Previously, Alex had spent those three days in the hospital watching the world.Felicia had thought he was resting. He was lying propped on two pillows with the television on the wall running the news, and a borrowed phone in his hand under the sheet, and he was reading everything this planet had to say about itself.It took him about a day and a half to understand the size of it.And the size of it was small.Earth was behind.Not a little. Not in one place. Behind in everything, the way a village is behind a capital.Their aircraft still burned fuel. Their computers answered questions the way a clever dog fetches sticks — eagerly, and wrong about a third of the time.Their medicine cut people open to find out what was inside them. There was not one machine on this whole planet that Prussia would have let into a museum.He scrolled for an hour through what this world called its best technology and put the phone face-down on his chest."Is something wrong?" Felicia asked from the chai

The crowd went home talking, and Alexander went upstairs to the governor's office and sat down with the truth.A tax haven is not a law. A tax haven is a reputation.You can write anonymity into your statute in an afternoon. Getting a man in another country to move nine million dollars to an island he has never heard of, through a bank with four staff and a door for a vault, on the word of a twenty-year-old prince the whole Empire calls an idiot — that takes something else entirely.He had no name. Harland had no name.And the island had nothing to sell. No ore under the chalk, no port, no factory, a fishing fleet older than its crews and a tourist season dying a little every year.To attract outside money, Harland had to create something people actually wanted to buy.It was the only way to launder the proceeds into clean, legal cash.He wrote to the head steward that night."If I want to borrow for Harland, how much can I have? I need it to start a business."The answer came back in