Region Sheets

The deep cluster the NV Dawnward opens in 2312. Everything in the reach reaches home through one throat, which is the whole shape of the trilogy: a region with a single door, a people living under a failing sun, and a road that gets wider every year. No shared coordinates with the home network — the reach is charted by topology, not by sky.

The charted Seam-junction network of human space — every junction with a real-sky position, mapped against the actual star catalogue. This is the navigable, ledgered, living half of the universe. First signal 2047; first traversal 2071; the network most of the franchise takes place inside.

The same charted junctions as the celestial sky map, laid out flat by their real positions — right ascension across, declination up — so the diagram lines up with where each junction sits on the star map. The clean, legible companion to the rotating sky view: every junction, its Wound-coupling, and the Seam routes between them, at a glance.

A completely disconnected Seam network with no shared coordinates and no relay to home — which is why it has no place on the Seam chart. It is a spent network: heat-death in progress, junctions guttering, the free-energy floor climbing, stars dimming toward a dead heart. The ISV Endurance is flung here by sabotage and finds her own way back the oldest way there is — by dead reckoning. This chart is schematic, not celestial: positions are narrative, not astronomical. Homeward is left; the deep cold is right.

The Sundgren Combine’s sling-and-catch transport region — the theatre of The Wrong Number. Mass-driver “slings” fling supply pods across the system on a flat ballistic line, and a chain of decelerator rings catches them at Tornel, gentle as freight. Crewed ships don’t run supplies here; they escort. Schematic, not celestial: positions are narrative.

The far reach: everything past the certified boundaries that no dependable schedule crosses. A converted survey hull, cut from a surveyor in 2326, works it — mark stations, watering runs, roads that are marked rather than held — and the same roads carry a colony survey out to Fifteen, where the Sennet junctions end. Drawn from the books' own clocks: the Far Roads fixes every interstellar leg at seven to ten days, and this sheet spends a tenth of its width on each. Positions are narrative, not astronomical; the Cairn is the hub and the reach runs away from it to the right.

Hart, on Fifteen: the settlement that terminal black is measured against. Drawn as a plan, not a star chart — the freight road from South Thermal to the Foundry gate, the nine kilometres of main out to Tolliver on the lake, the array on its rise, the Launch Spine at the strategic edge of town with the North Flats beside it where a station core comes down. The three distances the books state are honoured; the rest is the place register's relations, laid out so the search chapters can be followed on it.

Past the Rivas corridor: the Lantern, a cathedral-scale junction anchor that holds a great fold open, with Lanehead living off its crossing and Saltire on the far side of the fold; the Causeway, the contested chokepoint the third book is fought over; the Doorstep, the quiet junction in the same region the Endurance comes home through; and the Span, the throat she was flown back through. Schematic: positions are narrative, not astronomical.