“You’re a Gamer, then.”

“That’s right.” Lioe levered herself into the narrow pod. It smelled of smoke and fish, an odd, unfamiliar combination, stronger as the low door closed behind her.

“It’s a good club, Shadows,” the driver said. “Or so they tell me. I’m a home Gamer, myself.” The engine whined as he stood on his pedals to get the cab moving again.

Lioe leaned back cautiously against the thin padding, feeling the vibrations of the little motor through the soles of her feet. The cab swung left in a gentle arc that brought them out into a larger trafficway–not a busy street, only a few other vehicles, velocabs and pushcarts, moving between the bollards that marked the edges of the road. They swung left again, the driver hesitating for an instant to gauge the faster stream of traffic on the wider street, and then standing hard on his pedals to bring the cab up to their speed. The cab slid neatly into a gap between another velocab and an empty flatbed carrier belching steam, but Lioe was looking at the shape that soared above the street, cutting off the sky. The Old Dike was festooned with lights, strings and streamers of them flashing in sequence to warn off wandering helio pilots, but they only seemed to intensify the black mass of the wall itself. More light like fog flowed along its top, fading into the sky at least a hundred and fifty meters above them. Lioe shook her head, amazed and wondering, and the driver shot her a look of triumph.

“It’s something, isn’t it? That’s the Old Dike. The first‑in people built it to reclaim the Old City.”

Lioe nodded, still staring, barely aware of the other vehicles now crowding the road. “What’s that on top?” she asked, after a moment. “Another road?”

“That’s Warden Street,” the driver answered. “Runs all the way along the Dike, from Lockwarden Point to the Governor’s House. There’s good shopping up there, the best shops in town for fashion, if you’re interested.”

“Maybe,” Lioe answered. It must’ve been one hell of a project, building that, she thought, even if Burning Bright’s first‑ins were a different breed from the usual first settlers. Burning Bright had never been intended to be anything but an entrepot–could never have been anything else, at least under human settlement, given the minuscule landmass–and the first settlers had all been merchants and bankers, bent on turning the planet’s favorable position astride the main hyperspace channel between the Republic and HsaioiAn into solid profit. And they’d certainly done that: despite the best attempts of worlds like Ky and Attis/Euphrosyne, Burning Bright remained the busiest transshipment point for goods going from one metagovernment to the other. Even in the first years, the settlers would have had the capital to bring in the best technicians to build the Dike.

Traffic was picking up, more and more vehicles cramming the road, and crowds flowed along the walkways outside the brightly lit shops. Only the foodshops seemed to be open, but light and bright snatches of music spilled from their doorways, clear notes like plucked metal strings. She heard laughter as well, over the constant rumble of the crowd and the traffic, looked instinctively to see a woman caught in the blue‑white light of a store’s display window, her head thrown back, hair spilling in untidy curls around a lined, handsome face. Her skirt–no one wore skirts in the Republic, except for ethnic festivals–was starred with little mirrors, reflecting the store’s lights like chips of diamond. And then the cab was past her, and Lioe resettled herself against the padding, wondering what she had seen. A shape flashed through the pedestrians, a man’s head and shoulders moving with unnatural quickness above the people surrounding him, and then he shot between two men and a bollard, darting into the traffic stream on a battered bicycle. No one used bicycles much in the Republic, either.

The road rose ahead of them, and Lioe was suddenly aware, over the noise of the crowds and the snarling rush of the assorted vehicles, of the dulled, steady tolling of a buoy bell. She leaned forward a little, and the driver said, before she could ask, “We’re coming up on the Straight now.”

There were more bicycles in evidence on this stretch of road, and on the high‑arched bridge, as well as cabs and three‑wheeled cycles and a handful of the motorized denki‑bikes. Most of the cabs and human‑powered vehicles turned right or left onto the street that paralleled the as‑yet‑invisible river. As the driver stood on his pedals again to coax the cab up the steep rise, Lioe began to understand the reason. She could guess why there didn’t seem to be many fully motorized craft on Burning Bright–fossil resources were scarce and inaccessible, electrics were still impractical for heavy loads, and solar was even less practical on something as small as a velocab–but it was still strange to feel the cab wavering from side to side as the driver added his muscle power to the engine’s whining output. Strange, and somehow improper. Lioe was glad when the cab reached the top of the arch, and started the long glide down.

Across the bridge, the streets were quieter. The buildings turned blind faces to the road, and there were few pedestrians. Once or twice the cab crossed a wider street, both times with trees or flowers growing in a center island, framed by soft lights, and Lioe caught a glimpse of figures moving in that pastel radiance. More often, the cab flashed over the low hump of a bridge, and she saw shards of light reflected from the canal water less than two meters below. The driver–he had caught his breath, after the bridge–said, “This is Dock Road–Dock Road District, that is.”

“Mmm.” Lioe glanced from side to side, staring at the blank‑walled buildings. Most of them seemed to be four or five stories high, made of something dark that might have been poured stone. Nearly all of them had lighter inclusions: a band across the front, or outlining a door, or defining the corners of the building, but there were no windows, or at least nothing she recognized as a window. She had thought the on‑line guides had said that Dock Road was primarily a residential district, but these looked more like factories or warehouses than any house she had ever seen. And then the cab swept past a building with all its windows open, shutters folded back against the empty dark stone of the facade, a gate open too into a courtyard where people swarmed around a blue‑lit fountain, and music spilled out into the quiet street. She craned her head as they slid past, and out of the corner of her eye saw the driver smile briefly over his shoulder.

They pulled up outside Shadows a little before the nineteenth hour. The club was a more ordinary building, three stories high with bricked‑in windows and a brightly lit sign over the door, in a neighborhood full of buildings that had visible windows and doors that locked with metal grills. There was a food bar on the nearest corner–and a heavyset bouncer leaning his chair against the wall outside the entrance, so she shouldn’t have to worry too much–and some kind of shop across the street, its display windows shut down for the night. She paid the driver what he asked and added the tip the guides had said was appropriate, then turned toward the club’s well‑marked door. The cab’s motor whined behind her as the driver pulled away, but she did not look back.

After the glittering strangeness of the rest of the city, Shadows was refreshingly ordinary, another Gaming club like a hundred others she’d seen on other worlds. The door was painted with the images from hundreds of Gaming pins–conferences, competitions, specific sessions and scenarios, most of the Grand Types and even a few faces that had to be local favorites–but before Lioe could study them more closely, the door swung open onto a narrow hall.

The carpet was worn, with a few squares of a brighter shade of moss to show where the worst damage had been replaced. The white‑painted walls were mostly empty, except for a few display boards and a Gameboard under glass. The displays were of sessions that had attracted attention on the intersystems nets, and Lioe gave a mental nod of approval. There weren’t many–there couldn’t be many, if Shadows was as new as the steward Vere had said, and it was a good sign that the club hadn’t tried to inflate its reputation by adding displays of merely local interest. The Gameboard, the gleaming screen below it said, had belonged to the club’s founder, Davvi Medard‑Yasine. Lioe didn’t recognize the name.