It was important, a line had to be drawn and the endless talks about what our government would look like needed to end, but I still saw the reports and I knew the foods, clothes, and routine I wanted were going to have to wait that much longer.

That was one of the prevailing arguments for normal, for going back. This section of the city, this settlement, was the counterpoint.

Brockton Bay had been a port, growing as the industry did. A lot of what made it work as a fledgling port city made New Brockton work as one of our first footholds in Earth Gimel. Lumber, quarrying, some surface level minerals, and geography protected from the harshest sweeps of cold weather from the north.

The industry had become a prominent part of the city, and then the greater industry had outgrown it. Things had reached the point where it was easier to take one big ship and go to Boston and transport goods from there than to take two smaller ships and go to Brockton Bay, even if Brockton Bay was closer to the goods’ destination. The factories and goods went where the ships went, because it wasn’t sensible to ship raw materials from Boston to Brockton Bay to do manufacturing when Boston could handle it.

New Brockton felt like it sat on that brink between relevance and ruin. As a settlement, it was defined by tall buildings and the edifices of heavy industry. There were ships finding their way past each other on the water and big brick buildings with black plumes of smoke rising from their chimneys. Already back to the ways of an era that predated me, cutting corners to produce more at a cost to tomorrow. It was crowded and bursting at the seams, and it had been for a while now, trying to grow despite the constraints of water and mountain around it.

It didn’t escape me that the settlement continued to chug along while the gears and belts of the greater megalopolis were grinding to a stop under strikes and shutdowns.

I walked, rather than fly, because the directions I’d been given mandated it. I suspected it was intentional. I knew there were eyes on me, I knew who some of those eyes belonged to, and I had strong suspicions about others.