Up- and downstream of the bridge, the funeral piers were crowded with 
refugee families heaving corpses into the Huang Pu; the emaciated bodies, 
rolled up in white sheets, looked
like cigarettes. The Coastal Republic authorities had instituted a pass system 
on the bridges to prevent rural refugees from swarming across into the 
relatively spacious streets, plazas, atria, and lobbies of Pudong and gumming 
up the works for the office crowd. By the time Nell made it across, a couple of 
hundred refugees had already picked her out as a likely alms source and were 
waiting with canned demonstrations: women holding up their gaunt babies, or 
older children who were trained to hang comatose in their arms; men with open 
wounds, and legless gaffers dauntlessly knuckle-walking through the crowd, 
butting at people's knees. The taxi-drivers were stronger and more aggressive 
than the rurals, though, and had a fearsome reputation that created space 
around them in the crowd, and that was more valuable than an actual vehicle; a 
vehicle would always get stuck in traffic, but a taxi-driver's hat generated a 
magic force field that enabled the wearer to walk faster than anyone else.