The wall map was the largest object in the Council Hall and the only one Maya hadn't built herself.

It had come to Haven in 2042 from a community college in Albuquerque that had, at the time, been considering using it for a fire and had instead given it to her in exchange for a hundred and sixty pounds of carrots. The map was eight feet by twelve. Its base was the post-Cascade USGS reissue of the western states at one-to-five-hundred-thousand, mounted on quarter-inch plywood with a quarter-inch sheet of cork laminated under the paper for the pins. The cork had been new in 2042. It was now dimpled across the eastern half from the four years of pin-shifts and pin-movings and pin-corrections that the resistance and then the post-resistance had required, and where the cork wasn't dimpled it was dimpled in the small precise pattern of a woman who had stood in front of the map at four in the morning with a thumbnail and pressed.

Maya had made that pattern. She didn't deny it.

She was thirty-eight years old. She had been the chair of the Haven Council since 2038, which made her the chair, by that count, of nothing more or less than a small town the size of a county seat in Wyoming; the chair of a township that had elected her at twenty-nine and hadn't asked her, in the eight years since, to step down. They were going to have to decide, someday, whether to ask her to step down. She had been thinking about that someday a great deal lately. Not because anyone had said anything. Not because anything was going wrong. Because the map had eleven pins in it, and one of the pins was an unnumbered pin she had pushed in last week with no settlement name on it, and because she had begun, in the last fortnight, to wake up at four in the morning with the image of the map behind her closed eyelids and the small black-headed pins moving on it, and the map was telling her, as maps sometimes told their custodians, that the shape of the thing she was custodian of was changing under her hands.

She arrived at the Hall at six-thirty-eight. She was the first one in. She had been the first one in for eight years; the others had stopped trying to beat her on the day Henry had come in at five-fifteen one morning and found her already there with a fire in the stove. Maya, he had said, you are going to have to learn to let other people get the place warm; and she had said, Henry, you are going to have to learn that this is one of the small mercies I am unwilling to give up, and he had laughed and made the coffee and they hadn't spoken about it again.

She made the coffee now. The Hall's coffee was made in a fourteen-cup percolator on the back of the Hall's wood stove. The percolator had belonged to a logging camp in Idaho in the 1970s and had come to Haven in a yard sale in 2041. It made coffee that was acceptable from the first cup, and excellent at hour two, and no longer drinkable at hour four, and over the years the rhythm of the Hall's day had quietly arranged itself around the rhythm of the percolator. The morning meeting was at seven. The mid-morning workshop was at ten-thirty. The percolator was emptied and rinsed at eleven and started again for the noon council. Maya didn't, herself, drink more than one cup before the morning meeting. She had a particular tin mug she had carried since Tucson, and she filled it at the percolator and walked, with the mug warming her left hand, to the wall map.

She stood in front of it.

The eleven pins.

She read them in the order she had pushed them in, which was a small ritual she had begun without intending to begin and had, at some point in the last nine months, accepted. She read pin one — Haven, in the wide green valley at the center of the map. She read pin two — Bore-Nine, the deep aquifer outpost on the cracked plain a hundred and forty miles east. Pin three: Saltline, the coastal salvage town on the bones of the old container port. Pin four: High Verde, the southwestern mesa, the school-village. Pin five: the agrarian compound at Cottonwood, two hundred and thirty miles east. Pin six: Ridge-Six, on the new escarpment thirty-eight miles northwest, where Wren Ostlund had stood with a tarp and twenty-three people for nine days. Pin seven through pin ten: the four agrarian compounds along the old railbeds, named, in pencil on small cards pinned next to the pins, Larkspur, Cottonwood-South, Pine Bend, Halverson. Pin eleven: a high-desert school-village south of High Verde whose families were still moving and whose name Maya hadn't committed to ink yet.

And the unnumbered pin.

She had pushed it into the cork last Tuesday at four in the morning. She had pushed it with her thumb. She had pushed it into a part of the map where there was no settlement, no proposed settlement, no incoming refugee crew, no application from any council. She had pushed it into a small valley sixty miles north of Saltline that she had walked once in 2038 and remembered as quiet, and she had, when her thumb had come away from the head of the pin, sat down at the long table with her tin mug in her hands and looked at the map, and she had felt, for the first time in eight years of chairing this Council, a small clean stillness she hadn't been expecting and hadn't been able to explain to herself for two days afterward.

She had explained it to herself this past Sunday.

She had been standing at the kitchen sink at home, washing tomatoes, and the explanation had come up from the back of her head the way explanations did when they had been working themselves out without asking permission: the unnumbered pin is for the next one, and the next one is going to be set by someone who isn't me.

She had stopped washing tomatoes. She had stood with her hands in the cool water and the fact in her mouth, and she had said it aloud to nobody — the next one is going to be set by someone who isn't me — and her hands had finished washing the tomato in her left hand without her telling them to, and she had set the tomato on the cutting board and dried her hands and walked to the sitting room and looked at the wall there, where there was no map, and she had thought: I am going to propose the Inter-Settlement Council on Wednesday.

Today was Wednesday.

The first delegate arrived at six-fifty-one. It was Wren Ostlund, who had come down from the ridge yesterday because Tomas had told her to come down for this meeting and because Wren was a person who came when she was told to come for an Inter-Settlement Council that hadn't yet been founded. She walked into the Hall with the laminated badge clipped to her jacket and a leather satchel over one shoulder, and she stopped just inside the door and looked at the map, and she said, "Eleven."

"Eleven," Maya said.

"Plus one."

"Plus one."

Wren didn't ask about the unnumbered pin. She came to the percolator. She poured a cup. She came to the map and stood beside Maya and read the pins in her own order, which was Saltline first, because Saltline was where her own people had come from in 2031, and then High Verde, because she had been at High Verde for two weeks before they had moved her north, and then Ridge-Six. She finished her reading. She drank her coffee.

"You're going to ask Haven to be one voice," Wren said.

"Yes."

"They won't like it."

"No."

"Henry will like it."

"Henry will like it because he was thinking it before me."

"Elias?"

"Elias will think it for a week and then say so."

"The two tradesmen."

"Mac will be against it. Pete will be for it once Mac is against it."

Wren laughed her short dry laugh. "That's about the count I had."

The delegates came in over the next twenty minutes. Bishara Adeyemi from Saltline arrived at seven-oh-three, in a long wool coat and a knit cap with two small brass pins on the brim that Maya had never asked about and had, over the course of the two times Bishara had been to Haven before, decided not to ask about. Bishara took her cup of coffee black, no sugar, and she came to the wall map and read it the way Wren had read it but faster, with the particular efficiency of a woman who had read maps for a living since she was nineteen. Reza Moradi from High Verde arrived at seven-oh-six, with his shoulders set against the cold he had been driving in since Sunday. The delegate from Cottonwood — a former Nebraska farmer named Hollis Berenger, sixty-one, with a face the color of weathered cedar — arrived at seven-oh-eight. The delegate from Bore-Nine, a small red-headed man named Ed Whyte, arrived at seven-eleven. The four agrarian-compound delegates arrived in a single carpool at seven-fourteen. The high-desert delegate, who would be representing the eleventh pin, arrived at seven-eighteen — a woman named Imelda Quintero, who had walked into the Hall behind two of the carpoolers and had stood at the door for ten seconds taking the room in before she had moved. She had moved well. Maya had registered, even through the small distractions of the morning, that Imelda Quintero had moved like someone who had spent a great deal of time deciding when to walk into a room.

The Haven old guard came in last, on principle. Henry. Elias. Mac McAllister. Pete Sundberg. They sat at the Haven end of the long table and didn't, by silent custom, take coffee until the visiting delegates had taken coffee.

The Hall was full. The fire was up. Maya stood at the head of the table.

She put her tin mug on the table. She put her hand on the back of her chair. She didn't sit. She looked at the eleven faces at the table and at the unnumbered pin behind her on the map and at the long scarred surface of the table itself, which had been carved in 2039 by a kid named Toby Esperanza when Toby Esperanza had been thirteen and hadn't been able to sit through a meeting without putting a knife into something, and which now bore the long shallow looped initial T.E. in the wood at her end of the table, and which she touched, briefly, with her thumb, before she spoke.

"Welcome," she said.

She let the word do its work. They were all watching her. She had stood in front of this table for eight years. She had welcomed delegates from up to four settlements before; she had never before welcomed delegates from eleven. She didn't let her voice be ceremonial. She kept it the voice she had been using for eight years, which was the voice of a woman with a slight hoarseness in the lower register from a smoke-inhalation injury in 2031, and which had been, by long habit, the Haven Council Hall's voice.

"This is the first meeting of the Inter-Settlement Council," she said.

She watched the table take it. The Haven old guard didn't move; they had known the proposal was coming. Wren was steady. Bishara had set her cup down very precisely and was, at this moment, looking at Maya in the careful way of a woman who had learned never to assume good faith without testing it. Reza Moradi was watching the wall map. Hollis was watching his own folded hands. Imelda was, very slightly, smiling.

"I've a proposal," Maya said. "The proposal is that we form a rotating delegate body. One voice per settlement. Quarterly meetings here at Haven for the first year. After that the meetings rotate. Haven is one voice. Haven isn't the chair."

The Hall was quiet.

Mac McAllister moved first. He was sixty-four. He had been a master electrician in Ann Arbor before the Wave and a master electrician at Haven since, and he had, at various points in the last eight years, told Maya she was wrong about three different things and had, in two of those instances, been right. He cleared his throat.

"Maya," he said.

"Mac."

"Why."

"Because if we are the chair forever we are the capital. If we are the capital we are the empire. We didn't fight for an empire."

He rubbed his mustache. He looked at the table. He said the thing she had been waiting for him to say.

"What if the chair is just a function. Not a rank."

"It's a function until it becomes a rank, Mac. It always does."

"Always."

"Always."

He held her eye. He had, she knew, been thinking about this for a year already; he had been the one who had told her, last September, you are starting to think about what comes after, and hadn't pushed her on it but had been, in his quiet way, present every time the topic had risen. He nodded once.

"Then I'm against it," he said.

"On the record?"

"On the record."

"Why."

"Because Haven is the only thing I've helped build that has worked, and I am sixty-four, and I am tired, and I don't want to spend the years I've left watching this thing devolve into a federation that can't get itself out of bed in a hard winter."

Pete, beside him, looked at his hands. Pete was sixty-one. Pete and Mac had been friends for thirty years.

"Mac," Henry said. He hadn't yet spoken; he had been waiting.

"Henry."

"Will you vote against it."

"I'll vote against it."

"Fair."

Henry looked across the table. He had a small notebook open in front of him. He hadn't, throughout the meeting so far, written in it. He wasn't the chair. He was Henry Linden, who had survived 2034 and who had been, since the Wave, the Council's quietest moral conscience, the man at the end of every meeting whose one sentence — when he spoke — recalibrated the room. He spoke now.

"I want to second the proposal," Henry said.

He let the second land.

"I second it," he said, "because I am sixty-three, and I am also tired, and the difference between Mac's tired and mine is that I've been sitting in this Hall for eight years watching us refuse to do this, and I am now telling you that Maya is right and the time is now and we don't have another six months to put it off."

Mac nodded. He didn't contradict Henry. He hadn't, in eight years, contradicted Henry on a moral point.

"Other voices," Maya said.

Bishara spoke. "Saltline votes for. With one note." She held Maya's eye. "Haven being one voice is the proposal I came here to test. I came here prepared to vote against any proposal in which Haven wasn't one voice. I am ready to vote for one in which it's."

"Noted," Maya said.

Wren: "Ridge-Six votes for."

Reza: "High Verde votes for. We've been waiting for this proposal."

Hollis: "Cottonwood votes for. With reservations about the schedule of the bore-drill that I'll raise in a separate session."

Ed Whyte, Bore-Nine: "For."

The four agrarian-compound delegates: three for, one abstain.

Imelda Quintero, the eleventh-pin delegate: she had been quiet through the first round. She spoke now. Her voice was low. "We aren't yet a settlement," she said. "We are a delegation in motion. I'd like to vote, but I am not sure my vote is yours to count."

"You are at this table," Maya said. "Your vote counts."

Imelda Quintero looked at the wall map. She looked at the eleventh pin, which had her people's name on the small pinned card in pencil — MIRADOR, with a question mark behind it. She looked back at Maya.

"For," she said.

"That's nine for," Maya said. "Two abstain. One against."

She looked at the unnumbered twelfth pin behind her.

"The proposal carries."

The Hall didn't erupt. There was no banging of a gavel. Maya didn't have a gavel. She picked up her tin mug instead. She raised it. She didn't say anything ceremonial. The delegates raised theirs. They drank. The fire popped. Bishara, very softly, set her cup back on the table and said, in a voice meant only for the people closest to her, in Yoruba — a ti bere, which Maya, who had asked her once in 2044 what the phrase meant, knew meant we've begun.

Maya turned back to the map. She walked to it. She took, from the small wooden box of pins on the lectern, one black-headed pin, like the others. She held it up in the light.

She pushed it into the cork at a place where there was no settlement, no proposed settlement, no incoming refugee crew, no application from any council. She pushed it into a small valley far west of Saltline that she hadn't yet walked. She pushed it with her thumb. When her thumb came away from the head of the pin, she stepped back.

"For the next one," she said, to the table.

Hollis Berenger said, "Whose next one."

"Anyone's," Maya said. "Not mine."

The meeting went on. There was old business. There was new business. There were three radio reports to log, two trade-route disputes to settle, one curriculum question to refer. Maya let Tomas, who had walked in late, take the radio reports. She let Henry chair the trade-route disputes. She let Wren take the curriculum question, because Wren had come down for it and because Wren was the right person. She let other people speak first on every item. She sat in her own chair at the head of the long table, with her hands folded, and she didn't speak unless spoken to. She did this not because the proposal had been carried, exactly, but because she had decided it was time to begin practicing the rest of her life.

The meeting ended at ten-twelve.

The delegates went out to the kitchen for the noon meal Pell had been preparing in the back since seven. Maya stayed at the table. She did this on purpose. She didn't want to walk out with them; she didn't want, this once, to be the chair leaving her chair. She wanted to sit a moment with the chair that was now, formally, the chair of one voice among twelve.

Henry came back five minutes later. He brought her a bowl of bean soup. He set it in front of her. He sat across from her with his own bowl. He didn't speak. He ate.

She looked at him.

"Henry."

"Yes."

"Did I do that right."

"You did that right."

"You're sure."

He looked up from his soup. He had a small bit of bread crumb at the corner of his mouth. He took it off with his thumb. "Maya," he said. "You did it right because you did it before you had to. The doing-it-before-you-had-to is the whole quality of the thing. If you wait until you've to, the proposal isn't the same proposal."

She breathed out. She took a spoon of soup. It was hot. It was good. Pell had put a small handful of dried oregano in it in the last twenty minutes, the way Pell always did when there were guests at the Hall, and the oregano was making the soup taste like a place. She ate it.

"Henry."

"Maya."

"The pin."

"The unnumbered one."

"Yes."

"What about it."

"I want to leave it there. I want it to stay there. I want it to migrate. I want every time we add a settlement we move that pin further out into the empty country. I want the next chair to know, when she sits down at this table, that the unnumbered pin is the part of the work that's always still ahead."

He thought about it. He nodded slowly. "I'll write that down."

"Don't."

He looked at her.

"Don't write it down," she said. "Let it be a habit. Let it be a thing the next chair learns by watching."

He nodded again. He went back to his soup.

She looked, past him, at the wall. The eleven pins. The unnumbered twelfth, slightly to the west of where it had been an hour ago because she had moved it once before sitting down for the meeting. The dimpled cork. The long scar at her end of the table where Toby Esperanza, now twenty, who had built the eastern half of the Saltline breakwater the previous summer, had once carved his initial during a meeting he had been told to sit through.

She finished her soup.

She got up. She walked out to the kitchen. She put her bowl in the sink. She didn't, this once, do the dishes.

She let other people do the dishes.

She walked home by way of the long path, the one that went up the ridge behind the Hall and came back down through the orchard, because she wanted, before lunch was over and the Hall was needed for the next meeting, to walk past one of the standing stones and put her hand on it and say, with her hand on the stone, the thing she hadn't yet said aloud to anyone, including Henry. She put her hand on the stone. She said it. The stone didn't answer. The stone never answered. The stone was only a stone. But she had said it, and the stone had been there to receive the saying, and that, she had decided long ago, was what stones were for.

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