Delray has been dying for a century and nobody has had the decency to let it finish. The neighborhood sits at the confluence of the Detroit River and the River Rouge, wedged between the Marathon petroleum refinery (now Ouroboros Energy's Great Lakes Processing Hub), the Rouge industrial complex, and the international freight crossing to Canada. In the 20th century, Delray was a working-class immigrant neighborhood — Hungarian, then Mexican, then whoever was willing to live next to a refinery. In the 22nd century, the human population has dwindled to approximately 1,100 residents who are too rooted, too poor, or too sick to leave, occupying a landscape so contaminated that the soil itself is classified as industrial waste.

Ouroboros Energy's Great Lakes Processing Hub dominates the district — a chemical refinery and energy processing complex that no longer refines petroleum but converts industrial waste streams, biomass, and recycled materials into the synthetic fuel and chemical feedstocks that the GLMZ's manufacturing sector requires. The process is cleaner than oil refining was. The residual contamination from a century of petroleum processing is not clean. The ground is saturated with heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, and substances that environmental scientists identify by number rather than name because naming them would require acknowledging what they do to human tissue. Ouroboros maintains an air quality monitoring station in the district. The station's readings are technically within legal limits. The legal limits were set by a panel that included three Ouroboros consultants.

The 1,100 remaining residents live in what environmental justice researchers call a sacrifice zone — a geographic area where the cost of industrial activity is borne by the people who can least afford to leave. They are predominantly elderly. They are predominantly sick. The cancer cluster data is robust enough for an epidemiological study but not for a lawsuit, because Ouroboros's sovereign industrial charter exempts the Processing Hub from external environmental litigation. The residents have a community center, a volunteer health clinic, and a priest who holds services in a building where the paint peels in patterns that trace the groundwater contamination plume. They also have something the corponations didn't expect: a comprehensive archive of environmental monitoring data going back to the 1970s, maintained by three generations of residents who understood that the only defense against institutional denial is institutional documentation.