The Cartographers(120)

“We needed it then, to get into Agloe,” Wally said. “Now that we’re here, we don’t need it anymore.”

Nell clung desperately to the little folded paper. Was Wally trying to kill them?

Because if Agloe only existed on the paper, what would happen to it when the last copy was destroyed?

What would happen to them if they were inside when that happened?

“Do it,” Wally commanded. His voice was soft, but the threat was clear. Or else.

Nell’s hands fumbled as she unfolded the map again. She could see the memories flickering across Felix’s terrified face as he looked at it too, this little tattered thing that was worth more than any other artifact they’d ever seen. This single sheet of printed paper that had caused them so much pain and damage in their young lives, splitting them apart, bringing them back together, splitting them apart again, and pulling them inexorably to each other one last time, here and now, but not in a way that either of them could have imagined.

How many times, after they’d both been fired, had Nell fantasized about finding this map and shredding it, she wondered. Probably about as many times as Felix had.

Now she had the chance—she was being forced to do it—and would give anything not to.

Wally held up a hand to still her for a moment. He turned slowly in a circle, his arms out, his eyes falling over every cluttered surface of the factory. As if waiting for something—or someone—to stop him.

But nothing happened.

He grinned and aimed the gun at Felix.

“Tear it,” he commanded again.

Nell closed her eyes and ripped the page.

The sound struck her to the core. She shuddered, and so did Felix. She kept ripping, tearing it into quarters, then the quarters in half to eighths, and onward, until the map was no more than a bunch of tiny scraps of paper, each no larger than a puzzle piece. They slid through her fingers and fluttered to the ground like leaves in a breeze, covering the floor in a perverse autumn blanket.

She and Felix stared in stunned silence at the fragments where they lay.

It was gone.

The thing her mother had died for, and her father had given decades of his life for, and Nell had lost her career and her relationship with Felix for, even if she hadn’t known it at the time.

Gone.

After a long moment, she finally looked up. Wally was still standing where he’d been, looking at the same tatters of paper—but he was still smiling.

“See?” he finally said. “I was right.”

“Right about what?” Felix asked tensely.

“Right that this wasn’t the last copy,” Nell said, understanding.

They had destroyed the one they had with them, but the town was still there around them. They were still inside of it.

Which meant that something else was keeping them there.

Another copy.

Wally nodded. “I was right that Tam didn’t die all those years ago in the fire.”

“What are you saying?” Felix asked.

Wally’s eyes blazed as he looked at Nell. “She’s been alive, all this time. She’s been here, in Agloe.”

“That building was ashes. How could you know she survived?” Felix asked, incredulous, but Wally was still looking at Nell. She could tell that he knew she had also suspected it all along. That she believed he was right.

In response, Wally turned back to the printing press.

He ran his hand over the old contraption, his fingers sliding across the wood cranks, the smooth rollers, inspecting its parts as meticulously now as he must have all those years ago, when they were all deeply consumed with their reimagined version of the Dreamer’s Atlas. Their secret project that was going to change the way the world understood maps forever.

In all of their stories, Ramona, Francis, Eve, and Humphrey always insisted that Nell’s mother had never used the founder’s printing press in this abandoned workshop. She had been desperate to, convinced that it had been installed here for that very reason, but tragedy had struck them before she’d reached a point in her drafts to be ready to bring the antique machine to life.

It had been sitting here for decades, ever since the day of the fire, when they were all torn back into the real world and unable to return.

And yet.

At last, Wally held his finger out, so Nell and Felix could see what was now smudged on the tip.

Ink. Freshly wet.





XXV




“I know you saw the signs, too,” Wally said to Nell, continuing to stare her down.

“What signs?” Felix asked, still in disbelief. “No one has been here for over thirty years. No one . . . could have survived that long. This place is empty.”

Wally ignored him. Felix hadn’t heard the stories that Francis, Ramona, Eve, and Humphrey had told Nell about what Agloe had been like when they first found it—he didn’t know what had been here before and what had not. To him, the town probably still did look empty.

But it wasn’t, Nell knew.

It had appeared that way at first, in her initial shock. But the longer the three of them had walked, slowly making their way toward the printing factory, she had started to notice. Details that didn’t match their memories, things she couldn’t explain.

Her father and Humphrey knew the electricity in the town worked—but there were now lights on in buildings she knew the Cartographers hadn’t used when they were here. Furniture, too. Sundries on the shelves in the general store, books on the bookstore shelves, menus in the diner.