“Whatever. Let’s disappear into this crowd and find a place to change.”

“I’ll try to scramble recording devices pointed our way,” Kenzie said.

The road down to the settlement proper was a bit sloped, so I gave Sveta my good arm to help her keep her footing.

Earth N was not a very populated Earth. This settlement and the surrounding area were more or less it, with a few stations at key points around the globe, harvesting the most accessible resources that lined up with what we knew about from other Earths.

But with roughly one hundred and fifty thousand people settled on this world, ninety percent of them within twenty-five miles of the portal, it didn’t take much clout to control it. Lord of Loss and his clique managed that.

Things weren’t as nice as they were in the Megalopolis. Roofs were often corrugated steel. I saw houses with additions that were plywood with plastic tacked to them. Others were best described as cabins. It marked a stark contrast from a city where vast quantities of materials had apparently been arranged and even brought to key locations before Gold Morning.

The stores were basic, and any design beyond the bare bones had clearly been tacked on after the fact. A long lineup outside of a larger building made me think of a soup kitchen or other kind of rationing.

There were two people with visible injuries in the loose crowd that we’d joined. People from the train station. They were young, they might have been friends, and one sported a black eye, while the other had a cut on his cheek that extended to his ear. The injuries hadn’t seen enough attention—left to heal with the weight of the skin pulling the injury open, it would scar into an open line.

Both those two and roughly half of the remainder looked like they were denizens of Earth N. Their clothes and hair reflected the same standards and ideas that the buildings did. A lot was being done with very little, and that little was already a bit worn around the edges, strained by hard living and a lack of infrastructure. I saw clothes which were clearly less than two years old, yet worn. I imagined they had been washed with hard scrubbing in water outdoors.

“Fresh air,” Kenzie said. She drew in a deep breath. “It’s so nice.”

“It’s not like we don’t have fresh air in our neighborhoods,” Chris said. “There’s barely been an opportunity to screw anything up.”

“It’s still nice.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed. I’d been here before, but it had been in the winter, and I barely recognized the place now. I’d seen other places like it, and it had always felt strained and desperate.