The Dreamchart of the Leviathan

THE DREAMCHART OF THE LEVIATHAN

A Novel of the Kun

The sea does not remember. It dreams.

Eighteen-year-old Xi wakes in the iron belly of a colonial warship, her body covered in glowing cartographic tattoos, her memory an ocean of black water. She does not weep. She does not scream. She draws her finger along the glowing lines of her own skin, as if tracing a map she cannot read, and wonders why the light feels like home.

Xi is a dreamweaver-one of the lost few who can enter the dreams of the great sea-beasts called the Kun. It is the Kun who dream the world's sea routes into being, their vast sleeping bodies the only charts the ocean has ever known. The Eastern Star-Flags Alliance has sailed these dream-routes for centuries. The colonial Iron Federation has spent fifty years destroying them, hunting the Kun and forging their remains into cold, perfect steel maps that need no living thing to exist.

They want Xi to be their weapon. They want her to find the last of the Kun. And they want her to do it before the Eastern Star-Flags Alliance can use her to save them.

But the first time Xi's consciousness is forced into the dream-current, something goes wrong. She tears across three hundred miles of open sea and collides with Lu Changfeng, a young navigator aboard the last great ship of the Star-Flags Alliance. For thirteen seconds, she is not Xi. She is a boy standing on a moon-bright deck, his palm rough against a bone-white wind flute, his heart beating against her ribs like a second, unfamiliar tide.

When the connection shatters, they are strangers again. But each bears the other's reflection branded on the back of the hand. A mark that aches when the other is afraid. A bond that will demand a price neither of them can foresee.

Lu Changfeng believes the East must change or die. He wants to build a future with rules, with structure, with a chance to survive. Xi doesn't know what she believes-except that the old dream-routes are alive, and killing them feels lik