Chapter 8Fireflies filled the sky, scores of helopods flittering over Crestonia. Windows watched their every motion, the stares prickling the skin across his back, a constant twitch. In every direction lay mountains of city, constellations of light, masses of humanity.
The city peeled past them, the paper-mache sun staining a gray pastiche of cloud. Phalluses of glasma and steel r***d the sky, bending with each magnacar turn, names synonymous with soaring stock tickers, obscene profit margins, unscrupulous exploitation. Within a particularly dense stand of these pillories cowered a small white dome, the capitol capitulating to corrosive capitalism. Although capital continually slipped its dirty fingers into the hot pies of government, legislatures continued to cook up an ever-more byzanti
