Shadow and Bone is a new show streaming on Netflix currently. Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li) is a cartographer for the First Army, stationed in East Ravka, on the isolated side of the Shadow Fold, a dark stretch of dangerous water and land where people who try to cross rarely survive. She’s an orphan, and because of her mother’s Shu Han heritage, she’s never felt comfortable there. She’s been best friends with Malyen Oretsev (Archie Renaux), since the two of them lived in the orphanage together. He’s a tracker in the First Army, and they’ve been apart for awhile on their respective assignments. That is, until a mission to make a supply run across the Fold comes up and Mal is assigned to it. Not wanting to leave the side of her best friend, Alina destroys the maps made of the fold so that she and her cartography team can be assigned to the mission. On the other side of the Fold, in West Ravka, casino owner and speculator Kaz Brekker (Freddy Carter) gets intel from an operative named Inej Ghafa (Amita Suman) that a wealthy merchant is offering one million kruge for someone to navigate across the fold to retrieve precious cargo.