The Logic of Strangers

Every kindness has a price. He cannot be charged.

He woke in a weighhouse, in a republic where every debt is weighed to the grain, and the great scale could not weigh him.

In Tares, the Republic of Measure, a nine-year-old girl steals a loaf of bread. The scale weighs her hunger against her theft, and two grains of injustice are left over with nowhere to go. No one in the room is cruel. The arithmetic simply has no way out. What the stranger does about those two grains will follow him across the whole map.

Tares is only the first border. Beyond it lie the Kindly Census, where neighbors vote every day on who you are; the City of Open Doors, which took down its doors after a winter when families died alone behind them; and the Province of Licensed Questions, where a deep question costs you your certainties.

Each country was founded on a promise most of us would sign. Each keeps it too well. And the one man no system can count is keeping the account of what perfection costs, and who pays.

The Logic of Strangers is Book One of A Map of Other Laws, a complete five-book series of literary speculative fiction. Twenty impossible countries. One question none of them can answer: what is a person worth to a system that cannot count him?