"Do you know where I could get a bike?" asked Rakkel as they walked away from the hostel, back the way they came across the cobbled road.

"A bike?"

"Yeah. Or even where I could get a bike repaired."

"Nope," said Welton, happily. "No idea. But I'll keep an eye out for you."

This part of the city had wide streets, short buildings, and just enough passers-by for it to not feel abandoned. The air stole crispness from the river nearby and carried its scents to Rakkel's nose. Xe breathed deep, stretched xir lanky arms out, and relaxed. Xir fur ruffled slightly in the wind.

The thing xe hadn't mentioned to Rakkel yet, nor certainly to the lady to the hostel, was that xe didn't have any money. Not a single... coin? Xe wasn't even sure what sort of currency people used around here.

This tension tugged at Rakkel like a helium balloon tied around xir wrist: Free-floating, far away. It made xir feel just a little bit more alive. Sure, it might cause problems in xir medium- to short-term future, but what really made it pop and sing was that it didn't matter right now. Right now, xe was getting away with it. As opposed to earlier in the day, before the hostel, when it merely hadn't mattered at all, and xe wasn't getting away with anything in particular.

"Let's cut over a couple of blocks to the river," xe suggested to Welton. "Since we're following it anyway."

"Sure," said Welton. "If you'd like."

They cut over a couple of blocks to the river. It ran roughly two meters below street level here, at the bottom of a steep concrete embankment. An occasional ladder ran down to an occasional wooden pier. On the opposite side of the street stood rows of little shops selling fishing supplies.

"We'll hit the market if we keep following this street to the south, right?" said Rakkel.

"I believe so. As long as the street keeps following the river."

"I came past here yesterday," said Rakkel, "when I first arrived in the city. Or at least, I think it was somewhere around here. I wasn't paying much attention. I was too worried about the rain. Actually, I think that's the bridge I went across." Xe pointed. "It's nice to see it all properly."

Along the river, several boats gathered into a minor flotilla. A bang resounded across the water, and the frontmost boat launched a barrage of white and orange flower petals from a pair of cannons. In sequence, the boats behind it launched their own petals, firing again and again until this part of the river was carpeted with orange and white.

"What's going on?" asked Rakkel.

"I'm not sure," said Welton. "Some kind of celebration?"

"Some kind of funeral," said a voice.

Rakkel walked to the embankment and looked down. Below them, an old, obese man sat on a makeshift pier of old tires nailed together. His white hair went everywhere across his back and shoulders, but missed a spot right on the top of his head, where his dark skin showed through. The hat that would have covered the bald spot nestled across his drooping chest, clutched in his arms. He was extremely round, almost as wide as he was tall, and sat on the pier in the same way that Doople's meat buns sat on their tray.

He craned around to look up at xir.

"Ah!" he cried, "what vision are you?"

"Vision?"

"A slender, halo'd angel? Here to take me at last, are you?"

"I'm a lemur," said Rakkel. "Not an angel."

The man squinted. "Oh. Hmm. One of those techno-fanciers. A bio-mod. Pity. You have a lovely silhouette. I bet you were quite handsome as a human."

Rakkel frowned, but didn't rise to the bait. Instead, xe said "what was that about a funeral?"

"That's what the petals are for. It's in remembrance of someone. A local tradition. There's a story behind it - a young gardener, a tragic romance, a motorcycle accident. The traditional line is that the petals clogged the river so thickly, no boats could get through. Except it was the other river. Not this one."

"I see," said Rakkel, politely.

"It'll be me someday," said the old man. "Me who they'll clog the river with petals for." He nodded solemnly.

"Are you a fisherman?" asked Welton, coming up behind Rakkel.

"Aaah!" screamed the old man, his voice suddenly full of mortal terror. "Aaaaaaaaah! Get away from me, monster! Foul monster!" He leapt to his feet as quickly as he could, which wasn't very quickly. It took him a couple of tries.

"Woah, woah," said Welton. "What's wrong?"

The old man stumbled across the tires to the end of the tiny pier, where he toppled into the water. "Get away from me!" he screamed again. "Foul monster! Demon!" His fat, wide body floated on the river, still in an upright position.

Welton's whole body went tense. He started to strip off his jacket, as if preparing to dive into the water after the man, though it wasn't clear if the man could be rescued by anything less than a trained team equipped with ropes and floats and, ideally, a small raft to use as a base of operations.

"I think he's fine," said Rakkel.

"Is he?"

"At least he's clearly not drowning." The man did look distressed, but the focus of his distress was Welton, not the river. He paddled steadily away to the river's deeper part.

"He'll be carried away by the current!" insisted Welton.

But as they watched, one of the funeral boats broke away from the procession and came for the man. Someone on the boat threw him a rope and then, after a furious negotiation, tugged him over to the river's far bank, where he climbed ashore.

"I wonder what his problem was?" said Welton.

"Scared of pigs, maybe. He called me an angel."

Welton squinted at the river's far shore, where the old man had retreated to someplace he couldn't be seen, then shook his head.

"What a pointless encounter," he said.

Rakkel resumed walking down the street. "Pointless?" xe asked.

"Pointless. Senseless. Dismaying. The old man's wrong in the head."

"You're just offended because he was scared of you."

"I'm offended, sure. And baffled. And concerned." He hurried after. "I hope that's not a common perspective in this city. I mean, that he was scared of me. I hope nobody else sees me that way."

"He was looking up at an unusual angle. He said I had a halo - I think he mistook the way the light hit my fur. So maybe he saw something like that when he saw you, too. Some trick of the light."

"Maybe."

The streets narrowed as they approached the market outskirts, as if they were becoming more focused and businesslike. The embarkment by the river, by contrast, had relaxed itself and spread out into an expansive boardwalk. The boardwalk reached farther and farther into the water, taking greater and greater liberties with the river until, just before the place where the Sedge and the Aelt met each other, it seemed to span the river's entire width.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"But how do boats get across?" wondered Rakkel.

"Let's go and find out," said Welton.

"Is it on our way?"

"No, but are we in any particular hurry?"

"No," said Rakkel.

"There we go, then." He set off for the boardwalk.

As they approached, a medium-sized sailboat, clearly loaded with sacks of some cargo, drew near. They stopped and watched as it drifted up to the wooden planks, then began to intersect with them, then seemed to be carried right through them by the current, as if the boardwalk wasn't even there.

"Huh," said Welton. "Are they pointing the way through?" He stared at something on the river just past the edge of the bridge.

"Are what pointing the way through?"

"The holo-signs. Big arrows floating on the water."

"Arrows? I don't see anything."

"Well, you wouldn't, would you?" said Welton. "This is why we need to get your AR visor repaired, and soon."

"Oh," said Rakkel. "Huh. Really? Big arrows that I can't even see?"

"Yeah, though it beats me why they don't just use physical signs. It'd be cheaper than keeping these things running. On the other hand, I still can't tell what they're pointing at. Just looks like solid boardwalk to me."

They walked closer. They were the only people on the boardwalk, and had the distinct impression it mainly catered to the night crowd. Unlit LEDs covered all the posts and booths and fixtures around them.

Where the sailboat had passed, they saw as they reached it, the boardwalk appeared perfectly intact and whole. Though there were no booths or fixtures in a conspicuous band across the boardwalk's width.

"Is it a holo-boardwalk?" wondered Welton. He pulled his glasses up to look under them.

"Not if I can see it," said Rakkel. "Anyway, why would they make an illusion of the boardwalk?"

All of a sudden, the boardwalk shifted and buckled in front of them. It remained stable under their feet, though nevertheless there was a shuddering rumble that made Rakkel take a step to keep xir balance, automatically, and totally unnecessarily. A few meters away, however, a whole segment of the boardwalk bowed and dipped down into the water. As it did, another boat came forward and began gliding across the channel that had formed above the submerged wood.

Rakkel and Weaton stared as it passed. In its wake, the wooden boards rose smoothly back out of the water, little rivulets draining into the cracks between them, until it was as if nothing had happened.

"Remarkable," sad Welton.

"That can't be the easiest way to do that," said Rakkel.

"No," agreed Welton. "Totally impractical. But stylish."

"Seems dangerous to me. What if a boat comes along while people are standing here?"

"I think it only submerges where people aren't," said Welton. "I'm pretty sure we're standing right where the first boat went. But the second boat went over there. And given how the booths and things are positioned, there are at least four or five areas that could submerge if they needed to. That's why they use holo-arrows: To direct boats toward the places where nobody's standing."

"Okay, but what if there are people everywhere?"

"No idea."

"It is pretty incredible," admitted Rakkel.

"Must've taken a ton of engineering."

"Is there one on the other river?"

"No idea," he said again.

They waited and watched as a third boat came through, this time farther down along the boardwalk.

"And it happens automatically?"

"I guess so," said Welton. "I don't see where the sensors are, though."

"Maybe it can tell where the pedestrians are from the weight," said Rakkel. "The boats... underwater cameras along the edges?"

"Sure, probably."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

At last, they made it to the edge of the market proper.

What Rakkel hadn't expected was that it'd be quite so tubular.

Xe'd pictured tents, stalls, multitudinous throngs of people of all shapes and sizes and colors, constant shouting, haggling, strange wares brought from faraway places - all present and accounted for. But this took place in and on and among a series of giant, dayglo-colored tubes of metal or plastic or something. The tubes snaked all up and down the streets, vertically and horizontally, in lines and coils, tall enough and wide enough for several pedestrians to walk through them side by side and still have room along the edges for merchants to display their wares.

"It's in here," said Welton, leading the way to one opening in a tube nearby.

"What," said Rakkel. "What is this?"

"This is the market, obviously. Stick close to me. It's easy to get lost."

Rakkel took a hesitant step forward. "I should think so," xe said. "Why's it... like this?"

"Something to do with a more efficient use of vertical space," he said. "Or so rumor has it."

"I'm not sure I believe that. What even are these tubes? Who built them here?"

"Are you coming, or not?" Welton marched ahead into the tube.

The pair of them did not travel quickly.

Rakkel hadn't known what to expect when entering the tubes. Xe'd thought there would be stalls along the sides, maybe, or maybe sellers would have their goods laid out on rugs and carpets. It turned out that although there was some of this, the most common arrangement was for the tubes to be built up into shops, with shelves on either side and a passage down the middle - or, often enough, a tiny maze of aisles, which they were required to squeeze through before continuing deeper into the tubes. Sometimes two of these shops would split the tube lengthwise so that they had to choose one or the other to walk through. Several built crude balconies and lofts into the upper part of the tube, with more goods stored on the second level.

What made everything even more confusing was that the tubes themselves branched and turned unpredictably, so that sometimes what seemed like a quirk of the way a shop was laid out actually led one around an actual bend in the actual tube, making the shop seem impossibly deep.

Occasionally, they'd find their way out through a break or opening in a tube, and stumble, blinking through sudden sunlight across an outdoor space patchworked with more merchants displaying more goods, until they reached another opening in the tubes and went back in.

There seemed to be no method of organization. A shop selling clothing in a rugged, outdoorsy style would be located next to a shop selling fresh tubers, would be located next to a shop selling fragments of old-style automobiles, would be located next to a booth with novelty keychains on display. Every bend revealed something new. Welton kept having to double back and pull Rakkel away from a spread of fossils laid out on a rug, or a variety of glow-in-the-dark wall ornaments hung on display in front of blacklights inside a set of black curtains. In one corner of a tube, someone had carefully set up a space for customers to sit and be tattooed with animated ink. Rakkel stopped to have half a discussion with the tattoo artist about the techniques involved, and would have had the other half if xe hadn't noticed Welton, oblivious, almost going out of sight around the next bend.

But Welton was leading Rakkel - or so xe thought - farther and farther away from the central part of the marketplace and deeper and deeper into the maze of tubes, which had progressively become narrower and twistier and maybe even dirtier. Really? Dirtier? It wasn't clear. Maybe Rakkel only imagined it. But xe started to become uncomfortably conscious of how little xe knew about the pig. They'd only met the previous evening, in the presence of a total stranger who also only knew Welton secondhand and had only met him in person a day or so previous to that. Sure, Welton was personable, if excessively talkative sometimes. He seemed friendly and unthreatening.

The key word there being "seemed."

If Welton was luring Rakkel into some kind of trap, if he intented to take xir somewhere isolated and do something unpleasant, there was absolutely nobody who knew where they were or would come to xir rescue. Doople wouldn't be expecting to ever see xir again. Outside the city, xir closest acquaintence was hundreds of kilometers away. Xe was totally alone.

Of course, Rakkel had intended to come here anyway. Not here exactly, in this particular junction of this particular tube with that particular stall over to the left selling artifical aquarium fish flashing garishly with RGB-cycle rainbows, but at the very least, here in this market. Which spanned a significant portion of the city and would've been easy to get lost in even if it hadn't turned out, inexplicably, to be a literal maze. And which surely had its fair share of dark and dangerous areas, none of which would likely be safer to wander into alone by accident than deliberately with a guide. And if it came to it, xe thought xe could take Welton in a fight. Or at least find an opening and run away.

But still, xir fur was starting to stand on end.

They stopped in front of a gap between two merchants' stalls where the tube was joined by a smaller, darker tube which stuck through a jagged hole that appeared to have been cut into its side by some third party, some time after its initial construction. A black linen curtain hung in front of the opening, stablized with a rod at the bottom. On the curtain's front, someone had painted or printed a stylized image of a shark in electric blue.

"We're almost there," said Welton. "It's just through here."

"What's that?" asked Rakkel, pointing at the shark. "Some kind of... of gang symbol or something?"

"Ha, no, of course not," said Welton. "It's just... well, I'm not sure, actually. I assumed it was just decorative."

"All I need is to borrow an iron and some solder," said Rakkel, "right? To re-seat the... vertebrate buffer thingy?"

"Vertex buffer unit."

"Yeah that. So why are we going here? Isn't there somewhere closer and friendlier that sells that stuff?"

"Maybe. But Salmidon is an old acquaintence of mine. He's an expert. If it's more than just the VBU, he can help you fix it. And even if it isn't, he might be able to help you improve it."

"I don't really want to improve it," said Rakkel, guardedly. "I just want it to work."

"It'll need a firmware update for sure, though. Or else it won't work. Not with anything modern, anyway."

"Okay. I'm not sure what that means."

"Don't worry about it. That's the point - Salmidon can take care of everything for you."

"I really thought it was just a bad capacitor, and I could replace it with a new one and everything would work just fine."

"Yeah, but that's not what it was, was it?"

Rakkel sighed and shook xir head. "Fine, but if I wind up having my organs stolen and sold on the black market, you're paying to replace them."

Welton smirked. "Deal," he said. He pushed aside the shark-emblazoned curtain and went through.