Backstory
Inês Vasconcelos grew up in a Lisbon cartography shop, taught herself her father's shorthand, and learned three languages of scholarship before most of her neighbors had occasion to use one. Her father Joaquim left her a letter and a fraudulent boundary map, and the letter is an instruction to undo what the map does. The two-continent journey that follows is also the journey in which she learns that the network of letters, introductions, and trade connections her education gave her ran on the benefits of an empire she has not yet examined. Her flaw is a stubborn loyalty to her father's competence: she will resist, from the people most likely to know, the evidence that his work caused harm. The story will make her listen. Her great strength is a disciplined, adaptable intelligence that carries her through new protocols, new languages, and new moral registers without fuss, and lands her at each stage with a clearer view of the map she is actually trying to make.
