The Cartographers(129)

If Felix hadn’t been there in Agloe himself, he’d hardly have been able to recognize the man.

But he would have known the woman standing beside Wally anywhere.

Even decades later, she still looked just like Nell.

“Tam?” Ramona whispered.

Tamara smiled. “Romi,” she said.

Felix didn’t know any of them well, but the bewildered, relieved sobs that burst out of Ramona, Francis, Eve, and Humphrey as they collapsed upon Tamara, hugging and kissing her as she cried too, made his own eyes sting. Or perhaps he was thinking of the inevitable grief Tamara would have to endure over Daniel’s death. He suspected she knew that her husband was gone already, because it was Nell who had showed up in Agloe at the end, and not him, but that would not dampen the loss any, once she’d had time to face it.

He thought he knew how she must feel, in a smaller way.

He wiped his tears and looked back out to the field, where, by all laws of physics and nature, there should have been a town, but was not. Where Nell should have been but was not either.

“Was it all still there?” Francis asked at last, his gaze lost somewhere in the same field. “After all this time?”

“It was,” Felix replied.

“Did Nell save it?” Eve asked.

“I . . . think so,” he said.

He didn’t know what Nell had done—but he did know that it had worked. She’d finally found the town, and saved him, and her mother. Just . . .

Humphrey took a small step closer to him, as if afraid to speak the words too loudly. “But where is she, then?”

Felix looked down. “I’m not sure,” he managed. “Whatever she did to the map to stop Wally and let us escape, it must not have worked for her.”

“She might still be there?” Eve asked. “In the town?”

“I don’t know,” Felix replied. “I don’t even know if the town exists anymore.”

Had Nell really destroyed the town, and herself with it, to save them? Or had she thought of something else in the nick of time?

He shrugged helplessly—he was crying again. All he knew was that she wasn’t with them. She hadn’t made it out.

And he no longer had any way to get back to her.

Naomi put a hand on his arm, comforting him. “I know how much you meant to each other. I’m sorry.”

Felix tried to nod. He was sorry, and he also wasn’t.

Maybe if they were both still here, standing in this field, with the town safe and Haberson no longer a threat, something could have . . . happened. Not a second chance, but a third.

But also, maybe this was the best they could ever have. Maybe it was not possible for Nell to have both maps and Felix, the same way it hadn’t been possible for her parents to have maps and each other. And if that were true, then he was glad that she chose maps, in the end. They were perhaps even more a part of her life than they had been for her father, from the very day she was born, and she had been cut off from them for so long.

The grass squeaked softly behind him as Priya came around to his other side. The faint wail of sirens reached them on the breeze. “We called Ainsley when we got here. Police are on their way up from the city,” she said. “They radioed ahead to the local county precinct—officers should be arriving any minute.”

Felix bent down and forced Wally to sit up so he could fish his phone and tablet out of his pockets, to prevent him from deleting anything from the company servers. “Can you watch him?” he asked the rest of them. “There’s something I need to do.”

He saw Humphrey look across the field in response, to where he knew Swann was still lying peacefully in the grass. Felix swallowed hard against the lump rising in his throat again. He wanted to be there when the police examined Swann, to make sure his remains were treated with respect. Not splashed all over the news as a sensationalist crime report. It was the least he could do for the old man.

“I imagine the police also will have a few questions for me, too, once they’re finished with Wally,” Tamara said.

“How are we even going to explain it?” Ramona asked.

“And even though the last copy of the map is truly gone now, word will get out from this investigation—it’s going to reignite the search among collectors,” Humphrey added.

Felix smiled sadly. “I think this time, Nell’s made it so that no one else has to disappear.”

They all glanced down at the ruin of a man still hunched lifelessly at their feet. Haberson Global might no longer be finding missing persons, but it would no longer be creating them, either.

Finally, Francis sighed, a long, slow gust. “The truth will be good, at last. But are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

“I will be,” Felix said. “Let’s just get him secured.”

Naomi and Priya pulled their old boss to his feet, with the others’ help. The sirens were growing louder as they neared.

“She’s not really gone, is she?” Felix asked Tamara, once the rest of them had moved away.

Tamara turned back to him, her curly hair tossing in the breeze just like Nell’s always did.

“She’s a Cartographer now,” she said. “Like she always wanted to be.”

A Cartographer.

He liked that. It wasn’t enough, but it was something to hold on to, at least. That even if Nell wasn’t here with them, she was still out there, somewhere, in Agloe. It was better than the alternative. And if anyone had any idea what had happened, it would be Tamara, and she was smiling at him, not crying.