Sunny had never thought that he would leave the city one day. He had barely ever thought that there was anything beyond the city, actually. More than that, for him, the city proper itself had always seemed like an alien land. His whole world used to start and end with the outskirts.
Tens of millions of people who lived in the outskirts had a very special relationship with the wilderness beyond. They spent their lives much closer to it than real citizens, and were not separated from it by the tall barrier walls that encompassed powerful air filters. On one hand, it made them more attuned to the existence of the outside.
On the other hand, they associated the outside with death, disease, and starvation on a much more visceral level. To them, the wilderness meant death in a very practical sense of the word, as opposed to distant and purely theoretical.
