Linden shakes his head slowly back and forth, glassy eyes distant and thoughtful. "We all start working early in 6," he says. "There's not really school to speak of, so... I mean there's not much else to do. Children tend to do cleaning duty in hard-to-reach places, teenagers and adults on the assembly lines, and... the really talented people get to be engineers, that kind of thing. My father was an engineer, but I wasn't talented. A boy I sort of knew named Shawford Mell was, but he got caught and shredded because the foreman wasn't. They hosed it down first and said to pretend it was wet sand, but even with the tinted glasses they gave us no one wanted to go scrub it out. That's what's happening in 6," he says, tone overbright. "Arena or no Arena, death lives there."