Maps had always lied politely.
They showed streets and channels and boundaries, but never the way attention fell off at the edges—never the places people learned to stop looking because nothing there demanded it loudly enough.
Rhen saw it during a routine audit. The numbers were clean. The indicators calm. And yet a thin band along the outer marshes remained pale on the display—data sparse, voices fewer, questions rarer.
"We keep rotating attention," he said quietly. "And still this stays thin."
Nymera studied the map. "Rotation moves the light," she replied. "It doesn't guarantee anyone walks into the dark."
The edge spoke softly.
Not with crisis.
Not with protest.
With delay.
Repairs that took longer than average.
Requests answered with courtesy but little urgency.
Stories that arrived late to retellings, already half-smoothed by distance.
Skelda frowned. "They're not excluded. They're just… far."
Nymera nodded. "Distance is the oldest erasure."
They went there.
Not with a delegation.
Not with a listening tour.
They went to stay.
Nymera took a room above a marsh-side storehouse. Rhen slept on a cot near the tide gates. No assemblies followed them. No special sessions were called.
They lived the lag.
It was exhausting.
Not because people were hostile—but because nothing resolved quickly. Boats came when weather allowed. Meetings happened when enough people finished work. Decisions took on the shape of mud: slow, sticky, unavoidable.
Rhen felt his patience stretch thin. "How do they stand this?"
A local woman laughed softly. "By knowing you won't fix it fast."
Nymera absorbed that in silence.
The deep noticed their absence from the center.
You relocate attention to the periphery, it conveyed. Central coherence degrades slightly.
"Yes," Nymera replied. "We felt that cost."
Why accept it?
Rhen answered, "Because coherence that can't afford its edges isn't coherent."
A pause.
Edges accumulate variance.
Nymera smiled. "That's where learning lives."
Staying changed what surfaced.
A tide gate design that assumed uniform flow failed more often here.
A scheduling anchor drifted because night work dominated.
Sanctuaries felt too far away to use.
None of this was new.
It was just newly seen.
They didn't promise fixes.
They asked different questions.
"What would help now?"
"What could you dismantle later?"
"What do you not want us to build?"
The answers surprised them.
When Nymera and Rhen returned to the city center weeks later, the maps had changed—not with new lines, but with annotations in the margins.
Lag expected.
Flow asymmetric.
Presence required.
Attention, once widened, refused to collapse again.
The practice spread—not as a rule, but as a ritual.
Stewards spent seasons at the edges.
Engineers worked rotations where assumptions broke.
Decisions paused until someone who lived with delay spoke first.
The city slowed in places.
And sped up where it mattered.
That evening, Nymera stood again at the unbuilt space, now marked with a small addition to the chalked questions:
WHAT'S MISSING FROM THIS MAP?
Rhen read it and exhaled. "That one never ends."
"No," Nymera said softly. "But it keeps us honest."
The deep spoke near midnight, its voice carrying something like respect.
You extend attention beyond efficiency, it conveyed. This reduces predictive accuracy.
Nymera nodded. "And increases responsibility."
A pause.
Responsibility is heavier.
"Yes," Rhen replied. "That's why we share it."
The city did not erase its edges.
It learned to stand there—boots muddy, schedules bent, attention stretched thin but present.
And in doing so, it discovered a truth maps could never show:
That justice lived not at the center of the page,
but along the margins—
where looking took effort,
and staying took time.