Denver Sky

There is no sky in Bitlantis. There is the underside of the dome, and what the city throws onto it.

At night the traffic on the grid projects upward and, from the Shallows, it looks like constellations over a skyline that hasn’t existed for a long time: the old Denver, the one in the light. Nobody built it that way. The dome just remembers.

The hourglass hangs in the middle of it, red on one side and blue on the other, and it flips. Red-shift is a signal leaving. Blue-shift is a signal coming home. The Adept read the sky the way sailors used to; a red night means the Code Master is out on the grid, a blue night means he’s back in the Trench.

Halden has tried three times to turn the projection off. The dome ignores him. Sister Noise says it isn’t a projection at all and never was, and that the city is simply looking up at where it came from.

Kestrel sells the sky as a shirt. People wear it for the same reason they look up.