But as the day went on, he truly did approach the limit of the city and 
kept riding anyway toward the west, and it became evident then that he was a 
madman and the people in the streets looked at him with awe and got out of his 
way. Bicycles and pedestrians became less common, replaced by heavier and 
faster military traffic. Hackworth did not like riding on the shoulder of 
highways, and so he directed Kidnapper to find a less direct route to Suzhou, 
one that used smaller roads. This was flat Yangtze Delta territory only inches 
above the waterline, where canals, for transport, irrigation, and drainage, 
were more numerous than roads. The canals ramified through the black, stinky 
ground like blood vessels branching into the tissues of the brain. The plain 
was interrupted frequently by small tumuli containing the coffins of someone's 
ancestors, just high enough to stay above the most routine floods. Farther to 
the west, steep hills rose from the paddies, black with vegetation. The Coastal 
Republic checkpoints at the intersections of the roads were gray and fuzzy, 
like house-size clots of bread mold, so dense was the fractal defense grid, and 
staring through the cloud of macro- and microscopic aerostats, Hackworth could 
barely make out the hoplites in the center,
heat waves rising from the radiators on their backs and stirring the airborne 
soup. They let him pass through without incident. Hackworth expected to see 
more checkpoints as he continued toward Fist territory, but the first one was 
the last; the Coastal Republic did not have the strength for defense in depth 
and could muster only a one-dimensional picket line.