The Cartographer She Betrayed

She sold the same routes to three factions. Two of them used the maps to kill each other. She would do it again. Ada Reyes is the best cartographer left in the western basin and the most hated person in it. She sold passage through her own valley to whoever paid, and when a settlement burned, the men who burned it came in on her roads. Now her sister is dead, and Ada is walking north with the only master map, a plan to trade it for a boat, and the ghost of every route behind her. Then a coalition surveyor named Ilias Voss arrests her on the road — and gives her a worse sentence than a bullet. Redraw every corrupted route. In front of him. On the ground. Nine weeks of walking the wrong roads, arguing compass variance and grief, and correcting the last line on the map: the route that got his brother killed. He has known since the second week. He kept walking anyway. A slow-burn post-apocalyptic romance about maps, debts, and the long way back.