Not a ship — a place, and the most important one in its region. The Lantern is a
cathedral-scale anchor that holds a single great fold open and lit, so that a whole frontier — its
colonies, its freight, its people — can thread home through one mouth instead of
scattering across a dozen unstable seams. Keep the Lantern lit and the region lives. The schematic
is plain; the engineering is anything but. It was never built to carry what it now carries.
* The rising draw and the spar-3 drift are logged, filed, and left to the next survey. They read as the
ordinary fatigue of a structure doing too much for too long. They are not. In The Guttering Light a
bombing, a crackdown, and the failing junction all reach the Lantern at once — and the question becomes what
a region does when its one lit door begins to go out.