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.
THE TRUCKS STOPPED COMING
There was no bang. There was a summer that didn't end, then another one, and then the trucks stopped coming. By August the shops had nothing. By Christmas the police had nothing. The next spring the people who ran the city stopped answering, and the few who hadn't left put a fence round the park and a gun on every gap in it.
That was a hundred and fifty years ago. The war that did it ended somewhere a long way off, and whatever came out of the far side of it is still there, and poorer, and not coming.
843 ACRES
RATION CARD — WIRE YEARS
HOUSEHOLD 4471 ADULTS 2 · CHILDREN 3 ASSIGNED: SECTOR C LABOUR BALANCE OWED: 14
Central Park is a walled settlement of about eighteen hundred people, governed by a Council of Elders who meet at the Keep and set the jobs. The Keep is Belvedere Castle. The Well is the Reservoir. The Gathering is at Bethesda Terrace, once a month, where anyone may speak and only Elders decide.
The Lawns are farmed. The wall is rebuilt in winter out of whatever the work gangs bring back. Four gates, four families of Wardens, and a book at every one of them with every crew that has gone out and come back written in it since the Walling.
OUTSIDE THE WALL
The city is three hundred square miles and the settlement is a square mile and a third of it. Everything else belongs to somebody, or to nothing.
What actually kills Out-Wallers, in order: the city itself — floors, stairs, masonry, water — then people, then wild hogs, then dogs. Everything with claws in it comes a long way behind all four.
THE FEVER
It comes off the rats, and only the rats. Most people who get it are barely ill. A third have a proper fever. About one in six has it reach the brain, and of those, a third die, a third recover, and a third are left with something that does not go away.
Anyone who has had it and lived is burnt, and will not get it again. Everybody wants a burnt person nursing their sick, and nobody wants one living next door.
Nobody comes back from it changed into anything.
FOUR WAYS THROUGH
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.
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.
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.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE NOW
Trees have split the avenues open and grown up through the cars. Vines hang off whole blocks, and in summer some streets are as green as the park. Buildings still come down, usually after a storm, and a street that was open last month can be under ten storeys of brick.
Below Canal Street it is a different city. The sea has the lower floors of everything, and the streets are canals at high tide and mud at low.