Ashbourne was the bottom of the world.
Not metaphorically. Not in the way that people who have never truly been at the bottom use the phrase to describe a bad week or a difficult year. Literally, structurally, architecturally — Ashbourne occupied a basin of low ground ringed by higher land on three sides, so that the rest of Valdoria looked down on it from every direction, a fact that seemed, to Sid, almost too deliberate to be accidental. As though the city had been designed by someone who wanted the poor to be visible only from above.
He learned the world in stages, the way all children learn it — first the room, then the building, then the lane, then the bloc, then the wider geography that he could reach on his short legs and that stretched beyond his reach in every direction into territory he could see but not yet touch. He catalogued what he saw with the cold precision of a man who had spent decades cataloguing things, housed now in a body that moved slowly and tired easily and needed to eat at intervals that interrupted the thinking.
He hated the cataloguing having to stop for food.
But he did it. He catalogued Ashbourne.
Valdoria was a city divided into three zones.
Zone 1 was the Crown — the elevated districts where the glass towers rose and the streets were wide and the light worked consistently and the machinery of wealth operated in the smooth, self-lubricating way of systems designed by people who would always be inside them. Sid knew Zone 1 from his previous life's equivalent. He knew its grammar: the specific ease of people who have never wanted for anything, the blindness that ease produces, the way money, accumulated past a certain point, becomes invisible to the person who has it — just the water they swim in, not a thing they possess.
Zone 2 was the Middle Ring — the working city, the functional city, where the factories and offices and shops operated and the majority of Valdoria's population went about the daily work of sustaining a civilisation that was not primarily for them. They could see Zone 1 from Zone 2 on clear days. They looked up at it the way people look at weather — something real, something that affected them, something they could not control.
Zone 3 was the Ash. Ashbourne. Where Sid had been deposited.
Between Zone 3 and Zone 2 stood the Gold Gate.
He saw it for the first time at age three, on an occasion when Nina had taken him with her to the edge of Bloc Eight on an errand — she preferred not to leave him alone in the room, which was an instinct he found professionally frustrating and could not argue with on practical grounds. From the edge of Bloc Eight you could see the Gate: a checkpoint structure set between parallel fences, with the Regulatory Authority's blue and white insignia visible on its roofline and the figures of gate officers moving in the controlled, procedural way of people conducting an official function.
People crossed through it. Legitimately — with papers, with documentation, with the specific body language of those who have permission and are accustomed to using it. And on the other side, Zone 2 was visible: wider streets, maintained surfaces, the distant suggestion of a world that worked the way worlds were supposed to work.
Sid stood at the edge of Bloc Eight at three years old and looked at the Gold Gate and felt, for the first time since arriving in this life, something other than resentment.
He felt the clarity of a man who has found his target.
It would take years. It would take more than years. He was three and he couldn't speak in full sentences yet and he was in a slum, and the distance was enormous.
He started measuring it anyway.
The nine blocks of Ashbourne were each their own world.
Bloc Seven, where the Coles lived, was mid-level by the Ash's internal hierarchy. Not the worst. Bloc Five was the worst — gang territory, controlled by the Ironbacks, where the economy ran on violence and the social contract was built from fear. Not the best either. Bloc One was the oldest, most settled, most organised. Bloc Seven was somewhere in the complicated middle: enough structure to function, enough chaos to remind you that the structure was always provisional.
Marta ran it. She was the bloc leader — no official title, no RA recognition, just the accumulated authority of a woman who had managed Bloc Seven's resources and disputes and crises for twenty years with the disciplined care of someone who understood that nobody else was going to do it. She was large and deliberate, and her face had been trained to give away nothing it didn't choose to give. Sid observed her from a distance and filed her as: significant, competent, not to be approached carelessly.
The water ran three hours in the morning and two in the evening from the standpipe in the central square. This was the pulse of the bloc. Everything organised itself around it. The market was busiest in the hour after the morning water. The lanes were quietest at midday when the heat — in summer — was at its worst and the children retreated to whatever shade existed. The Ironbacks from Bloc Five did their occasional territorial demonstrations in the late evenings when the RA officers had finished their scheduled patrols.
Sid mapped all of it. He mapped it in his head because he had no paper and couldn't yet write fluently, and the map in his head was detailed and accurate and updated every day with new observations.
He had no immediate use for any of it.
He built it anyway. Because the one thing Marcus Hale had always understood, in his bones, was that information was never wasted. You just couldn't always see what it was for until you needed it.
Nina worked. She always worked.
Three jobs, rotating through the week like the elements of a machine that had been set in motion before he arrived and would keep moving regardless of what he thought about it. The chemical processing facility in Bloc Three, early mornings, the work that left her smelling of something industrial and coughing in the evenings — the cough he had noted and filed under 'problem, not yet addressable.' The laundry work in Bloc Two, afternoons. The community kitchen deliveries, unpaid, three evenings a week, because she had been doing it for years and stopping would mean sick people didn't get food.
She came home tired in a way that was simply her condition. She didn't complain about it. She didn't perform her exhaustion for sympathy. She came home and made food and sat with them and told her small stories and was present in the room in the way that people are present when being present is a choice they make every day despite everything that argues against it.
Sid watched her and thought inefficient. Watched her and thought: too much unpaid output, insufficient return. Watched her and thought: the community kitchen deliveries are economically irrational; she should cut them.
He thought all these things and said none of them because he was three and then four and his vocabulary was still developing, but he thought them clearly, in the cold managerial register of Marcus Hale, and they seemed correct to him.
He would not understand, for another two years, how comprehensively wrong he was.