The Wake of Borrowed Maps

Wiremu Te Aho has learned that a map can preserve a route, conceal a theft, protect a confidence, or make another person's home appear empty.

Born in nineteenth-century Te Waipounamu, Wiremu grows from a boy questioning survey lines into a Māori seafarer whose work carries him through whaling waters, commercial ports, contested records, and the unequal machinery of colonial trade. Every crossing teaches him that knowledge is never separated from the person permitted to hold it-and that a clean copy can hide a complicated harm.

In Yokohama, an unresolved chart brings him into the path of Aiko Mori, a young Japanese copyist who understands that accuracy without consent can become another form of possession. Their carefully bounded exchange will outlast their meeting and reshape the evidence Wiremu carries home.

As family obligations, dangerous labor, grief, and compromised choices accumulate, Wiremu must decide whether humanity's memory protects it from repeating cruelty-or has become one of cruelty's most adaptable tools.

The Wake of Borrowed Maps is Book Five of the Fate versus Faith series, a literary historical-fantasy saga in which nine distinct lives become evidence in the final judgment of humanity.