The Cartographers(130)
Tamara put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go with them too, and let you have some time alone,” she said, and he nodded gratefully. “Take as long as you need. We’ll wait for you.”
Felix went to Swann’s body as she left and crouched beside him. It made his heart ache to see him up close. To see how much older he looked than the last time Felix had seen him, when he’d left the library. If only he’d gone to Dr. Young’s funeral, or not stormed out of the NYPL memorial event early. Their first conversation in nearly a decade wouldn’t have had to be their last, too.
He looked up. In the distance, the others were making their way through the grass back toward the road, Naomi and Priya leading as Francis and Humphrey half walked, half carried Wally between them, to where their car was still parked along the shoulder.
So much had changed in just one night.
Swann had come to help, but now would not be going back. The unconquerable Haberson Global had crumbled. Nell’s mother had returned, impossibly.
And Nell herself . . .
Nell . . .
After a few moments, Felix heard the faint sound of car doors slamming closed and the sputter of an engine coming to life, so the heat could be turned on. He imagined the local police pulling up around them, lights flashing, radios blaring. Naomi on the phone with Ainsley, explaining everything. The eventual news stories breaking that William Haberson had been arrested and was responsible for countless crimes. He tried to picture what was going on back at the sleek, towering Haberson offices right now, within the company that had once seemed like his whole world and now would utterly cease to exist.
And he wondered what would happen to the Haberson Map. It was easy with maps on paper—if you tore them, or burned them, they were gone. But what about a map like that? Where did it go when you turned it off for good?
Slowly, Felix touched Swann’s still, cold shoulder and told him he’d be right back. There was one other person he had to say goodbye to today, as well.
He stood and walked forward, deeper into the field, leaving the sounds of the humming engine and the others’ voices behind him. He kept going, until he was alone, and all he could see was meadow and the low gray sky.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” he said softly. The green absorbed the sound into its myriad blades of grass and did not reply.
He toed the dirt.
There was no point in staying. Nell could not answer him now, or probably even hear him. And there was so much to do. But he couldn’t make himself start the long walk back to Swann, and then back to the police to answer their thousands of questions, and then to reporters after that, and who knew what else.
He wished he and Nell had just had a little more time, or that there was some way he could see her again—but that was impossible now. She was in Agloe, wherever Agloe was, if it was anywhere at all. There was no way to get to it anymore.
But he had so much left that he needed to tell her. It was infuriating—for years, they’d had absolutely nothing to say to each other, and now all of a sudden there were a million things—but she was gone.
“Take care of yourself, Nell,” he whispered at last, his throat tight.
Something he’d heard her father sometimes say on the phone to colleagues at other institutions came to him, a memory from a lifetime ago. He smiled and wondered if perhaps it was something the Cartographers used to say to each other long ago, when they’d all still been friends.
“I hope the maps are good where you are.”
Autumn at the NYPL was nothing like autumn at Haberson Global. All of Haberson’s internal systems had been run by a smart computer, from the lights to the thermostat to the humidity in the air to the grocery orders for the free gourmet cafeterias, and it all adjusted with the seasons. It had never been too sweaty there in June, nor too dry in November. If the outside weather suddenly shifted, the computer would adjust, raising or lowering the temperature across the entirety of the facility so all employees remained comfortable.
But autumn at the NYPL was like being tossed from a boiling furnace into an icebox and back, a hundred times a day.
The hallways were always so frigid, icicles practically grew from the corners where the walls met the ceiling. It was all that marble, and the centuries of settling and resettling the old building had done. In the copy area, people actually held their breath when they went in to retrieve their print jobs, because the vents gushed such scalding air straight onto the machines, the smell of burnt ink pervaded the whole room.
And in Felix’s office, it was practically a steam sauna.
He loosened his tie and tried to sit in his chair without letting his back touch the leather, lest he stick to it through his shirt. He’d taken to eating his lunches outside, hip propped against one of the lion statues that flanked the building while the snow swirled around him, just to relieve the flush on his skin. There was a collections meeting after this, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to talk himself into putting his blazer back on for it without fainting.
It was funny how much things had changed since the spring.
William Haberson’s—Wally’s—trial was ongoing, and it would likely be years before everything he’d done was fully uncovered, but Haberson Global already no longer existed as a company—some of the smaller branches had been spun off or purchased by competitors, but the tech juggernaut that had previously ruled the industry was no more than a ghost, even more than Wally himself was.