A Market Adrift

At the fringes of the Floating Market, walls salt-bleached and hollowed by the sea waves, a building sits derelict. It was a surgery, or something arranged to resemble one, as best the disgraced owner could. Blood sits long-dried in jars; samples sliced from the bodies of the desperate, the drugged or the self-loathing have rotted away to nothing on the saline wind. The researcher’s notes are missing too.

Nobody knows whether the owner would have wanted this, would have relished the generation growing up with no manifestation, as she once did. There is nobody who would want to ask, and nobody left to answer. The building sits in suspension, silent as sun-punished bone.

There are other buildings like this. Places awkwardly suspended as the market remakes itself, as the tides of residents wax and wane.

Fate peddlers whose livelihoods have dwindled as the world moves on. Cures that fewer and fewer wish to buy. People chased from their country for their appearance or their practices, at last attempting to come home.

But there are more newcomers. A rush of them, when the Párt’s regime crumbled – the refugees met repurposed barges and warm beds, while the loyalists met slit throats and fox-eyes blinking watchfully, remembering. These streets have never liked the law.

And, stepping into the spaces where coin-flow had stuttered, there are traders.

Great galleons, wares legal or otherwise, strain at the bustling dockside, as this place seizes upon the sea-winds of nations industrialising and borders relaxing. The Floating Market, unregulated hive of taverns and peddlers it remains, may become the most thriving free-port on the continent.

Change is a fickle wind, and these floating fragments ride it with all the fate-defying resilience it always has.

Though the market is adrift, ropes still hold together. People out here know how to anchor each other.

The Fate’s End casino lights seem to watch over it all, sign quirked jaunty as a smile.