Seven Trades

The Seven Trades are the Colony’s system for dividing and administering work: seven self-governing Works cover the labor required to sustain the settlement, while their heads form a Board of Trades that reports to the Household. By extending this structure beyond the walls to the power station, turbines, grazing fields, and pits, the system makes collective survival an organized division of labor—and places that labor within a hierarchy of civic authority.

Structure and Responsibilities

The Seven Trades encompass the Watch, Heavy Duty, Light and Power, Agriculture, Livestock, Commerce and Manufacturing, and Sanctuary-Infirmary. Their remit includes work both inside and outside the Colony’s walls, linking defense, energy, food production, and other essential services within a single framework.

Each Trade is self-administering. Its head joins the Board of Trades, which reports to the Household in the manner the Household determines and at its discretion. The Household also consults the Board on defense, production, illumination, and the distribution of equal shares, but retains final authority in disputes and civil emergencies. The design therefore gives the Works operational autonomy without making them politically sovereign.

The Watch illustrates how a Trade could have specified internal staffing and responsibilities. It was to include at least one First Captain, three Second Captains, fifteen Full Watch, and a number of runners to be determined. Firearms and piercing weapons within the walls were to be stored in the Armory under the Watch’s protection, joining defense work to the settlement’s centralized control of weapons.

Membership and the Sanctuary

The system begins shaping a child’s place in the community before that child enters a Trade. Children remain within the Sanctuary, identified as F. D. Roosevelt Elementary School, until their eighth birthday. On leaving, a child selects a Trade, subject to the Colony’s needs and approval by both the Household and the Board of Trades. A personal choice is thus recognized, but bounded by communal labor demands and institutional consent.

The rules also connect work assignment to household membership and equal shares. On release from the Sanctuary, a child’s share reverts to the Household of which the child is part, to be carried along at marriage. The provisions make the allocation of labor inseparable from the allocation of resources and the structure of family life.

Sanctuary children are kept ignorant of the world outside the walls in its present condition. They are not to be told about the virals, the Watch’s duties, or the Great Viral Cataclysm; knowingly informing a child of these matters can be punished by being put outside the walls. The Sanctuary is therefore not only an educational institution but also a boundary around knowledge, regulating what future Trade members are permitted to know as they grow up.

Social Order and Significance

The rules’ reach is visible in ordinary family memories. Sara recalls childhood in the Sanctuary as a world that felt safe, where her concerns were visits from her parents, the teacher’s mood, and friendships. Her parents came to say good night, then left when the teacher said it was time; only later did Sara recognize that her childhood understanding concealed a troubling truth about adult life. The arrangement’s emotional cost emerges through the gap between a child’s sheltered routine and the life beyond it.

The broader provisions show a community balancing survival, labor, and population. In another settlement, the importance assigned to pregnancy is stated bluntly: a woman able to bear a child is treated as a valuable resource because so few people remain. Against that logic, the Colony’s rules distribute work from age eight and attach shares to households and marriage. Together, these arrangements reveal a social order in which reproduction, labor, and access to resources are bound to the continued existence of the group.

The Seven Trades consequently function as more than a list of occupations. They connect the Colony’s infrastructure and defenses to its governing bodies, while shaping children’s transition into adult work and defining how shares move through households. Their promise is coordinated survival; their constraint is that individual choice and knowledge remain subject to the needs and authority of the community.