Motorcity doesn't have stars.

That's one of the disadvantages about living Below the Surface. No sky. No wide expanse of edge-to-edge blue, as seen from the penthouse of one of the towering, pristine buildings, or hover-platforms so high above the ground. No random disarray of constellations splayed across the midnight sky, sneaking out after curfew while the whole city is glowing dimly with artificial light.

Mike had figured the stars might have looked better somewhere farther away from this radiant abyss. Light pollution, or some obscure phrase from generations long gone, made stars appear fewer and washed out. But no one comes out onto the roof to stare at the sky anymore, anyway. Why, when you have everything you could possibly want inside? If you wanted to see the sky so bad, pull it up on a wall-to-wall screen and watch clouds pass in a time-lapse-film.

Motorcity doesn't have a sky.

It has a void, hundreds of feet of rusting cables and beams that weave and criss-cross their way up, gradual blackness that seems so massive it could swallow you whole. In that way, it is like a sky; a sky that eventually ends, and above it, certain doom. Maybe the real sky––the blue thing, up there––maybe that ends, too, somewhere. Maybe beyond it lays an uncertain doom, a million miles heavenward. Somewhere beyond the firmament, it lies, waiting.

Motorcity doesn't have stars, not in the traditional way. It has oblong glowsticks and chains of mismatched lightbulbs. It has the eerie red specks of mutant-rat-eyes, it has flashlights and fires in oildrums. Motorcity shines, with its neon lights, and, of course, with its flash of headlights. Deep below, Motorcity waits. Until the generators stop and the batteries run out and Deluxe itself ceases to glow, here it will remain, to welcome you home.