Chapter One: The Map That Would Not Stay Still

On the morning the map changed, Mara Vale was late to her own life. She knew this because the kettle screamed itself hoarse while she stood in the doorway, coat half-buttoned, watching the lines on the paper crawl like ants. Streets lengthened. Rivers curved where none had been. The old bell tower—gone for thirty years—rose again in a charcoal smudge, as if drawn by a hand that could not quite remember its height. Mara set the kettle back on the stove and pressed her palms flat against the table. The map was supposed to be fixed. It had been fixed for a century, or at least since the city had stopped pretending it knew where it was going. She had inherited it from her father, folded so many times that the creases formed a second geography, a lattice of right angles and compromises. She breathed until the room steadied. The map did not. Outside, the siren for the seven-thirty ferry moaned across the harbor. Mara was a cartographer in a city that believed maps were quaint souvenirs, the kind you framed in cafés and forgot to read. Her job, as defined by the Municipal Archive, was to preserve artifacts of a static past. Her job, as defined by her father before the drink took him, was to tell the truth about places. The map twitched. Mara folded it along its old scars, slipped it into her satchel, and left the apartment without finishing her tea.