do not need reasons to exist. I do not need to justify the space I take up in this world. Not to myself, or Platt, or some hospital governors, or a pirate ship full of men with cutlasses. I have as much claim to this world as anyone else. No one will offer Johanna and me permission to make this work ours, to take up her mother’s maps and follow their headings to the horizon’s edge, where the sea and the sky smoke together. First of our name, first of our kind. There’s
