“Or . . . ,” Tam said.
Wally nodded. “Or they took the loss because they were trying to protect this place. No matter the cost.”
“So, even if the founder knew he’d created Agloe, if they worked that hard to keep it hidden, we really might be the only ones who know about it now,” Daniel mused. “We really could do this. To show the world. We really could be the first, with our new Dreamer’s Atlas.”
“We really could,” Tam said, leaning close to the fire we’d made that night in the pit, so she could speak to us over the top of your drowsy head.
“We just have to keep it a secret,” Wally echoed, his gaze far away. “Our secret.”
We could do that, I thought. This was the biggest discovery any of us would ever make—that anyone in the entire cartography industry would ever make. I couldn’t imagine any of us doing something to jeopardize that.
And we didn’t. As you know now, Nell, there isn’t anyone else out there who knows that Agloe exists but us. We did keep it a secret.
We just didn’t know that it would also be keeping all of ours.
I don’t know how it happened—isn’t that what everyone who betrays someone says? But I don’t know how it happened. I just know why. If we had never found Agloe, if we had all never gone inside . . .
But we did find it, and we did go inside.
And suddenly, there was somewhere I could hide my secret. Not just a glance that someone might notice, a whisper someone might hear, or a risky stolen moment that someone might stumble upon, but an entire town. I could bury it down deep there, where it would never be found.
Work began in earnest on our new Dreamer’s Atlas. Every spare moment that we weren’t sleeping, we were working on our masterpiece, with even more fervor than we’d already had. It used to amaze me back at the university how much our ideas could grab hold of us, but our studies had been nothing compared to this.
Even though everything about our project was now different, the way that we worked didn’t change at all, as if we were fated for it. Tam and Romi, our artists, would be responsible for drawing our two new maps of the same, but not same, area—Romi, with her exacting hand and lines more steady than a compass and protractor, would lead the drafting of the real-world version of the Sullivan County and Catskills territory, and Tam, with her boundless creativity and artistic eye, would lead the drafting of Agloe. The next time we went into our mysterious phantom settlement, they took over an empty ice cream parlor off the central square and made it our headquarters, where they spread out notes across the bare counters and taped up dozens of preliminary sketches on the huge front window, so they could use the light to quickly trace revisions.
Daniel, our goof, always throwing curveballs to make us think deeper, and Bear, forever game to be included in his adventures, were tasked with gathering the references and research Romi would need to conceptualize her map—so she could make it as real and accurate as possible, while still allowing for the possibility that Tam’s map could exist therein. In their efforts to understand how the town worked, and how it was connected to the real world, if at all, the two of them became obsessed with experimenting on a cluster of six vacant houses and a small diner in a single neighborhood block they claimed for themselves. Daniel dug up power lines, Bear tried to follow telephone poles. They brought groceries and pans and plates from Rockland and made lunch at the diner for the rest of the group. They took us on boat rides from the vacant boat rental shop on Beaverkill River, which ran through the town. The rest of us were still so unnerved by the sheer impossibility of it all, I don’t know how much we really enjoyed it, but you loved it, Nell. It was the perfect summer adventure for a kid. Your laughter would ring out across that empty place, echoing off every window and roof.
And last but not least, Wally, our details genius, was consumed with the research he’d started on General Drafting, obsessed with tracking down every single reference he could find to every single article, to ensure that we truly were the only ones who knew about Agloe.