Sootfall

At the centre of the city stands the Works. It has run without stopping for longer than anyone can properly account for. The records go back far enough to show it already running, and no further. It burns coal, scrap, water and shifts.

It throws ash into the sky. The ash comes back down as weather.

Nobody currently living knows what the Works produces. The question isn't forbidden; it simply has no answer anyone can check, and asking it out loud marks you as recently arrived. What everyone agrees on is narrower and more practical: it must be fed, it has always been fed, and the year it isn't will be the last year of anything.

So the city feeds it. That is the whole arrangement, and every job in Sootfall is some version of that job.

Sootfall grew around the Works the way rust grows around a nail: not planned, just accumulated. Districts are named for what happens in them, because nobody ever got round to naming them for anything else.

Ash falls year-round. Heavy some weeks, a grey drizzle most. Everything outdoors is the same soft charcoal colour within a month, which is why the residents dress the way they do: strong colours, printed slogans, anything that still reads as yours after a week under the Fall.

Locals don't say Sootfall. They say the Fall.

Living here is being in it. New arrivals are said to have come down.

Nobody is native to Sootfall. Everyone arrived, was left here, or came up from underneath, and each species found a different rung of the same ladder. Two of the five are on shift. The Permit Halls release the other three files when their species clocks in.

Grimps

Trade: Force From the Undersink · Doors, meat halls, fight pits

They dug the tunnels the Works' coal comes out of, for generations before anyone thought to pay them. Violence in Sootfall is a trade like plumbing, and the Grimps hold the licence.

Read the file →

Mutts

Trade: Repair From the caravans · Haulage, garages, the Yards

They came in with the supply caravans and never left with one. They fix what breaks, haul what's heavy and know every shortcut in a city that was never mapped.

Read the file →

?

Three files sealed

Goobers · Voidlings · Frogs

The paperwork, the unfiled and the owners. Each file opens with its own shift.

When →

Five species on five rungs of one ladder, all feeding the same machine. The grievances are specific, permanent and mostly petty. Nobody is at war. Everyone is annoyed.

Two questions, and nobody in Sootfall has an answer to either. Asking the first marks you as new. Nobody has been brave enough to try the second.

• What the Works makes. The wagons go out on the east road every morning, loaded and covered, and nobody has ever met anyone who met the buyer. A century of shifts has gone into it. Whatever it is, it had better be worth that.
• Whether the Works can stop. Everyone assumes not. The year it isn't fed will be the last year of anything, and the city has never once put that to the test.