Her eyes were keen for the color of amber and suddenly it was everywhere: on placards, across rows of gambling machines, video displays, items for sale in the shops that lined the place. Amber wasn’t a color she’d thought of as that common, but now that she was on the lookout, it was ubiquitous, just not as a colorful frame for doors. Seeing the city from space, Naecia thought she’d appreciated the magnitude of their task. Being inside it, she feared becoming paralyzed by hopelessness. She kept walking, afraid that if she stopped, she might sit down and never move again. So she kept going. For now.

They located the transway for the northern latitudes and boarded. Aptat stood, one hand gripping a handhold. Elsewhere, other obviously engineered persons and robots did the same, while the more traditionally organic lifeforms strapped in.

Naecia focused ahead, careful not to get lost in the passing blur of the city outside her window. It was only a few seconds before they burst through the underside of the city, crossing a vector of open space below civilization that would take them in a straight line from the equator to the top of the sphere. The transway tube ran out in open space for a short while until they ascended through the city’s nadir up in the higher latitudes.

The shuttle slowed into the northern station where the two of them debarked. The entire trip had taken only a few cygments, just long enough to listen to the audio tour of Aszerat she’d downloaded to her com.

Aszerat was the twelfth of the Effelox Free Cities to be constructed, starting nearly a thousand galactic years prior. Built to offer a no-consequences getaway for the system’s growing population of workers, tycoons, and “security” syndicates, its offerings were primarily of drink, pharmacy, flesh, and entertainment. Its heart and soul remained with those first wild occupants and the city managed to keep a reputation in line with those early times. The seedy underbelly of the Effelox system had risen from the streets and transways of Aszerat and still thrived there today.

Aptat walked briskly out and into the crowd before Naecia had even unstrapped, saying through the com, “I’ll work out West from here, you take the East.”

“Okay.”

“Get up high as soon as you can. Work your way down. Limit the amount of traverse.”

“Right,” she said, watching Aptat disappear.

She found the nearest lift, housed in a building occupying four hundred and twenty-one floors. Stepping in, she said, “Four twenty-one.” The doors closed and the floor felt like it was shot up below her. Everything on Aszerat was twice as fast as she was accustomed to. She stood in the corner, giving her two surfaces to lean on.