It was real. It was here.
“I knew it,” Wally said, breaking the silence.
“Knew what?” she stammered.
But Wally gestured to the Haberson duffel bag in Felix’s hands. “You can bring that here.”
Felix hesitated, but a gentle wave of the gun forced him to comply. He handed the bag to Wally, who went to the press and set the bag on the flat expanse where a roll of paper would feed in. He slowly unzipped it. Inside was a small, sleek-looking device, like a futuristic printer, with the Haberson logo painted on the side of it. Wally tossed the bag out of the way and then pressed a button to wake the machine.
It was a portable scanner, Nell realized, as a sliding motion along the top, a mechanical arm moving across a plate of glass, caught her eye.
“Why do you have that?” she asked warily.
Next to the much larger antique contraption, it looked so strange. Too aerodynamic, too artificial. Compared to the press, which required setting paper and cranking levers by hand, all it took was a button push to make the Haberson scanner work. There was hardly any soul to it. It just copied maps—it didn’t make them.
“I know you’ve also wondered why your father didn’t destroy this map,” Wally continued as he prepared the device, ignoring her question. “Why he kept it all these years, despite the terrible things that had happened here, and despite knowing I was searching for a copy.”
“Because it’s the last thing that belonged to my mother,” Nell said. She wasn’t going to tell him what she really hoped was true.
But Wally was nodding as if reading her mind anyway. A smile had crept onto his face.
“Tear it,” he said, pointing at the Agloe map in her hands.
“What?” Nell and Felix gasped at the same time.
“Tear the map,” Wally repeated. “Right down the middle. Then again, and again, until it’s scraps.”
“Are you serious?” Felix cried, nearly hysterical with anger. “You murdered Swann to stop him from destroying it, and now you want to—”
“We needed it then, to get into Agloe,” Wally said. “Now that we’re here, we don’t need it anymore.”
Nell clung desperately to the little folded paper. Was Wally trying to kill them?
Because if Agloe only existed on the paper, what would happen to it when the last copy was destroyed?
What would happen to them if they were inside when that happened?
“Do it,” Wally commanded. His voice was soft, but the threat was clear. Or else.
Nell’s hands fumbled as she unfolded the map again. She could see the memories flickering across Felix’s terrified face as he looked at it too, this little tattered thing that was worth more than any other artifact they’d ever seen. This single sheet of printed paper that had caused them so much pain and damage in their young lives, splitting them apart, bringing them back together, splitting them apart again, and pulling them inexorably to each other one last time, here and now, but not in a way that either of them could have imagined.
How many times, after they’d both been fired, had Nell fantasized about finding this map and shredding it, she wondered. Probably about as many times as Felix had.
Now she had the chance—she was being forced to do it—and would give anything not to.
Wally held up a hand to still her for a moment. He turned slowly in a circle, his arms out, his eyes falling over every cluttered surface of the factory. As if waiting for something—or someone—to stop him.
But nothing happened.
He grinned and aimed the gun at Felix.