She departed through the main gate and rode down the hill. She kept 
approaching the cloud layer but never quite reached it; the lower she went, the 
softer the light became, and after a few minutes she could no longer see the 
rambling settlements of Dovetail when she turned around, nor the spires of St. 
Mark's and Source Victoria above it. After another few minutes' descent the fog 
became so thick that she could not see more than a few meters, and she smelled 
the elemental reek of the ocean. She passed the former site of the Sendero 
Clave. The Senderos had been bloodily uprooted when Protocol Enforcement 
figured out that they were working in concert with the New Taiping Rebels, a 
fanatical cult opposed to both the Fists and the Coastal Republic. This
patch of real estate had since passed into the hands of the Dong, an ethnic 
minority tribe from southwestern China, driven out of their homeland by the 
civil war. They had torn down the high wall and thrown up one of their 
distinctive many-layered pagodas.