[ WP ] The Earth does not rotate . One side always faces the sun and is in continual daylight . The other side is in eternal night . Cultures on both side develop around this .

Marcus reached up and turned on his headlamp with one gloved hand. His other checked the latch on his harness as a matter of habit. He braced his feet against the sides of the shaft's ladder and leaned back to feel the air rushing down from the surface above. He never had much of an opportunity to feel it in the city below, huddled protectively beneath 40 kilometers of Earth's crust. It was one of the reasons he volunteered for the Maintenance Corps, the only faction besides the Researchers allowed even close to the surface. 
 
 `` There's nothing like the feel of the wind on your face,'' his father had always told him. `` It's the greatest thing in the world, like the Almighty himself is breathing down on you, full of freshness and life.'' He'd been a shaft engineer in the Corps for thirty years, right up until the first day of the War when a Brightsider rocket collapsed the ventilation shaft he was working in. 
 
 Marcus unlocked one of his harness straps and clipped it to the suspension ring that ran along the wall and away from the ladder. When he felt it snap closed, he unhooked the second let it drop, pushing himself away and into the darkness of the empty air. He hung for a moment, suspended in nothing and savoring the sound of the wind, so different from the din of the city: natural, peaceful, soft. Marcus imagined the great SunCallers and SightBlinders rumbling across the dunes of the surface above. The entire city knew by now: their defenses gone, the outposts overrun. It was worse than they had feared. The Council had claimed their only hope was to retreat deeper into the Earth, beyond the Heatways and into the Abyssal caverns, but Marcus knew it was no use. He looked up to see a tiny pinpoint of white blossom at the end of the tunnel.
