These newcomers arrived waving the tsar’s banners, talking of things like land development and city planning, or else under the emblems of private companies who squeezed every drop from Oblya’s day laborers and then vanished, only to be replaced by other men, under different emblems but with the same goal of bleeding the city dry. They were the reason Oblya’s port bustled with trade from the east, and the reason why our streets were laid out as neatly as wheel spokes.
