“But it doesn’t matter,” Francis replied, cutting her off gently. He could clearly see what she was thinking. “You can’t get to Agloe without the map. There won’t be anything there but a field.”
“But we do have the Agloe map,” Nell said.
Swann shook his head. “It’s gone, remember?”
Nell swung her legs over the couch. The last lingering wave of nausea crested—she closed her eyes and held her breath until it passed. Her head was finally clear.
“No, it’s not,” she said.
“Your bag was stolen in the attack,” Swann said patiently. “Everything that was in it—your wallet, your phone, the portfolio . . . all stolen. Wally has the map now.”
Nell’s feet found her shoes. “No, he doesn’t.”
The rest of them faltered, confused.
She rose to a full stand, shaky, and then firm. She turned to them. “Because the Agloe map wasn’t in the portfolio.”
“I don’t understand,” Francis said.
As he, Ramona, Eve, and Swann stared at Nell, stunned, she looked back to the photo again. At the last face in the line of friends, grinning even more broadly than the others, so unexpected and yet so familiar at the same time.
“I hid it,” she said.
“Where, my dear?” Swann asked.
She still could not believe it. But all of it made sense now—how much Bear had cared for her, in the others’ stories. How he had helped her when almost no one else would, reputations be damned.
She turned the photo around so Swann could see it.
“At Classic,” she said.
Bear was Humphrey.
Francis
The weeks dragged, each one more strange. It seemed like that summer passed in an instant, a surreal, horrible blur that could have been just a single day, and also never ended.
The day the Sullivan County Government Center was burgled, the house woke up to yet another argument between Tam and Romi. Romi had made a good start on the real-world map, enough that Tam was ready to begin drafting her version of the same area, but almost immediately, the two of them had butted heads. Romi wanted Tam to do what she’d done on her map—render Agloe precisely, as accurately as possible—because she believed that would be the only way to understand how it worked. But Tam wanted to start experimenting right away. We’d told everyone about the printing press when we’d found it, and she wanted to use it for her version. What better way to understand what General Drafting’s founder had been doing? Who cared if it wouldn’t match Romi’s aesthetic? Romi argued that the variables were too great, that the significance of our project would lie in comparing the two places, not contrasting them. But Tam’s imagination couldn’t be stopped.
“They’re just notes! You have your own scratch paper, too!” Tam was shouting when I came stumbling down the stairs that morning, still in my pajamas.
“But I’m not hiding the map they go with!” Romi shouted back.
“I’m not hiding a map, either! And I’m definitely not the one snooping through your things!”
They were squared off in the living room, and Daniel, Eve, and Bear were trying to run interference. Daniel, especially, looked at his wit’s end—I knew how he felt. The strain on Romi from their constant arguments was probably the same as that on Tam. Some nights, after everyone had gone to bed and just he and I were outside by the fire, he’d confess he was starting to feel a little desperate about this place. That it might be tearing us apart rather than bringing us closer together, the way our project was supposed to. That he had to do something, before it spiraled out of control.