The Cartographers(67)

“You won’t believe what he told me,” she said to Felix, raising her voice slightly over Francis’s whispered protests. “He said that Agloe is a real place. Like an actual, physical place, that we can go to with the map, like”—she sneered as she said the last word—“magic.”

“Nell.”

She finally realized that Felix wasn’t the same as when she’d seen him the night before. He was much quieter now. Colder. He seemed to have not even registered the utter ridiculousness of what she’d just said, in fact.

“I just passed Irene Pérez Montilla on the way in,” he continued once she’d gone silent.

It took her a moment to change gears.

“What?” Nell asked.

“She told me she’d just come from chatting with you, and that I could find you near the hanging Ratzer piece. She looked upset, so I asked her if she’d had a chance to talk to you about Dr. Young’s map yet. ‘There was no map,’ she said.”

Oh no.

“You didn’t tell her, did you?”

Nell bit her lip to keep from cursing. “I can explain.”

“You were never going to do it.”

“I just need a little more time,” she pleaded.

But the hope had already gone out of his eyes.

“Come on,” she said. “You couldn’t honestly have expected me to turn it all over without—”

“I did,” Felix replied. “Because you promised you would. I trusted you.”

Nell cringed. “I’m sorry, Felix, but this is important.”

“And I’m not?” he asked.

But he didn’t look angry. He just looked sad.

“I thought it was going to be different this time. That we were going to do things together. But here we are, again. I’ve done everything you’ve asked to help you, but you’re doing whatever you want, without telling me what’s going on, without stopping to think if it might hurt me. Expecting me to simply fall in line.”

He was talking about the Junk Box Incident now, she knew.

“That’s not fair.” Her throat was uncomfortably tight. “There was no way I could have known my father was going to turn on us like that, back then.”

“But you didn’t have to fight him on it. To push him that far.”

“Of course I did. He was wrong—look how wrong!”

“He was the senior curator of the Map Division. We were interns.”

“So I was supposed to let him lie? To embarrass me in front of all of our colleagues?”

She was lining up her argument—she would win this, she would make him see—but Felix didn’t have any fight left in him.

“Maybe this is my fault, for believing it could be different this time.” He sighed. “I’m done talking about the past. And the present.”

Nell felt sick. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’m done. One last favor, you said. For Swann. I think I’ve more than fulfilled that obligation.”

Nell gulped, trying to fight the lump back down into her chest. Her breath was starting to hiccup. Dimly, she was aware that Francis was still there, lurking somewhere behind her, too afraid to step farther away in case he lost track of her, but she didn’t care.

She had to convince Felix that she hadn’t meant to hurt him. That it wasn’t like that—that she had not chosen the map over him, again. She had to convince him to stay.

“I’m so close to figuring this out, Felix. I have to, we have to—”

That was the wrong thing to say.

“No,” he replied. “There’s no ‘we’ anymore.”

Nell was clenching the strap of her tote bag so hard she was afraid it was going to dissolve in her hand.

“This isn’t your job. It hasn’t been for a long time. Just let it go.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” she snapped, a little too loudly.

A couple of guests nearby glanced over, but Felix didn’t raise his voice back. “I’m serious, Nell. This isn’t a game. And it’s dangerous. Crimes have been committed. People have died. Just tell the police about the map, and—”

“You know I can’t,” she argued, quieter again, but no less upset. “If I do that, they’ll say it’s evidence, and it’ll get processed and put into closed-case evidence warehouse purgatory, and I’ll never see it again.”

“Who cares if they file it away, if you get your job back?”

“Because then I won’t be any better than him!” Nell hissed. “He spent his whole life trying to do something with this map, but failing, and I’m so close to figuring it all out. To doing whatever he couldn’t with it!”

Felix might have laughed or sighed. It came out as a dry, static cough. “Unbelievable. All these years, and you still can’t let it go. You could have everything you want back, but you’d rather throw it all away just to beat him. To prove you were right.”

“What do you know?” she asked. “You’re not even in maps anymore. You sold out.”

“I sold out?” he snapped, furious.

Nell grinned angrily even as she winced. She’d finally gotten under his skin and hit a nerve.