Adaeze Traoré is a lean, sun-darkened man whose face carries the deep-etched lines of someone who has slept outdoors more than inside. His hair is silver-streaked black, kept in tight locks that hang to his collarbone, adorned with small brass charms he picks up at every stop. His hands are the most notable thing about him — enormous, ink-stained, with knuckles swollen from decades of drafting in the cold. He carries three hand-sewn leather satchels at all times, each packed with rolled paper maps he has made himself, annotated in four languages with notes on water quality, E.L.F. activity, corrupt checkpoint guards, and where to find honest food. His geneware is a single cosmetic mod — irises with faint golden patterning that he got from a Helix Biosystems field clinic fifteen years ago in exchange for drawing them an accurate map of the Waukegan shelf.

Adaeze Traoré talks like a man who has learned that most words are wasted. He is not unfriendly — he simply measures speech the way a traveler measures water. He has been moving along the hyperlane corridors and shoreline routes for thirty years, since his cooperative settlement outside what is now Grainfort was absorbed by Axiom and everyone was given seventy-two hours to vacate. He does not consider himself a refugee anymore. He considers himself a professional. He trades in maps that official systems won't make because official systems don't want people knowing the things he knows.