile is a stretch of derelict elevated expressway, closed for twelve years and planted: fig, buddleia, reed, sedge, and an orchard nobody owns. Its underdeck market is entirely acoustic, with no public address and no holo-ads, because nobody is selling to a scan.

Meridian's survey drone flies its length once a week and files nothing. The people who use the word Commons are careful to say it is not a faction. See the margins. Nobody holds the Mile. There is nothing on it worth taking. At the Deck Kitchen there is one long table, and you eat before you trade.

At the Fig Interchange a stub ramp goes nowhere, and a ghost signal has been playing there since before anybody now living moved in: a short run of notes, and a child saying a number.

Heat tier

3

The Stilts are a stilt-built sprawl up to five storeys high, standing on tidal mud that changes shape twice an hour, with two complete street grids at two heights. The town's whole civic identity is the Lamphouse, a crane cab somebody converted into a light eleven years ago and has kept lit ever since. A tide bell, rung by hand, keeps the clock.

Three groups live here and none is in charge: Chrome Dogs at the Rookery, the Longshore crew at the Winch, and the Drift on the Weed Line, people who came and never left. See the margins and Chrome Dogs.

Heat tier

4

Hullrow is exposed seabed with eleven ships on it. Crews cut the ships apart for scrap.

The biggest hull is the Loomline, the cable ship that laid the Deepworks' first trunk. It lies beached bow-first and cut two-thirds of the way through, and the crews of the Winch and the Plate Yards argue about whether to finish. The signal in the Drum Room comes from the ship itself.

Combat

None

The Low Sea is open water. The Dock Gates shut the night of the Seal and have never opened. The river falls into the sea at the Wrackfall, lit from below by Deepworks algae and permanently steaming. Beyond it lie four stretches of water, and in the last one the Glass Reef, where twelve years of Bleedthrough have fused into a long span of crystal that hums.

The sea is the one region with no faction presence at all, no enemies, no heat and no writ. The Longshore Ferry runs it twice an hour, on a schedule that predates every current claim to anything.

Heat tier

5

Anchorhead is where the Loom made landfall. The Pale stands here: Meridian's wall, with an anti-air dome and a garrison, and no public statement about any of it in three years.

The Chainhead is the first landmark of the Loom, a silhouette of a fist holding a rope. The Lantern turns on a period nobody has matched to anything.