The Pale!
Xasan had been on the force for a year before the Returners, ha, returned, and he’d spent some time in the part of Coaston that had been ‘given’ to the new arrivals. He’d also been involved in the relocation of all the stubborn holdouts who weren’t going to move unless they were made to. Nobody had died in Coaston over being relocated, but that was more luck than anything else. The Returners hadn’t been shy about exercising their squatters’ rights, after all.
He was mildly surprised to see how little the Returners had changed the place. The streets were still there, and the traffic lights; even the trees and grass looked the same. The signs on the shops and the billboards all used that weird chicken-scratch alphabet, and the Pale smelled different in the spring evening air, but if you squinted it didn’t seem too strange. Everything was well-maintained, too, with nothing out of place and nothing left to stay broken. The Returners weren’t slobs. It felt empty, though. He knew the Returners liked having more personal space than humans did, but seeing all this quiet really drove that home.