Become a citizen.

Thin air, hard light and the clearest sky in Hearth, which is why the gate-watchers and the observatories are here. Also the system’s mineral source.

Vertical. Settlements are stacked into valley walls and joined by cable and short flights; walking anywhere sideways means going up first. Hard to walk, spectacular to fly.

Patient and taciturn. Cairn has watched the gates longer than anywhere else, and it was Cairn that first noticed a dormant gate wake. Cairn people are the ones who notice things.

Relentless sun, enormous solar fields, and the smelters and fabricators that build everything Hearth does not grow. Kiln is the foundry.

Hard and hot. You work at night and shelter at noon. Water is the local currency and the local obsession, and the horizon is so far away it is unnerving after a lifetime of forests.

Proud of the difficulty. Kiln is where the ships get built, and Kiln does not let anyone forget it. The best pilots in Hearth are disproportionately from Kiln — which Kiln puts down to character, and everyone else to boredom.

The seed vaults, the growth labs, the medicines. Whatever its builders intended, Canopy is where life is at its most inventive, and the Charter’s biologists have never run out of work.

Dense, humid and close — the horizon is thirty metres away in every direction. Infrastructure is visibly losing to the plants, and settlements climb into the canopy because the ground belongs to something else.

Improvisational and a little feral. Canopy fixes things with whatever grew nearby, and has the highest rate of unchartered departures in Hearth — which the Charter finds troubling and Canopy finds funny.

The system’s hydrology: filtration, processing, and the reclamation of everything the other five worlds are finished with.

Wet, flat, grey-green and quietly beautiful if you give it a season. Nothing stands far above the water and nothing stays dry. Settlements are on stilts and boats, and the routes between them change.

Disreputable and unbothered about it. Fen processes what the others discard, including cargo that arrived without paperwork. The least respectable of the six, and by a wide margin the most interesting.

Built like the others, to the same standard, clearly on purpose — and nothing the Charter can measure explains what for. Bioluminescent growth in colours with no business being in a forest, and light that comes up out of the ground at dusk.

Small, quiet and heavily supervised: mostly researchers and the families of researchers. The Charter would rather people did not settle there, and people settle there anyway.

The one you pick on purpose. The luminous growth is spreading, into patterns survey after survey declines to call deliberate. The file is open. The file has always been open.