Van Hallam once explained scerm to me using a triangle: Liminal at the top, Physical at the bottom-left, Social at the bottom-right. Most folk ignore the liminal, he said, which goes a long way toward explaining why Hellsborough functions the way it does — which is to say, poorly and with great conviction. Scerm is the embodiment of the murk, the prayers of Dunlockslyn, quantum code — once you know it, he told me, there is no unknowing it. He said this as a fact. I suspect that was also intentional.

Murk behaviour changes character as you descend toward the River Loxley — in the Wisewood it has grain and weight; at the river, it has water's ambitions without water's discipline. It pools where water would pool, saturates the banks the way a slow leak saturates stone: invisibly, completely, with no respect for what was there before it arrived. Ming Shalom's people guard the Hellsborough Hole approach from the south bank. They have a patrol rhythm. Patrol rhythms exist to be found.

Off-world visitors tend to struggle with two items of Hellsborough vocabulary above all others: ¢hits (the cryptocurrency, pronounced 'chit', which occasionally develops opinions about its ownership — this is a known property of the currency, not a glitch, and the financial system has adjusted accordingly) and 'snough', an expletive approximately equivalent to 'bloody hell'. You will use both within twenty-four hours of arrival. The ¢hits will find their way into your pocket. The 'snough' will arrive considerably faster.

Hellsborough properties are documented to learn their occupants — not metaphorically, but physically: foam compression, appliance calibration, every surface slowly adjusting to the exact weight and warmth of whoever sits still long enough. Mrs Atherton's notepad, recovered from her vacated flat during the Hellsborough residential survey, charted this process in shrinking handwriting across several weeks. 'The flat is learning me the way the chair learned me,' she wrote, 'and I don't want to be learned anymore.' Her final entry was a single line. I haven't included it. I haven't forgotten it either.