When he looked up, she and Priya were hovering at the edge of his desk, staring at him with concern.
“Are you okay?” Priya asked.
“I have to go,” he said suddenly, jumping out of his chair.
“What?” Naomi asked. “Now?”
“You can’t leave!” Priya insisted. “The cops are coming to talk to you! And we don’t even know what we’re looking at! How the hell is this even possible?”
“I have no idea,” he said helplessly, scrambling for his keys. “But I can’t wait for the police now. You saw Wally on that video. You think they’re going to know how to deal with someone who can do that better than us?”
“But you can’t even reach Nell!” Naomi said. “Her phone is disconnected, remember? How are you going to find her, to tell her all of this?”
That slowed him down. He’d forgotten she wasn’t answering her phone. There were several places she might be, if the police hadn’t caught her at the library—at home, or Swann’s brownstone, or her father’s darkened, closed-off apartment, or maybe even Classic—but what was he going to do? Rush between them all, back and forth through New York nighttime traffic for hours, until he finally guessed right and found her?
“Actually, I know where she’s going,” Felix finally said. “The only problem is, I don’t know how we can get there.”
“Agloe,” Naomi answered, with dawning understanding.
He began to pace. “The whole point of Agloe is that it doesn’t appear anywhere else but her cheap little map, so we can’t refer to another one or look it up in our database . . .”
“There’s not much online either,” Priya confirmed. “Some old sales for possible copies like you found earlier, but nothing about its secret value—or the actual location of the town.”
Felix stopped—an idea occurred to him.
“Let’s set the Haberson Map to look for Agloe,” he suggested.
“What?” Priya cried.
“It got close the last time, when we set it to look for the burglar!” he reasoned. “Honestly, maybe it did better than we asked—it found what we needed, rather than what we thought we wanted. Maybe if we aim it toward Agloe, it’ll find Nell.”
“But what more information can we input to help it search?” Naomi asked. “If only we had a scan of her map.”
If only, Felix thought. He wondered what the Haberson Map would do with an impossible data point like that. In response, the map seemed to glow brighter at him from the big screen.
He closed his eyes, trying to picture Nell’s map from the last time he’d seen it. When they both had been crouched over its faded old paper on the table the night before, going square by square on the grid, searching for that mysterious little place. The closest they’d been to each other in a long, long time. He remembered the faint floral scent of her hair, the sound of her shallow, focused breathing. How long it had taken, moving inch by inch across that miniature world, searching for the phantom settlement, and then how he’d been surprised when they’d gotten to—
Felix gasped suddenly.
“Maybe I can get us close enough,” he said. “The phantom settlement was just down the road from a house upstate that Nell’s family used to live in a long time ago.” He waved off the surprised looks they gave him at that. “I don’t know the house’s address, but I remember that the name of the town it was within was called Rockland.”
“Priya, pull our—” Naomi started to say, but Priya had already opened up the section of their server devoted to residential apps to sort through a huge address database. “There’s nothing under owners or renters,” she said. “But you said that house burned down, right?”