From the Mothercoast the map swept east: hundreds of miles of open ocean, barren islets, wild currents. The Mother of Storms. Baru’s eyes crossed the distance like a ship, imagining thirst, hundred-foot waves, maelstrom, thirst and thirst and desperate salty thirst. At last she came to a coastline complicated by inlets and fjords and interior lakes. Smoking volcanoes issued clouds of thin paint.

The mapmakers had written here, in plain blocks, THE SUPERCONTINENT.

“Why is it super?” she asked.

“Because it’s huge.”

“How do you know?”

“We found maps. Made by explorers from the pre–Oriati Mbo. They died over there.”

“Oh…” Baru said, dreaming of long eons and secret valleys. She would like to be an explorer.

“Who would ever want to oppose our glorious Republic?” Apparitor murmured, with bitter admiration. “Who would want to kill the thing that makes maps like this?”

Baru would. Because she would never share this world with Tain Hu. She would never point from a ship’s mast and say, See that mountain? I’ve named it for you.

“Tell me the rules,” she commanded.

*   *   *

“BEHOLD, attend, hear ye hear ye, and et cetera,” Apparitor hiccupped. “Let these be the laws of those who act beyond the law.”

The cooks had laid out breakfast. Soft-boiled chicken eggs cooling in their brown shells, spring mango, smoked fish, rusk bread, and dipping coffee. The centerpiece was three guga in a sugar glaze: baby gannets, taken from the clifftop colonies which surrounded the keep in white fields of guano and squawking chicks. The exile staff held a contest every year to make the best gannet dish. For Baru they’d arranged the chicks upon mirrored vessels, posed as if in flight.

She was ravenous. She hadn’t eaten since she saw the ship coming in with Hu.

“The Cryptarch’s Qualm.” Apparitor stared into his vodka bottle as if he could read the words from the light in the drink. “Your power is secret, and in secret it is total. But to use your power you must touch the world. To touch you must be touched, to be touched is to be seen, to be seen is to be known. To be known is to perish. Act subtly, lest you diminish.” He took a slug.

She only needed to survive long enough to destroy it all. Subtlety could be dismissed. “Eat,” she suggested. “Or you’ll be useless soon.”

“I don’t want to be of any use to you.” But he picked up an egg and began to juggle it, one-handed. “Next, the Tyrant’s Qualm—”

“Are we tyrants?” Baru sliced her mango. The blade snicked on the plate: the texture too much like flesh. Her chest hurt.