Nell closed her eyes and ripped the page.
The sound struck her to the core. She shuddered, and so did Felix. She kept ripping, tearing it into quarters, then the quarters in half to eighths, and onward, until the map was no more than a bunch of tiny scraps of paper, each no larger than a puzzle piece. They slid through her fingers and fluttered to the ground like leaves in a breeze, covering the floor in a perverse autumn blanket.
She and Felix stared in stunned silence at the fragments where they lay.
It was gone.
The thing her mother had died for, and her father had given decades of his life for, and Nell had lost her career and her relationship with Felix for, even if she hadn’t known it at the time.
Gone.
After a long moment, she finally looked up. Wally was still standing where he’d been, looking at the same tatters of paper—but he was still smiling.
“See?” he finally said. “I was right.”
“Right about what?” Felix asked tensely.
“Right that this wasn’t the last copy,” Nell said, understanding.
They had destroyed the one they had with them, but the town was still there around them. They were still inside of it.
Which meant that something else was keeping them there.
Another copy.
Wally nodded. “I was right that Tam didn’t die all those years ago in the fire.”
“What are you saying?” Felix asked.
Wally’s eyes blazed as he looked at Nell. “She’s been alive, all this time. She’s been here, in Agloe.”
“That building was ashes. How could you know she survived?” Felix asked, incredulous, but Wally was still looking at Nell. She could tell that he knew she had also suspected it all along. That she believed he was right.
In response, Wally turned back to the printing press.
He ran his hand over the old contraption, his fingers sliding across the wood cranks, the smooth rollers, inspecting its parts as meticulously now as he must have all those years ago, when they were all deeply consumed with their reimagined version of the Dreamer’s Atlas. Their secret project that was going to change the way the world understood maps forever.
In all of their stories, Ramona, Francis, Eve, and Humphrey always insisted that Nell’s mother had never used the founder’s printing press in this abandoned workshop. She had been desperate to, convinced that it had been installed here for that very reason, but tragedy had struck them before she’d reached a point in her drafts to be ready to bring the antique machine to life.
It had been sitting here for decades, ever since the day of the fire, when they were all torn back into the real world and unable to return.
And yet.
At last, Wally held his finger out, so Nell and Felix could see what was now smudged on the tip.
Ink. Freshly wet.
XXV
“I know you saw the signs, too,” Wally said to Nell, continuing to stare her down.
“What signs?” Felix asked, still in disbelief. “No one has been here for over thirty years. No one . . . could have survived that long. This place is empty.”
Wally ignored him. Felix hadn’t heard the stories that Francis, Ramona, Eve, and Humphrey had told Nell about what Agloe had been like when they first found it—he didn’t know what had been here before and what had not. To him, the town probably still did look empty.
But it wasn’t, Nell knew.
It had appeared that way at first, in her initial shock. But the longer the three of them had walked, slowly making their way toward the printing factory, she had started to notice. Details that didn’t match their memories, things she couldn’t explain.