I don't have a lot to add to my previous review of this piece, though I still think you're a good writer and you probably have a killer tale cooking here. I'm not going to get into minutia of character and plot. As to the former, you seem to have that well under control. Emma stands out, she has definite personality and one senses that she has clear priorities motivating her. As for plot, it's only the first chapter so there's no way I can assess your ability to take an initial situation and develop it, run it through multiple plot points and conjour up a third act, though, on the evidence here, you probably have a good idea where you want to take this.

My one complaint is similar to what I stated earlier, though I think I have a better sense of what the problem is. Emma is your main character, which is to say, her point of view will be the reader's gateway to all that transpires. (It's possible that you will have multiple POV characters, but that doesn't seem to be the case yet. No matter, my issues apply to any such character). What this means is that there is nothing that we experience that is not experienced by the POV character. So: every time you insert a bit of narrative backstory for the purpose of feeding information to the reader ask yourself, given Emma's self-awareness of her own past as well as the history of the world in which you've placed her, is this something that she herself would actually think? Would these thoughts pass through her consciousness? In other words, is this Emma, or is it you? If it's you, then you're going to have to pay strict attention to the pacing of the actual narrative. Stopping the action so you can provide an info-dump will ruin the reader's experience of what's taking place. You're narrative intrusions really need to be measured to match the present-time action. For instance, a character pausing to light a cigarette might be an occasion for them to reflect on a bit of backstory, but only a bit, and only for as long as they pause to strike the match. A cab ride uptown might allow for longer rumination, but since you would never show the entire ride, you don't have enough time for more than a few inserts.

Note here (in this admittedly long quote from the text) what you do to a simple stop in a coffee shop.

After walking up an interminable number of stairs, she finally made it into the Printz’s mall where she finally managed to find a coffee shop that faced into the street. Most people had set out early today so they could walk the last few blocks to their places of employment, relishing the brightness and warmth before the city exerted its inexorable power and took it all away, and that apparently encouraged people to spend what little money they had on luxuries like coffee from a shop, something they wouldn’t normally even think about. It was a wonder those places made enough money to keep them open, but she guessed there was always just enough patronage. Like most businesses, making money wasn’t the real objective, since profits would always be mean. Their true purpose was simply to provide employment, which in a world with twenty percent unemployment, was always a welcome thing. The aspirations of eighty percent of the population were simply to avoid falling below the poverty line.

The coffee shop had probably never been so busy, so Emma felt exceptionally lucky to snag a window seat, sliding her bum onto the stool even as the former occupant was sliding his off. This manoeuvre earned her a few hard stares from those who had been anticipating that particular moment for themselves, but their frustration was quickly forgotten as the buzz swept them up once more and recaptured their attention. One patron even offered her a wry grin and a shrug, an unexpected instant of bonhomie in a city where such things rarely happened outside your own tower. Sunny days were banner days, and on the last occasion two years ago, almost the entire population of Philadelphia had poured out onto the streets and had a party until the inevitably rising winds had put paid to such frivolity. The Dynasties, which had some amount of interest in almost every business in the city, had accepted the loss of revenue as most people skipped work that day. Normally people wouldn’t even think of doing such a thing, being so dependant on their jobs as they were, but with so many electing to take a day off there was little chance they’d get fired.

There was no chance of that happening today though. After the last party day, the Winstanley, Cavanagh and Xi Dynasties, which had the largest presences in Philly, had posted notices saying they’d allowed the party that day, but wouldn’t countenance it happening again. Bastards. The Dynasties had arisen in response to the Monopoly, imposed fifty years ago by Karyn’s corporation, Interplanetary Freight and Logistics (IPF&L). The Dynasties were great family run enterprises with fingers in every pie. The individual members of these family run machines were known as cogs, and even the most minor cog on the fringe of the most minor Dynasty was more powerful than any government on the planet. Nobody liked them, but they were necessary to keep Karyn in check.

She had quite literally monopolised space travel, kicking everyone else out of space at gun point, destroying ships that tried to test her resolve. Earth fed itself and the colonies on Mars and the Moon, and feeding twenty six billion people had forced the population into the cities so land could be reclaimed for agriculture. The growth of cities, often into mega-cities - redefined (for tax purposes) as having populations of forty million inhabitants or more - had required a lot of metal, and Earth was no longer able to provide the quantities needed either for that growth or for the general manufacturing base. Mars provided the bulk of metals now, and the Moon provided fuels extracted from the lunar regolith, mainly as hydrogen isotopes.

The interdependence of the three worlds meant that Karyn was now in a position that wielded huge imperial power. The Dynasties were formed from the leaders of the most powerful multi-national corporations, the only people with enough clout to negotiate with and oppose her.

Aside from interplanetary freight, her ships also provided global transport for those things that absolutely needed to be ‘there’ in a few hours, and sometimes were chartered to ferry people around the planet too, but all that was tolerable. What nobody wanted was her getting her fingers deep into the economy at the sort of level where she had direct control. By successfully fending off those aspirations for fifty years, the Dynasties had earned their keep. Everyone feared Karyn becoming a de-facto dictator. Nevertheless, she still wielded enormous power. Constant rises in her tariffs had driven the world to impoverishment, and the Monopoly was the defining factor in everyones life. Everything that contributed to your life being crap could trace its origins back to the Monopoly. If you wanted to know why most people hovered near the poverty line, you only had to look up to see the culprit. The bitch lived in isolation in her orbital habitat, the Aerie, just a few hundred miles overhead.

As the time approached daytime work hours, the coffee shop began to empty. The staff behind the counter looked relieved, and the beaming face of the manager spoke of unexpectedly large profits. Looking out onto the street, she considered the area. It was generally an upmarket zone, not far from the extreme south of the city which stretched as far as Wilmington. At one point in time it had been the suburban area for both Wilmington and Philly, before the city grew to swallow both, and so had always been the sort of place people aspired to live in, at least since the latter half of the twenty first century. Now though, although it was an expensive place to live, it looked pretty much like the rest of the city: tall towers ranging in height from forty to seventy storeys - somewhat lower than the average for the city - and subject to the same extreme weather patterns that mega-cities engendered. Claymont was bordered by the Delaware, which was pretty broad at this point, and she idly wondered if that gave it an improvement in weather or worse. Most of the cool, moist air that was sucked in by the rising thermals of the city came from further afield, the Atlantic, so on consideration she decided that the Delaware probably did little to affect rainfall here.

Not only are your characters standing around, looking at their watches, waiting for the action to kick in again, so are your readers. Not to mention that the story you've done such a good job of introducing up to this point suddenly vanishes while you begin a totally different story. "But," you protest, "it's all the same story." Fine. Figure out how to feed the larger context to the reader in the course of showing us Emma's story, since that's the one that will keep them turning the pages. Again, ask yourself, are these Emma's thoughts, things she would actually think in this moment, or is it just you blundering onto the stage, calling a halt to the proceedings in order that you might deliver a history lecture?

It's perfectly fine to have that larger context at your fingertips. Crucial, even. But reveal it through Emma, through the many minute signals that she would take for granted, but which, properly presented, allow the reader's sense of your larger universe to come more clearly into focus.

The example I gave was extreme, but there are many salted throughout the text, so much so that I feel confident in assuming that the pattern will continue throughout the remaining chapters. As they say, stories are all in the telling. You just need to evolve a more elegant way of telling this story. If you do, you'll have probably have a winner.