Backstory
Tomás Ribeiro is a young naval surveyor stationed in Mozambique who arrived in Africa believing in the empire that commissioned him and has spent fourteen months quietly revising every article of that faith without telling anyone. His discipline is absolute — he has memorized his orders verbatim and rewrites them in his own hand to be sure of them, which is exactly how he caught the forgery. His commission is his family's livelihood; exposing the Muanje fraud will cost him his career and, through him, his sisters' prospects, and he has been composing and destroying letters about this for weeks. He is stubborn about naval precedence in a way he does not entirely recognize as self-protection, and Inês has noticed. His great loyalty — to the navy that shaped him, to the woman whose father left her this mission, to the village his fraudulent orders would displace — runs in three directions that increasingly require different actions.
