This article explores political spaces beyond sovereign cartographies in the context of the ecological crisis. It retraces the history that led the inhabitants of Vaitupu, an atoll in Tuvalu, to purchase the Fijian island of Kioa in 1946. Today, as Tuvalu’s low-lying islands face increasing threats from global warming, Kioa is being considered as a potential site for the relocation of Vaitupuans or even Tuvaluans as a whole. Rather than using Kioa’s history to speculate about future climate-induced relocation scenarios, the article takes a reverse approach, examining how these relocation hypotheses align with the historical, legal, and political complexities surrounding Kioa’s acquisition and management. The article argues that, despite lying a thousand kilometres apart and being divided between the sovereign jurisdictions of two distinct countries, Vaitupu and Kioa form a “latent archipelago”—a non-sovereign yet politically significant transnational space.