The Cartographers(102)

That drew Naomi over to his desk as well. “And?”

“It’s useless,” he admitted. “But I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

He’d watched it ten times that day, but that was before he knew hardly anything about the Agloe map or the old web he was now tangled up in over it. Maybe this time, something would jump out at him. Something he hadn’t seen before.

It had to.

Then something did.

“Actually, Nell told me there was a second map that her father was after, right before he died,” he said to Naomi and Priya as the realization came to him. “It was an old building diagram of the library where he worked. We couldn’t imagine why he’d want something so random, so Nell went looking for answers.”

“A building diagram of the library?” Naomi repeated, thinking. “Maybe he was looking for an old room or something? One that had been blocked off in a remodel?”

“The opposite, actually,” Felix said. “It wasn’t a room that had been closed off and then removed from the floor plan, but rather a room that had never existed, yet still showed up on paper. Its own little phantom settlement.”

Priya frowned. “But again, why would a little error on a piece of paper make either of these maps so valuable?”

“I don’t know. But the error on that map was in the Map Division.” He took a breath. “The exact room where the burglar was searching.”

Francis told me that the reason the Agloe map is so special is that . . .

He could hear Nell’s voice, just as mystified as he now felt, in his mind.

“But why would a fake room matter to a break-in?” Priya mused. “You said it yourself. It wasn’t bricked over—it never existed in the first place.”

Felix ignored them as they debated, turning back to his computer, where the video waited for him, a big, dark, silent square.

It’s because the town becomes real if you have it. You can go there.

He still couldn’t imagine that could be true at all. But Dr. Young had risked his life to keep the Agloe map, and Francis, Ramona, and Eve had risked theirs to get him the Sanborn . . .

He clicked play, and the video began to run.

“What are we looking for?” Naomi asked, as she and Priya saw that the playback had started.

“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “But I . . . have a hunch. Maybe.”

He watched the burglar—Wally—comb through the Map Division again, nimble and swift, as Naomi and Priya peered over his shoulder. Priya winced as he attacked the guard and callously continued on, and Naomi groaned as the view tilted downward as always near the end, still shuddering from the damage of Wally’s swing.

They watched shadows cross in and out of the frame, back and forth as Wally double-checked every shelf in the partial view, moving increasingly faster with frustration. Then, finally, he vanished the same way he had the first time, there in the periphery of the lens one moment and then gone the next, with no other alerts elsewhere in the building triggered, and the recording ended.

“Wait, that’s it?” Priya asked, as surprised as Felix had been the first time he saw it. “How the hell did he get out?”

Felix sighed, desperate, and hit play again.

The black stared back at him, peaceful and still. A flash erupted as the camera’s lens came to life, and the burglar was there again, darting across the room, dodging the tables, opening every cabinet. Then the camera crashed downward again.

“Felix, I know you want to help, but . . . ,” Naomi tried, but he didn’t look away. He scrolled back yet again and watched the familiar room as Wally darted in and out of view, studying its thick old walls, its towering double-paned, wrought-iron windows. The shelves, the desks, the tables—

Wait.

There wasn’t a door there in the library.

“How—” He gasped, confused.

“What is it?” Priya asked, leaning closer. “What do you see?”

Felix pointed. There was a door in the back wall of the reading room in the video—even though that was impossible.

What was going on?

Felix grabbed his mouse and scrolled back on the timer, frames stuttering, this time dragging it much, much further back, hours before the relevant break-in section, all the way to when the security guard first began his walking rotations after hours, around nine o’clock in the evening. Felix waited on the Map Division, watching the dark screen as the guard moved down the hall, and then the room came to life, the camera triggered by his motion—

There was no door.

Felix hit pause and rubbed his eyes again, trying to clear his head.

He could still see the Map Division perfectly in his mind, even after all these years. He knew that side of the room well—he’d been in charge of dusting the display cases there every Monday morning. There was definitely not a door there, only the glass cabinets and a small expanse of wall they sometimes used to hang single-piece specimens belonging to no collection. A door couldn’t be there. If one was, it would open directly into the huge bay of printers Swann had installed in the back-office archives. And Felix had just seen when the guard entered the Map Division that there wasn’t one.

But somehow, during the break-in—and also on the Sanborn map Nell had—there was.

“Felix, what are we looking at?” Naomi asked. Neither she nor Priya knew the details of the room as well as he did. “What do you see?”