The Leviathan is a nightclub built on a decommissioned colony barge — a flat-bottomed vessel eighty meters long and twenty-five meters wide that was originally designed to haul agricultural supplies between the Lake Michigan floating colonies. When the barge's hull integrity degraded below cargo-safe thresholds, its owner — a colony captain named Adaeze Karpenko-Obi — did not scrap it. She welded it to two smaller barges for stability, anchored the assembly three kilometers off the Chicago shoreline, and opened a bar. The Leviathan has been floating in approximately the same spot since 2191, held in place by anchor chains and by Adaeze's refusal to acknowledge that a nightclub on a barge is an unreasonable thing to operate.

Reaching the Leviathan requires a boat. Water taxis run from Old Harbor's eastern dock every evening starting at 21:00, the crossing takes fifteen minutes, and the taxi operators — all colony natives — charge a flat fare that includes a drink token and a life vest that nobody wears. The crossing itself is part of the experience: fifteen minutes of open water, the city's light behind you, the Leviathan's light ahead, and the absolute darkness of Lake Michigan on all sides. On clear nights you can see the colony flotillas' running lights to the north, clusters of civilization scattered across the lake like a second, quieter skyline. You arrive at the Leviathan by climbing a rope ladder from the water taxi to the barge deck, which is the club's bouncer — if you can't climb the ladder, you can't enter. Adaeze considers this fair.

The Leviathan's deck is the dance floor — open sky, open water, the city a wall of light on the western horizon. The below-deck spaces are the bar, the lounge, and a series of small rooms that Adaeze rents for private meetings at prices that reflect the fact that you are three kilometers from shore and no surveillance system in Meridian can reach you. The music is provided by colony DJs who play a genre that has no name on shore — a hybrid of styles from the flotilla's culturally blended communities, built on bass frequencies that carry across water and rhythms that come from the particular experience of living on a surface that is always moving. For freelancers, the Leviathan is freedom expressed as a location — a place that is technically part of no jurisdiction, reached only by deliberate effort, governed by a woman who answers to no one, and soundtracked by music that the city hasn't learned to make yet.