Karch lay at the edge of the globe, as far from civilization as was possible on a planet like Delos. If our cartographers had shared the romance of the ancients, they might have drawn dragons and sea serpents in the waters encircling her. Where Meidua was tall, her proud towers stretching like supplicating fingers toward the gray heavens, Karch was squat, a rambling tangle of two-and three-story buildings along the stony rise above the bay. On those blue-gray waters, floating like so much garbage, lay a tangle of pontoon bridges and floats anchored to concrete piers like bones in a fish. A
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