Thirty-four years after the sky burned

The sky burned for nine days. The cities of the Meridian Compact went dark within one. Three accounts survived, and the game doesn’t pick between them.

• Fire from the sky. What Shelter 9’s textbooks say.
• A judgement. What the Pilgrims of the Seal say, in the chapel at Grit.
• A chain of mistakes. What the Lamplighters say. They still listen to the old broadcasts.

What matters is what people did next.

Years count from the sky: B.A. is before Ashfall and A.F. is after it.

1. B.A. 19

   The Meridian Compact is signed. The Continuity Program is born, with Director Anselm Vane as its public face. Twenty-four shelters are planned.

2. B.A. 12

   Shelter 2, the Root, is finished: the first shelter and the deepest, under the northern mountains.

3. B.A. 9 to 2

   Six more are built: 4, 9, 12, 15, 17 and 21. The money runs out and the other seventeen sites are cancelled. That’s why Shelter 9 has an unfinished section with a HARD HAT REQUIRED sign.

4. B.A. 2

   The Pairing Protocol is adopted. Every Sleeper is matched with a Bond in a different shelter, on the theory that a pair is a team and a team survives.

6. A.F. 0

   Ashfall. The sky burns for nine days.

7. Seal Day

   11:42

   On the third day the doors of the seven shelters close. 1,104 people stand outside Door Nine: guards, staff and families who had been promised places. A cadet named Edda Rook, twenty years old, holds the gate. She is told to leave her post and doesn’t. She holds it for six hours.

8. A.F. 1

   Shelter 17 votes to open its door early, to look at the sky. The ash gets in. The shelter goes quiet.

9. A.F. 3

   Shelter 21 sends a final status line to the Line stations, then stops.

10. A.F. 5

    The hydroponic gardens of Shelter 12 fail. The shelter starves behind a closed door.

11. A.F. 6

    People who were left outside cut open the gear door of Shelter 4, looking for refuge. They find sleepers and wake them roughly, and several don’t survive it. The people who did it wear dust-coloured coats from the supply stores. They begin to be called Dustcoats.

12. A.F. 9

    Shelter 9 wakes its first batch. A Steward founds the Undermarket.

13. A.F. 20

    The Scramble. The Registry’s map of who is paired with whom is jumbled, and pods begin to open at random.

14. A.F. 21

    Shelter 2 stops answering.

15. A.F. 28

    Imara Dray becomes Steward. The gear door is opened for trade, and the Gate Post grows up around it.

16. A.F. 34

    Now. Your pod opens.

• Shelter 2, the RootSealed and silentThe first and the deepest, under the northern mountains. It stopped answering in A.F. 21.
• Shelter 4Fallen, A.F. 6The nearest. Its gear door was cut open and lies in the sand. Wolves nest in the vestibule.
• Shelter 9, the UndermarketOpenThe only shelter with a settlement living in it: a cavern under a dome, with a plaza, five shops and a tavern.
• Shelter 12Fallen, A.F. 5The gardens failed. A seed cellar is still down there.
• Shelter 15SealedBuilt under a lake basin.
• Shelter 17Fallen, A.F. 1The Last Vote: the shelter that opened its door to see the sky.
• Shelter 21Fallen, A.F. 3The farthest. It went silent first. What it left behind is a message.

Each shelter has a Custodian, a management intelligence that runs the doors, the air, the pumps and the pods. Custodians aren’t villains. They follow rules, and the rules are old. Shelter 9’s is called NINE. It’s damaged, it speaks through a few terminals and says very little, and it can tell you which door is open.

Every Sleeper was matched with a Bond: a friend, a partner or a sibling, placed in a different shelter on purpose, so that no single disaster could take both. Each pair got a Pair Tag, a brass-coloured strip stamped with half of a shared code. Somewhere in another shelter, someone else is sleeping and counting on you.

The directory that says who sleeps where is called the Registry, and it is scrambled. The Steward will tell you nobody can look anyone up.

Nobody in Scorvane holds land, and nobody can claim any. People are tied by favour, not by ground. The more a group knows you, the more it will sell you and say to you.

The Undermarket

Shelter 9. Keeps the settlement fed, safe and not too curious.

The Gate Post wardens

The compound outside the gear door. Keep trade moving, the roads open and the sentries paid.

The Tinkers

Last Drop and Kestrel Field. Want parts, fuel and a working machine under every driver.

Copperhead Union

Copperhead Mine. Wants fair pay and a living mine.

The Lamplighters

Tinwhistle Deep, Lantern Ridge and the old antenna. Keep the old radio network alive and listen to everything.

The Pilgrims of the Seal

Grit Chapel. Want to make peace with Seal Day. They believe it was a mercy.

The Stillwater Anglers

The lake docks. Fish, and would like not to be bothered.

The Dustcoats

Cinderwall, the ruined towns and the camps. Want an answer and a door. Failing that, supplies. Most are hungry people with rifles; the core of them, the Muster, follows Marshal Edda Rook and reads the Door List aloud.

The wasteland is about seven and a half miles on each side. Shelter 9 sits on its northern edge, and a ring of mountains closes every side. Inside the ring are ruined towns held by crews, mines under the hills, lakes that rise and fall, and Cinderwall, a walled city where Rook has her seat.

The weather follows the real calendar. When it rains the lakes rise and the ponds fill. In the dry months the people call the Thin Seasons, the ponds vanish and old things surface.

Scrip is the currency of Shelter 9. Its slogan is painted on every surviving billboard: Scrip spent is Scrip saved. It’s backed by nothing except the fact that the canteen takes it. Food and water are only ever a help or a hindrance, never a way to die, and the Undermarket’s whole public-health policy is two slogans: Eat your beans and Boil your water.

Rumour fills the gaps in the Registry. Some of these are true.

• The Sleepers wake when someone’s thinking of them.Shelter 9 folklore.
• The inner door is just a door.The Steward, firmly.
• The Seal was a mercy.The Pilgrims of the Seal.
• Rook has a list of names and it is longer than the Compact’s.The traders at the Gate Post.
• Never fish at Noon-Hide.Everyone, for different reasons.
• If you hear a lullaby underground, turn around.Foreman Brannock Hale.
• There’s a garden in the mountain.Children in the Undermarket.
• Same ring with a notch on a wagon door, then on a barge. Ask the pedlar and you get a shrug, a joke or a price.A scrapper who counts such things.
• The roads don’t stop at the mountains.A trader at the Gate Post, to nobody in particular.