In the quiet hours before the morning tide, when the last tier of refugees had settled into deep, healing medicine sleep, Qiao Ming walked out onto the secluded balcony of Entry hall 102.
The balcony was a narrow slab of white banded limestone that jutted out over the deep silt drain tube. An upright deep gap four hundred paces deep where the cold, dead salt water of the ocean trench was drawn into the lowest cleansing drain pits. Here, far from the warmth of the forty-eight thousand hearths, the air was sharp and cold, smelling of ancient stone salt, stone-hard kelp, and the ancient dust of drowned continents.
The lanterns of the Grand Cross-hall were still visible in the far distance. He drifted like a faint star-pattern through the lower galleries, but here at the edge of the deep gap, the gloom was velvet and deep.
Qiao Ming stood at the stone railing, his bare calloused feet resting against the damp stone curb.
For twenty years, he had been Caspian the Mapmaker. The man with the knotted horsehair line, the folded brass star-compass, and the salt-whitened oilskin coat. He was the one who did not panic when the seawalls shattered. The one who sounded the ledges while children screamed. The one who calculated cubic yards of shifted weight and sea-weights of deep water pressure while empires dissolved into bloody mud.
