The Cartographer's Last Lie

Fenwick Vane has spent thirty years redrawing the world — rivers, borders, entire towns — with nothing but a pen and the quiet, terrible certainty that he was helping. Nobody ever asked him to stop. Nobody ever asked him to check. Now he's dying, and the last thing his hands draw before they go still will become permanent forever: a truth the world can never be argued out of. The problem is, he has never once drawn a true thing.

Then Sil arrives on his doorstep, furious and precise, carrying six months of evidence and one stolen sister. She doesn't want an apology. She wants him to *look* — at every place he's touched, every life he's rearranged, every cost he never bothered to count. Eight sites. One month. A journey through the wreckage of good intentions.

Because the hardest thing to draw isn't a better world. It's the one that's actually there.