My sincerest thanks to my editor, Jess Harriton, for her work not just on this book but on the entirety of the journey these girls have endured, through war and its aftermath. Many thanks, too, to my agent, Noah Ballard, for spurring me on this odyssey to begin with. Shane Rebenschied created such a stunning cover for this book, and I thank Tony Sahara and Kristin Boyle for their art direction. It is a cover that celebrates the beauty and intelligence and fierceness Mante Dalton has brought to this book. Readers may notice in this book some of the stylistic and syntactical liberties I took, and to the degree that I’ve achieved any measure of success in that regard, credit must go to Marinda Valenti for her astute and precise copyediting. Thanks also to Abigail Powers for proofreading.

The illness that sweeps through the refugee population in Alabast is based on the real-life cases of hundreds of refugee children in Sweden who, upon hearing that their families were to be deported, fell into coma-like conditions. For that aspect of this novel, I relied heavily on reporting done in 2017 by Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker. Relatedly, I drew from Patrick Kingsley’s work in The Guardian, reporting from Joshua Hersh in Virginia Quarterly Review, and others who have done the necessary work of chronicling the perilous, unfathomably brave journeys undertaken by those fleeing conflict zones and other arenas of oppression for what they hope will be a place where they can build a life for themselves and their families. A number of pieces shed light on how host countries treat their new arrivals, notably Mac McClelland’s investigation for The New York Times Magazine of a Turkish camp holding Syrian refugees; additionally, Jonathan Blitzer of The New Yorker documents in detail the tragically incomplete and often hostile attitude that US governmental policy has held toward Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States.