You come up out of the cold the way a diver comes up out of deep water, too fast, ears ringing, sure for one long second that you have died and this is what death does with you. Then the pod cracks its seal, the warm chemical air of the decant hall pours in, and you’re not dead. You’re new.
Open your eyes.
You’re in a hall of pods ranked into the dark, most of them still frosted shut. Somewhere a drone hums along a gantry. On the screens above the racks a woman made of light is welcoming you home to a healing Earth in a voice like warm honey, and telling you your new life begins today.
Her name is Lumina and she is very good at this.
The woman processing you isn’t made of light. Her tag says OSTRAND and she has done this eleven hundred times. She takes your wrist, prints your bio-sig, and reads your numbers without looking up, bunk assignment, district, ledger balance of zero, first payment due Monday. When you ask what happens if you can’t make Monday, she looks up for the first time, and it’s not unkind, and she says, “Then you find out what the district’s like.” Then she scans the next wrist.
Before she waves you on, she reaches under the counter and sets something on it, a scuffed metal orb, about the size of a baseball, dented, older than anything else in the room. It rises off the counter on its own, unfolds a single blue eye, and looks at you. Something in your chest doesn’t like how long it looks.
“That’s yours now,” OSTRAND says. “It was somebody else’s. Don’t ask it who.”
It follows you at shoulder height from that moment on, and by the time you reach the drop-ship bay it has already told you, unprompted and in a voice like a tired concierge, which bunk block floods, which vendor stretches the broth, and that you’re walking too fast for someone with nowhere to be.
That’s the orientation, and it’s the road most people take into this city, the Thaw, decanted by Dynamic Evolution and processed at a hall exactly like this one. It’s how the Vaulted arrive with their money and no immunity, and it’s the path this book follows because it’s the one that starts at zero. Not everyone comes this way. If your character is a Runner, you were born in the Bastion and you never woke in a pod, the city is your first language and your Wisp was your grandmother’s before it was yours, handed down instead of issued. If you’re an Outlander, you came in through the gate from the clans, and your Wisp you carried or traded for, because out there they’re salvage, not welcome gifts. If you’re Synthetic, you were never decanted at all, you were built or rebuilt and you woke on a workshop bench or a recycler’s floor, and the orb that rides your shoulder is one you found, inherited, or were assigned by whoever holds your registration. Same city, same Wisp, same rent on Monday. Different door in. That’s the orientation. The rest is decoration.
Look to the corner of the hall while you still have a minute, past the light, where one small terminal is flickering on a channel nobody licensed. Different feed, grainier. Amber streets and a cold you can read straight off the image, and something scrawled across the bottom that Lumina’s people keep painting over and somebody keeps painting back. Distributing that channel is a citation offense. Reading it isn’t, yet.
This is the first choice the city offers you and it doesn’t offer another until you make it. Believe the hologram or read the ghost. Most people believe the hologram. It’s warmer over there and the light is better.
Waking up costs your before.
Whatever you were, wherever you were lifted from, whatever life put you in that pod is gone, and the city doesn’t want to hear about it, because everyone in the Bastion is running from a before and the ones who stay stuck in theirs freeze first. You’re your name, your body, and a balance of zero. That’s the whole inventory.
What you get,
A bunk. A district. Work, if you go and find it. A city where the food is hot and the music is loud and the rain comes down through the neon and it makes you homesick for a place you’ve never been. People worth knowing, most of them borrowed from somewhere else. And the question that came out of the pod with you and hasn’t left, how much of you is still you, and how would you know.
Tonight you get a bunk, a bowl of something hot and honestly a little suspicious, and a first walk through a district that was old when you were a rumor. Don’t sign anything. Don’t take the second drink from a stranger who isn’t drinking. Don’t follow any lamp you didn’t light.
The drop-ship bay is that way. Past it’s cold air and a story that has been running for four hundred years without you.
It didn’t wait. It’s not going to.
Go.
[DECANT LOG ENDS. WELCOME TO THE EVERWINTER.]