Absalom has canals. It's one of the city's nicer features, even if they're usually a thicky, soupy green and smell like alchemical runoff on a good day. Rahim likes them. Élie likes to bring him into the city whenever he can spare the time from his work – to see Naima, who can't ever, and buy chestnut cakes from a Galtan exile with a cart at the corner of Synastry Street, and generally see things beyond mortal imagining, which tend to crop up every city block. Just now he's found a group of street performers with glowing animate tattoos that leap between them and out into the air, but Rahim's more interested in the water. Élie wonders if it reminds him of his infancy by the river Junira. Or maybe it's just hot.