Narrative atlas · spoiler-aware

Where the record touches ground

Follow the novel from Lake Michigan through the Bright Belt and north to Toronto. Named geography is mapped directly; fictional and deliberately vague locations are marked as illustrative rather than passed off as canon.

Nine sites from the record

A map with its uncertainty showing

Place names and spoiler-light setting notes are visible. Character visits and plot events remain closed until you choose to reveal them.

Geographic anchorRegional anchorIllustrative placement

Site 01 / 09Regional anchor

Lake Michigan · south of Chicago

Vance south shore

First seen: Prologue Prologue · Ch. 20 · Ch. 33 · Ch. 38 · Epilogue

The Vance family’s freshwater cooperative occupies an unnamed stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline south of Chicago. The manuscript fixes the shore and its relationship to the city, but never supplies a town or dock coordinate.

Map notePlaced on the south Lake Michigan shore as a regional marker; the exact Vance dock is intentionally unspecified.

Location spoilers · Hidden by defaultReveal visitors and story notes

Amara and Silas build their calibration discipline here; Mara and June learn it as children. The cooperative’s clean feed is defeated during the Cascade, and its old checksum later becomes the authentication root beneath Proof of Presence. Mara returns to the same frontage to teach children how to ground an observation.

Characters and witnesses