Fractional Fiction, for those of you new to the series, is a discipline as much as a name. Every novel in it grows from a small fraction of documented reality, real texts, real law, real science, real ground, and the fiction rises around that fraction without ever falsifying it. Each book carries exactly one invention, one thing that does not exist, and the notes in the back declare it openly so you always know where the ground ends. Everything else holds. The permits in this book are real permits. A treaty really was signed on the sand at Point No Point in 1855. The six words are the real six words. And the three sources this novel is built on are named in the back matter like load-bearing walls. The first is a real book from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country by a writer named Emma-Lindsay Squier, with an introduction by Gene Stratton-Porter that carries an idea this novel takes as law: a wild thing that stops being afraid of us cannot go home. The second is the oldest family record in Greek literature, Hesiod's Theogony, a list of who was born to whom, in which every generation of gods, warned about its children, devours them, and is replaced anyway. And the third is Dante, read in the English Longfellow made in the years after his wife died, when translating the Inferno was the only room of his grief he could stand in. From Dante the book takes its shape, a teller walking a silent listener down through the rings, and it takes a plea. In the sixth canto, a shade stops the pilgrim and asks for the only afterlife that is real: when you are back in the sweet world, carry me into the minds of other people.