The Cartographers(127)

“Keep going,” Wally urged her, still staring at the map.

Nell took another step.

“That’s it,” he continued, mesmerized.

“It doesn’t have to be like this, Wally,” Tamara said. “Things don’t have to repeat.”

But he ignored her. “Your mother will understand, once we show her,” he said to Nell. “Put the map on the scanner and join Haberson. Join me. You’ll have access to more maps than you could in a hundred lifetimes at the NYPL. There will be no place you cannot go. Nothing we cannot do.” His grip on the gun tightened. “When the scan completes, when you behold the Haberson Map at its full potential, you’ll both see. You’ll see this is really where you belong.”

Nell didn’t answer him, but she didn’t have to. Wally touched the muzzle of the gun to her mother’s temple.

Her resolve to drag out the walk as long as possible failed her, and Nell scrambled forward, terrified. All she could think about now was Swann, the look of shock on his face, the dimming as the light went out of his eyes. The scanner’s glass pane looked blankly back at her, hungry, empty, waiting for her to put her mother’s map into its frame. The mechanical arm with its lights and clamps and rollers waited to the side, ready to trap the page into the machine.

“Now,” Wally said.

Nell slid the map inch by inch onto the glass, numb with panic. She needed more time.

“Press the green button,” he commanded. “That’s all you have to do.”

Nell looked back at the scanner, frozen—but the dull click of a safety disengaging from its trigger made her own hand move.

She gasped as her finger pressed the button.

The lights on the scanner’s plastic siding began to blink, its heavy mechanical arm jerking to life and lowering on its hinge so that it could carefully creep over every millimeter of her map.

“Very good,” Wally said, as the arm clamped down and the cameras whirred inside, beginning their scan. “You did the right thing. You’ll see.”

As Nell watched the machine slowly devour her mother’s final creation, she clenched the fountain pen so tightly, she could feel the little scratches forming the Cartographers’ compass rose against her palm. The only thing she could think to do to stop Wally and end his long, twisted struggle was to destroy the map, but she couldn’t do that without also destroying them, too.

There had to be another way.

As she stared desperately at the map on the scanner, something her mother had written in her letter to Nell—that she realized she could use her skills as a cartographer to save herself, and the town—triggered an old memory. A conversation she’d had with her father over and over in the library, every time he called her to his desk and let her peek at whatever priceless specimen was inside the leather portfolio that day. The words came back to her in a rush.

You’re a what? he’d ask as she’d reach for the portfolio with her tiny hands, bouncing up and down excitedly.

I’m a cartographer, she’d answer. Just like you.

And what do cartographers do?

They make maps.

A cartographer, not a Cartographer. She had been using the word to mean its common definition, because she hadn’t understood then. But the answer was there all along, in both of her parents’ words.

She looked down at the pen in her hand again.

Suddenly, she knew what she had to do.

“Wally,” she said, and he looked away from the scanner to her at the sound of his old name. “You’re wrong, except about one thing. Where I belong.”

She didn’t belong at Classic or even the NYPL, as he’d said—but least of all, at Haberson Global, working with him.

She belonged somewhere else.

Wally looked puzzled at her statement, but her gaze left him and moved beyond, to the back of the printing factory. To where Felix had slowly crept away when Wally had turned the gun on her mother, forgetting about him. Felix was crouched in the corner, his hands fumbling with something small. Moments ago, a small mote of light had flared there against the dry wood, nothing more than a spot at first—but then had grown warmer, bigger, brighter, as Wally had been distracted.

Fire.

“No,” Wally whispered, stunned.

Nell looked back at her mother, waiting to see what she would do.

Tamara looked at Wally.

And then she wrenched free from him in his state of shock and disappeared into the depths of the factory, toward the growing flames.

“Tam!” Wally screamed.

He stumbled forward a few steps after her, horrified, as the fire rushed up the walls.

But Felix had taken advantage of the moment to circle around, and he suddenly appeared again from the other side of the factory, sprinting straight for Wally. “Run, Nell!” he cried as he crashed into Wally, throwing them both to the ground.

But Nell didn’t want to run. Just the opposite.

She spun back to the scanner, her eyes locked on the map as it glowed under the blue light, as Felix wrestled for control of the gun.

“Don’t you dare!” Wally yelled as he fought. “Don’t touch the map!”

“Get back!” Nell shouted to Felix, and Felix shouted something back to her in the scuffle. “Get as far back as possible!”

“Tam!” Wally cried again. “Nell, stop!”