The Cartographers(69)

“We have to get you out of here,” Swann said.

Nell blinked, still in shock. “Why?”

His grip on her arm grew even tighter, more desperate. “I heard one of the officers as they came in—you’re the prime suspect, Nell.”

What?

Swann went to the door, urging her to follow him, but she couldn’t make her feet cooperate. “How . . .”

“I don’t know! Maybe you were the last person the other guests saw speaking to her. But Lieutenant Cabe was here before the event even started. I saw him parked down the street in a black undercover car—”

“A black car?” she gasped. “That car has been following me for days!”

Swann looked horrified. “Maybe someone put an idea in their heads, to throw suspicion on to you. Told them that you’d come back after all this time, right after your father died, and then the break-in happened just after—”

Nell faltered.

It was Wally who had cast suspicion on her, somehow. It had to be—who else knew that the Agloe map even existed?

He was here.

Swann was right, they had to run, but where could they go? There was only one door out of the room, and the hallway led right back to the lobby, where the NYPD was swarming. She’d be spotted for sure. Everyone knew who she was.

Including Wally.

“Nell. Oh my God.”

He was no longer looking at her, but just over her shoulder, at the back wall of the room.

“Look.”

Just then, the door to the Map Division burst open again right next to Swann, and Nell braced, expecting the police, but it wasn’t officers. Felix? she hoped—but it was Francis, with two other people following him. Too much was happening for her to think clearly. Irene, the police, Swann panicking, the blaring alarm.

“Nell!” Francis called. He was lunging for her. “Look out!”

Swann was shouting for her to run too, but Nell could hardly move. Faintly, she realized that she was standing near the place on Eve’s Sanborn map where its drafter had long, long ago hidden his secret little room in the floor plan.

Something blurred in the corner of her vision as she turned. A shifting, an opening. A door appearing in the wall where there should have been nothing but smooth paint.

Suddenly, someone else was standing behind her.

Finally, Nell did open her mouth to scream—but no sound came out before the blow.

Then the world went dark.





III

The Town





XVI




The office was utterly silent except for the occasional click of Felix’s mouse, and the quiet, electric hum of the gargantuan Haberson server housed in the cold room right on the other side of the wall. It had bothered him on his first day there, burrowing into his skull, that soft but relentless whining drone. But then on his lunch break, he’d gotten the engineer on shift to badge him into the room, a vast, cavernous cube that felt more like science fiction than reality, and he sat with the unfathomable beast for a whole hour in the dim light, staring at its myriad blinking lights and circulatory system of wires, listening to it breathe. It was where the mighty Haberson Map lived, he’d realized as he watched it think. His map.

After that, the sound didn’t bother Felix anymore. By the end of the next day, he could no longer even hear it, as if it had become a part of him. But he knew it was there, present and comforting, behind the scenes. The same way no one thought it was strange that they couldn’t hear their own heartbeat.

Tonight, though, he craved that conscious, inescapable sound again—if only to distract him. But in the late-night quiet, his mind kept drifting back to Nell, and what she was doing now. She was probably still at the library, the event winding down. Maybe in Swann’s office with him, sipping more of his very fine Scotch—the same one that Dr. Young also used to keep in the cupboard behind his desk. The first time Felix had tasted it had been the day Nell convinced her father and Swann to hire him with her as an intern at the NYPL. The second had been a few months after that, when he’d successfully defended his dissertation at the end of that final semester and received his Ph.D. in cartography. He had always imagined the third time would be when he and Nell showed the two old men the ring that he would have someday picked out with her, on her finger.

Well.

And despite not wanting to be, he was still curious about the Agloe map. Especially about what Francis’s outlandish claim, that the phantom settlement on it was real, actually meant.

Felix shook his head. It had been nonsense. He must have misunderstood what Nell had been trying to tell him. He had to admit, he’d been so upset in the moment, he’d hardly been listening.

But it didn’t matter. Tomorrow, he was sure Irene would call Nell to invite her back to the library and tell her she knew about the map—or what Felix had accidentally revealed before realizing Nell hadn’t kept her promise to him. Nell would have no choice but to admit it then and accept some much needed help and security.

She’d probably hate him forever, and he’d never see her again, but seven years ago, he’d already assumed that was how things would go. If it wasn’t meant to be between them, at least this way she’d finally be free of her father’s damned shadow and back at the library. And safe.

He had his own map to worry about, anyway. A far better one. A map that not even all the esteem and scholarly power of the NYPL’s preeminent Map Division could give him. This was the entire world, in one single map. It was going to revolutionize the field of cartography. Hell, it was going to revolutionize every field—shipping and logistics, tourism, weather, agriculture, location-based games people played on their phones, even crime. It was going to be perfect. That was the entire reason William had hired Felix and formed his team to develop the Haberson, after all.