The Cartographers(21)
“That’s not what I mean,” she replied. She didn’t want to tell him what Irene had confided in her at the library—that the NYPL was in trouble and she might be able to help—he’d think she was pathetic. Still clinging to a dead dream. He’d moved on and seemed content at Haberson. He wouldn’t understand how stuck she was at Classic. How much she still missed the library. How much she missed real maps.
“It’s like closure, okay?” she said instead. “I just want some closure. Both about the whole Junk Box thing, and about Dr. Young. I just want to figure out why the map is so valuable—so I can know why he lied about its worth and ruined us for it all those years ago. As soon as I get that, I promise Swann and I will explain everything to the police. They can swab and dust this map, stare at it with even less understanding than we do, and then lock it up in their evidence vault, behind miles of red tape, to their heart’s content. I just want to know first.”
Felix fretted for a few moments. “Fine.” He sighed, relenting. He had always been the more cautious of the two of them, but she knew that he remembered how complicated her relationship with her father had been, even before he’d destroyed their lives. “What’s your next move?”
“Well, if the map really would fetch prices like these, I suppose my father would have needed help to find a buyer . . .” Nell looked down at the business card still in her hands.
“No way!” Felix exclaimed. “Ramona Wu is shady. Crooked. Can you imagine, if anyone saw you together? I wouldn’t be caught dead—”
But Nell shrugged. “I don’t have a reputation to lose anymore, remember?”
Felix fell silent, abashed. He glanced around the tiny, dingy apartment, as if realizing for the first time just how solidly on his feet he’d landed after the scandal—and just how far Nell had fallen.
“Well, just be careful,” he finally said.
“I will, Felix,” she replied. “I promise.”
They stood there awkwardly for a few moments, unsure of what else to say. Nell desperately wanted him to leave, so she could let out the metaphorical breath she’d been holding since he’d arrived, but she also suddenly . . . didn’t want him to go?
“It was good to see you again, I guess,” Felix added.
“You, too,” she replied. She went to open the door for him, before the moment could get more embarrassing. “Thank you for your help.”
“No problem,” he said after he’d stepped through.
See you later, she wanted to add as she slowly closed the door, but that wasn’t how it worked anymore. There had been too much damage done, and too much time lost. He would probably email Swann directly after he watched the tape if there was anything noteworthy, and that would be the end of it.
They’d likely never see each other again.
Nell pulled the door back open to see Felix at the stairs, about to descend.
“Dr. Young’s funeral is the day after tomorrow, if you wanted to come,” she blurted out.
VI
Onscreen, a swarm of dots spread themselves across the black backdrop, shifting from green to orange to red. They undulated, alive, just slowly enough that Felix could track one if he didn’t blink, but one shudder of his eyelids and his target would be gone, flickering to another color and racing away.
“Let the variable go,” Naomi said.
Felix pressed a key on his keyboard. “Variable is a go.”
To the right of the screen, another dot, this one purple, joined the swirling tapestry—but at half speed and moving at right angles instead of smoothly like the rest. Instantly, beautifully, the rest of the dots adjusted. They began to move around the purple one, changing colors and parting in ripples that automatically evened themselves out. It wasn’t about cars, it was all conceptual, but Felix couldn’t help but think that ecosystem shifts still looked a little like afternoon Manhattan traffic. Chaotic harmony.
“So far, so good,” he observed, but Naomi held up a hand as if to say Just wait.
On the other side of the desk, Priya stared at the same view on her own monitor. They were all holding their breath. The dots kept adjusting, and adjusting, the balance kept . . .
Then the scenario crashed.
“This is worthless,” Priya groaned, flopping back in her chair.
The field had become a tangle of chaos. Green dots backed up everywhere, smashing into each other, flashing straight to red. The purple dot, its mission completed, ran away off screen.
Felix pulled off his headphones. “This can’t be done with our current data. It just can’t.”
Naomi poked her keyboard dejectedly. The dots disappeared from all of their monitors, remaining only on the giant, spaceship-like flatscreen overhead.
“Why did we think we could predict future endangered species? Half of those dots were for insects that haven’t even been discovered yet!” Priya grumbled. “Three months of work, down the drain.”
If they went back to the very beginning, it was even longer than that. Their team, handpicked by the founder of the company himself—the brilliant, mysterious William Haberson—had been working for almost a year now on his equally mysterious mission.
For all its hundreds, possibly thousands, of different departments, Haberson Global was at its heart a logistics and navigation company, dedicated to finding things. Missing persons, lost pets, ancestry records, old friends who had fallen out of touch, distant branches of a family waiting to be reconnected—the list went on and on. The idea was, if they could amalgamate enough data to trace something on the company’s central creation—the ever-evolving, ever-growing Haberson Map—they could find it.