For a long moment, Wally didn’t say anything. He stared at her, smoldering with betrayal, his pupils so large and dark, they swallowed his pale eyes. Nell clutched her mother’s map and fountain pen in one hand and the letter in the other, waiting breathlessly to see which way his reaction would go.
But Wally didn’t become angry or upset. He turned back to the waiting scanner on top of the printing press and stroked its pristine surface gently, almost lovingly.
“I forgive you, Tam,” he finally said. “It isn’t your fault. You’ve been here so long, you don’t know what I’ve spent my life trying to achieve. Let me show you. Once you see, you’ll understand. You’ll see I was right all along. That I still can fix everything.”
“It’s too late,” Felix said to him. “It’s been too late for a long time.”
But Wally ignored him and turned back to Tamara. “Once we combine them, the Dreamer’s Atlas will be complete. With the only copy, our map will be as close to the world as you can get. It almost will be the world, in a way. We can do whatever we want with it.”
“You and I may have found the town, but I never wanted it to be only ours,” Tamara said. “We never should have tried to keep it a secret. That was where we went wrong, all those years ago.”
“Where we went wrong was trusting the others,” Wally replied.
“Maps aren’t meant to be secrets, Wally. They’re meant to be shared,” she said.
“Not this one.” Slowly, his gaze slid over to Nell. “You understand what I mean.”
“No, I don’t,” Nell started, but he quelled her argument with a tired wave of his gun.
“Yes, you do. You had every opportunity from the start to turn the map over, and you didn’t. You didn’t tell the police, you didn’t tell Irene or the NYPL. You didn’t share it with anyone, didn’t let anyone help you. You didn’t even tell the Cartographers, when you found them. You wanted to keep the map all for yourself.”
“No,” Nell insisted again, but it came out weak, barely more than a whisper.
She knew he was right. She was no better than Wally was. At any moment, she could have told any of them—Irene, Lieutenant Cabe, Ramona, Francis, Eve, Humphrey—but she’d done the exact opposite. She had tried to keep it a secret, even to the point of wrecking her chance at a better life at the library, and her own personal safety. And even worse, she’d forced Swann and Felix to go along with it—and it had cost Swann his life and might be about to cost Felix his.
Felix was shaking his head at her now, begging her not to listen, but Nell couldn’t deny it. She could lie to herself that it was because she’d been trying to help the NYPL, or find justice for her father, but that would be all it was. A lie.
Wally’s eyes bore into her, knowing.
“You’ve been on your own for so long, Nell. Wouldn’t you like to belong somewhere?”
“I belong,” she said reflexively.
“Where? At the NYPL?” he asked. “They cast you out, and now your only friend left there has died. At Classic? You’ll stay there for ten more years because you don’t know what else to do, and then what?” He took a small step closer to her and her mother. “I spent a lifetime trying to finish this map alone. But here we all are, drawn together again. That’s worth something. Wouldn’t you like to be part of something bigger than you are again?”
“But this isn’t the way,” Felix said, but Wally took another step, forcing Nell to take a tiny one back.
“Put the map on the scanner,” he said to her.
“I won’t,” Nell argued.
She stared at her mother nervously. Wally had been her best friend for their whole young life. No one knew him better than she did—no one could stop him except her. Her mother had to know that. She had to do something.