The brass eyepiece of the thirty-power naval spotting scope was icy cold against Julian Vance’s right eyebrow.
Crouched on the rain-swept gravel roof of Apex Super-Mart #02 at the northern edge of District 2, Julian adjusted the knurled focus ring. Three hundred yards to the north, the entrance to District 1 hung in the misty night like an illuminated island of glass and gold. Massive fluted pillars of reinforced concrete held it two hundred feet above the harbor viaducts.
Skybridge #1 spanned three hundred feet of empty air between the working-class tenements and the private citadel of the Uptown Spire.
Through the crosshairs of the scope, the divide between two worlds was brutally stark.
On the southern side of the bridge, where Julian and his crew knelt, freezing acid rain fell in relentless sheets, pooling in dark asphalt gutters beneath flickering streetlamps. The cold cut through wool and canvas, carrying the sour stench of harbor diesel and burnt coal.
On the northern side of the bridge, behind an eighty-foot wall of bulletproof plate glass, the air was seventy-four degrees and dry. Banks of high-intensity solar radiation lamps bathed Spire Plaza in brilliant, artificial noon sunlight. Palm trees imported from tropical greenhouses swayed gently in conditioned breezes, while crystal chandeliers suspended from vaulted marble porticos threw diamond patterns of light across polished travertine floors.
