City life

A household is four to seven people at one address. Two of them are related and the rest are the reason the rent works. The people you live with are the address, used like a noun: the whole address is down with it. A person with no address is not homeless. The city's word is unplaced, which is a housing status and, in a Meridian mouth, something else.

You can date an adult by their name to within a year. Children born in the first years of the Kindling were named after whoever had done the thing in the reel that season, so one classroom in the Wick has four children with the same street name and the teacher numbers them by desk. After the Turn nobody does it. A child born since has a flat, short name, chosen on purpose, and the parents will tell you it just sounded nice.

The old are mostly warm and never spliced: Loom-era hands with weave-alloy worn into joints that were already worn. They got a decade of lifting the stove and no parades. They do not fall, they get up, and both facts unnerve their grandchildren. Care is a union rota or it is a chit chair, a canteen table where an old person can sit all afternoon on one meal credit, because a full room looks like a busy shop from the street.

A death is a Form 9 and six days, unless alloy was present. A death with alloy in it is removed to the Licensing Tribunal like any other alloy matter, and a removed Form 9 has no clock. Its status is pending, and pending has no end date, because nobody ever wrote one. The body waits in a Tourniquet recovery bay, running up an observation fee by the day.

You cannot dig in Catena. The city grew on the works, and under two metres of almost anywhere there is somebody's conduit or the works itself. The union has its own arrangements, kept in the book. Everyone else has three choices. The Longshore Ferry's second run on the last day of the month takes no fares, goes out past the Stilts and stops short of the reef, and nobody calls it a funeral run or waves at it. The Offcut crews in Rustfield will do it at night for a fee. Or the Municipals hold the body until the file closes, and then there is a shelf.

There is no officiant, so nobody says words over anybody. What people do, in every district and without ever having agreed on it, is read the entry out. The union reads the book. The backs print the name in the Tuesday list. A family with neither reads the Form 9 aloud off the carbon, at the address, with the fee line still on it.

Somebody sits with the body. Weave-alloy and hardware from the recently dead move quickly into the chop-shop trade between a death and a filing, so someone stays in the room. Old people sit, mostly, because they can. Nobody explains this to a visitor. They make a chair available and look at you until you take it.

Most of what Catena eats is vat protein from Tallyman in one of a dozen flavour packets. The premium tin costs four times as much and is the same vat base with a different packet.

Cable broth is a savoury broth heated over repurposed conduit, a Yards speciality served from carts that double as union meeting places. It is broth and never noodles. Sparkfry is skewered protein fried at illegal conduit-tap stalls, cheap, slightly dangerous to make, and loved. Chit cake is a dense ration bread, eaten on Kindling Night and almost never otherwise.

Service at the broth cart on the Junction's well rim is two words long, and its owner will not repeat a rumour for a second customer. Ma Torro's in the Yards has been the locals' meeting room for nineteen years. The things the city runs short of are real food, housing near the Coil, clean medical care without a licence, and information anyone actually trusts.

Meridian has never banned a thing it could tax, and it has not had to ban religion. Catena has none, and has had none long enough that the vocabulary went too. A five-year-old in Catena does not know a word for prayer.

Things here answer to metal, to proximity and to what you have been seen to do, and prayer makes no difference. Everybody in Catena has watched something enormous and indifferent decide about a person on the strength of a workplace exposure.

What the city kept is the observances without the reasons. Divers keep to them as practices: they count the notes of the Chorus, knock the plate of the Hoarding on the way past its back, and let the first Scrap Rat go. Tenants in the Wick knock the ceiling once before they sleep and say it is for the pipes. The one religious word in daily use belongs to divers, who call an ICE unit that keeps its dead in service the Chaplain.

Catena has no crime families and no protection racket a visitor would recognise. Organised crime needs a service the state won't provide, and here a corporation provides everything, badly, at a price. So crime grew into the paperwork, and the street calls it the desk trade. It is clerical.

The trade begins in the Renewal Line at the Coil. Line-holders stand in the queue for a fee. Expediters sell an appointment: they know which windows run fast, which clerk is off, and which four-digit code sends a file to a desk that answers in a week instead of a quarter. At the top are people who know a clerk.

A forged licence is worthless, because the registry never forgets and every scanner in the city talks to it. What sells is a real filing with the wrong facts in it. You buy ten seconds of a clerk not looking while a genuine one is created, and after that it is true.

Protection is sold against a filing, and not against violence. Pay monthly and nobody reports the unlicensed splice work in your back room. The collectors carry clipboards and say premium.

The debt that shapes the most lives is the splice debt. Doc Splice's ceremony costs money, and Fast-Splice costs less. Meridian does not lend to the unlicensed, so somebody else does: a share note fronts the install against a share of a year's salvage, on verbal terms enforced socially. The lenders are ex-installers, small brokers, a fence, the odd respectable stallholder with savings.

The murals are the visible memory of the Kindling, each of them a thank-you note for a specific job. They stop three blocks out from the Coil. They survive best in the Fringe, where Meridian would rather not send a scrub crew somewhere its security does not patrol in force. Where scrub crews do come, they leave a grey rectangle, and the grey is almost right.

Mural wardens are citizens of no faction who repaint within forty-eight hours of a scrubbing. What they lose over the years is colour and not the picture: the mixes went out of production, and the swatch cards get copied from copies. Bleedthrough has never touched a mural. See the host law.

Somebody is always eating: cable broth, sparkfry, chit cake.

Kids are playing Splice or Snitch, even on the Coil's apron, where they are moved on politely.

Somebody is repainting something.

There is a queue, and every queue has its own customs.

After any fight, people play at accent spotting.

Somebody is listening to Nyx Static and pretending not to, and the Coil's canteen is where they pretend hardest.

Somebody is waiting for a diver to come back up.