While she’s away, I wander the upper decks and mix with the tourists. They don’t pay much attention to me—my trainer uniform makes me as invisible as the waitstaff. But on the third night of the voyage, that changes.

The old man finds me on the main deck, reclining on one of the pool chairs and staring out at the ridge of Durga’s shell, highlighted by the moonlight. At first I don’t realize he’s there—I’ve gotten so used to being ignored—but then he clears his throat and says, “You’re quite young.”

I bristle at that, and not just because he’s quite old, his face cracked with lines, his hair barely a wisp. “First time,” I tell him as he settles on the chair next to me.

“Big responsibility,” he says, nodding toward the Reckoner, then remembers to introduce himself. “Hiro Kagawa. I was a Senator in the Southern States of America back in the day—I was actually on one of the subcommittees that authorized Reckoner justice in our waters.”

It takes me a second to connect the dots. The Southern States began the Reckoner trade long before the Southern Republic of California did, their hand forced by the swollen Gulf that was already choked with pirate strongholds. They had started raising monsters within years of the Schism. Which means …

“You lived in the United States, huh?” I ask.

“I was elected right after the Schism,” Mr. Kagawa says, his eyes sparkling in the low light. “But I lived through the worst of it, right before the world started to split.”

I figure it’s only fair to let him do what old men do best. “What do you remember?”

He sighs, rolling his head back toward the stars. “Oh, mostly rhetoric. ‘Smaller Governments, Bigger Hearts,’ all those catchy phrases being tossed around. Names too. Midwestern Republic. Southern States of America. Things with heft that people could get behind and trust to look after them. The seas were swelling, the floodwalls—” His voice cracks, and he blinks. “Well, you know the rest.”

I know enough. I know that one by one, the world governments started divvying up their lands, running algorithms, optimizing the care they could provide for their citizens, until the lines had been redrawn. No more United States, no more China, no more India, no more accounting for thousands of miles and billions of people under the rule of a single power.

It was so long ago that the world had already gotten used to it by the time I was born.