The Great Egg

The Great Egg is the headquarters of the Wells Society, a stubborn old waterfront structure whose name outlived whatever once justified it. Modeled on the coastal rescue stations that lined the pre-fall shore, it is broad-shouldered and weather-beaten, all reinforced boat bays, storm shutters, watch platforms, and thick-walled workrooms cut to shrug off salt and flood. Nothing about it looks egg-like, and almost no one would call it great at a glance, but the name sticks, because Harbormarch clings to continuity long after the words stop matching the thing. Inside, it works as archive, workshop, training hall, coastal laboratory, and planning center, its rooms crowded with storm logs, rebuilt instruments, salvaged charts, and half-restored machines dragged out of the old world and pressed back into use.
  The Wells Society plays the longest game in Harbormarch, measured in decades rather than shifts: seawalls and pumps, drainage and dredging, purification and food resilience. Along the southern shore it organizes the food strips, marsh plots, and fish-breeding inlets meant to free the district from the Board's northern growyards, because it understands that a Harbormarch which cannot feed itself is hostage to the Board's appetite. The Board understands it too, and answers with a quiet war of sabotage that keeps every reclaimed acre under hostile eyes. The same engineers also make the Murder Gardens front possible, designing the barricades, drainage diversions, and burn lanes that let the Ossuary and Blacktide keep working while the neighborhoods stay standing.