The City is very large, but not infinite. There is a boundary between where The City is and where it is not. That boundary is deliberately hard to find. Let's suppose that you start out on Ulyitsa Kropotkina, a major thoroughfare in the Novorussia district. You can follow that street for hundreds of miles in what seems like a straight line. The name will change, to Wia Centra and then to Hoffmanstrasse and then to a dozen other names as you pass through various districts. After a day or two of motorized travel, or several weeks journey by foot, you will find yourself right back on Ulyitsa Kropotkina in Novorussia. Every street that completely traverses The City in any direction is like that... some take longer to bring you back to where you started than others, but they all eventually do.

To get to The City's edge, you have to leave the beaten path. You have to sneak through the maintenance tunnels, and drop into the transport tubes where gravity behaves strangely and cars flash by at hundreds of miles per hour. Pause for a moment to ponder that it must have been centuries since anybody's feet have touched this ancient plasteel, but don't pause too long, because this lull in the traffic won't last forever, and eventually a municipal bus will appear out of nowhere and your head will become a chunky reddish film rapidly spreading accross its windshield. Better to hurry onward to yet another maintenance hatch which takes you even deeper into the no-user-serviceable-parts-inside, warranty-void-if-opened nether regions of the city. Here and there, you might have to wear your gills and swim through liquid waste backed up from the recycling vats. In one place there's literally a bottomless chasm, and you have to swing accross on loose cables dangling down from both sides. It's easier than it looks, though, because the gravity is pretty low in that spot. By this time, you're in the really old parts... so old that the nanites don't bother maintaining them anymore, and they actually have started to look old.

You squeeze through dense tangles of burnt wires and brittle tubing, and then break through... to empty space. Find something to hold onto so you don't drift away, because there is almost no gravity at The City's Edge. All around you, as far as the eye can see, is an expanse of pipes, scaffolding, and conduit. If you look closely, you'll notice that far away it repeats itself... if you bring a telescope, you might even see the back of your own head out there, staring into a telescope. That's because of the curvature of the pocket universe that contains, and is almost completely filled by, The City.

As for what's overhead, that varies. When Clav and I first found the place as children, the sky was filled by a blue nebula, sprinkled with bright, newborn stars. It never changed in the slightest detail... it could have been a giant painting for all we knew. Then, one day when we came there, the scenery was abruptly different. The nebula was gone, replaced by a band of stars cutting accross the center of the sky. Once, when The City was conducting 'safety drills' we got bored of sitting all cooped up in the emergency shelter so Clav got Ist, one of his broodmates, to help us hack an airlock. We took Ist to our secret spot, and that time the sky was not motionless. It was full of starships, like in the Interactives, many of them exploding in tiny flashes of light. We were old enough to know then that it wasn't just for practice that they were making everyone sit in the shelters. As we watched, the sky rippled. It broke up into smaller and smaller wavelets until we couldn't see anything but a storm of light and shadow. Soon after the city-wide safety drills were over, and we got into big trouble for sneaking away. None of us told the adults about our secret, and so Ist came to join our little club; from then on, it was three of us going to The City's Edge. We were lucky. It is rare for people of any age to have so much space all to themselves. To know about something that nobody else knows about. Maybe that's why each of us has turned out the way we have.

The last time I went there, it was just before I left for the Justice Academy. I went by myself, because Ist had already left the old neighborhood and Clav was sick. It was harder getting there than it used to be, with my heavy, bulky adult body. When I broke through the tangle of junk into the open space, I almost broke all the way through and could have easily gone spiralling endlessly into the cold depths of space. I just sat there for a while, catching my breath, and looking at the sky for what might be the last time for many years. It was still the same unremarkable cluster of stars that was in the sky after the space battle. Maybe it meant we won for a while. Maybe The City finally found a patch of space to look out on where the Others wouldn't be looking back in on us. I took it as a good omen.