"I didn't say unusable, I said uninviting."

Shrug. "Shall we fly to your hidden shuttle?"

"Sounds like a plan."

Steel follows. "I might want one of these. It would be awfully convenient in some ways, I think."

"The shuttle? They're a little harder to pilot than I'm making it look, if you want to do anything more than point-to-point, but maybe that'd do it for you. I could make something less complicated that would handle that though."

"Point to point would do it. For visiting cities and advertising your shiny new island. We might want regular trips to the various existing places and back, if we find any cooperative municipalities."

"I was thinking bridge with an automatic train."

"Bridges can be destroyed by someone sufficiently determined, and cannot reroute as easily. If you find a relatively unclaimed spot and claim the far side it might work, though."

"What is the state of the bridge-destroying art?"

"Pyre-fire burns hot enough to melt most metals. Sugar-oxygen bombs are unstable but powerful. You can make a nick and repeatedly freeze and melt water inside it to force something apart. If they were really determined they would start flinging boulders the size of buildings and slugs of metal the size of people at it."

"Okay," shrugs Cam, "I'll get exotic with my bridge materials and be ready to make ferries if someone gets past them."

"If you think that'll take care of it. Time to fly over the sea looking for convenient islands?"

"The things you can do continue to be slightly unnerving. I'm tempted to never draw circles again, in case I get someone like Durant."

"Durant?" Cam hops out of his ship.

"He's the richest man in Opri, thanks to his buddy-buddy relationship with Kell, tax exemptions, protection rackets, and monopolies on certain services."

"I mean, that would be an unfortunate daeva to summon, but the ones you'd really have to worry about would be more overtly destructive than - I mean, accumulating capital is not a thing in Hell or Heaven, it's probably a thing in Fairyland but then you'd just have a fairy participating in your economy, that's not such a disaster."

"So the ones to avoid are less greedy authoritarian, more serial killer? Fair enough."

"I mean, if you get a greedy demon, they don't even take summons. Why would they? They can make an enormous pile of gold and jewels and sleep on it like a dragon if they want without having to bother you. The time to worry is if they want to hurt people."

"Do you already have the infrastructure of this place appeared? Water, electricity, sewage, the subway - underground trains, I assume?"

"I have space for it. It won't all be hooked up until there's somewhere for it to go."