AW
Angel Walks
Planks, ladders and rope between roofs at eight and ten storeys. Light loads only. Every crossing has an owner at the far end and a price, and nobody survives a fall from most of them.
SIX OUT, SIX BACK OR SAY WHY
New York, a hundred and fifty years after the fall. Central Park is a walled settlement of eighteen hundred people, and it is the safest place left in the city.
The fields don't grow medicine, or pump parts. So every week or so somebody opens a gate and a crew goes out.
You are the crew.
RATION CARD — WIRE YEARS
HOUSEHOLD 4471 ADULTS 2 · CHILDREN 3 ASSIGNED: SECTOR C LABOUR BALANCE OWED: 14
INSIDE THE WALL
Eighteen hundred people, a Council of Elders, and a wall built out of the buildings on the other side of it. The Keep is Belvedere Castle. The Well is the Reservoir, and the water is rationed at the drawing posts by people who decide who gets a little extra.
It works. There are children here who have never been outside it, and old people who have never wanted to be. Every crew that goes out is walking back towards that.
OUT THERE
Families who hold a tower and charge you to cross their roof. People under the streets who farm rats, eat them, and mostly will not hurt you. A business that owns people, keeps their numbers in a book, and passes the debt to their children. A community that carries its dead inside the living, at a table, with manners.
And in more than one part of this city, a butcher with a clean floor, a drain, and a queue outside.
Nothing supernatural. Nothing mutated. The horror in this city is what people decided to do about all of it.
GATE BOOK — BACK PAGE
PLACES NOBODY HAS COME BACK FROM The far end of the 59th St bridge — 4 crews, last one 6 yrs ago Staten Island, anywhere — 6 crews. One came back, two short The Fort, inside the wall — 1 crew. They were let in The north Bronx, past the water — 3 crews
FOUR WAYS THROUGH
ST
Street
The grid, and the only layer that takes a cart. Every street in this city is carpeted in broken glass, and a crew moving fast on it can be heard two blocks away.
UG
Underground
Fast, unseen, dry in places, and somebody's home. It is also where the rats are, and the rats are what carry the Fever.
WA
Water
A boat carries more than a crew ever can. Every landing belongs to somebody, and you settle up before you step off it.
There are no safe routes.
AND THEN YOU COME BACK
The outer gate opens into a walled yard with a second gate at the far side. A healer looks at you. A Warden asks the three questions before anybody lets you through the second one, and if the answers are wrong you spend three weeks in the watch-house by the wall, where your family can see you and cannot come near.
Then it goes in the Gate Book, under five headings: what happened, what's changed out there, what 843 Acres now believes, what's owed, and who came back hurt.
The third heading is the one crews lie in.
ISSUE BOOK — I. BARROW
Rifle ×1. Rounds ×6. Carried by Okafor. Six out, six back or say why.