I explained, “We’ve got these long narrow bands of mingled city and agriculture connecting the primary settlement points, to the point it’s hard to say where one thing starts and the other ends. And instead of building five big houses they’d rather build an apartment building that hosts twenty, which makes things fuzzy with the distinctions of urban and rural. So we get the ever-expanding megalopolis blob and we can’t figure out what to call it, even though it’s already this monster.”

Our progress out of the city center was slow. Construction. Endless construction. Jasper seemed happy to be driving, even at a crawl.

“Yeah,” the first guy spoke.

“In terms of the bands that rope everything in together, we go by the cities and locations that were there beforehand. If you look at where Norwalk would be on a map, that’s the name for the region we’re heading to. If it’s east-west it’s a span. If it’s north-south it’s a stretch. But it’s all a part of the city.”

“What if it’s both?” someone asked.

“Then it’s neither,” Jasper said. “You just give it a name.”

“More accurately, you try to give it a name and end up in a heated, months-long debate about what to call the area, with way too many emotions tied up into things,” I said.

The guy from right behind me said, “I don’t see why we can’t just give the individual areas names like they used to have. If it’s close to Norwalk, then we call it fucking Norwalk.”

“Hey,” I said. I gave a stern look to the guy who’d said it. “Swearing’s fine, but not if you’re getting heated. We’re chatting, not getting up in arms.”

“Right. Sorry,” the guy said. He didn’t look particularly sorry.

We picked up speed as we pulled onto a street with less construction. With the back of the bus open and the windows on either side of Jasper and me rolled all the way down, the wind whipped through the bus. The city smelled like dust, drywall, and hot pavement.

I dangled one arm out the window, moving my fingers and feeling the air moving against them.

“It gets complicated,” I said. “Geography’s slightly different, they’re hardly checking longitude and latitude exactly when we settle in one place or another. They’re doing what the surroundings allow. Means the Norwalk we’re going to might actually be between two places, or off to one side.”

Jasper chimed in, “I always remember the Norwalk–Fairfield span because it’s close to the portal for Earth N. N for Norwalk.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that works.”

“I’ve got a question for you, though,” he said.

“You want to talk about your tattoo idea.”

“Yes,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “Do what you want.”