Nell started to speak, and then paused. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. The threat had simply never been an issue for any of the cartographers in her era. “Kind of a paradox.”
“Very,” Eve agreed. “But someone finally figured out a loophole. No one knows who first came up with the solution to protect the original creators, but it was genius. Hide a lie inside the truth.”
“A trap,” Nell said.
“Exactly,” Eve replied. “A phantom settlement.”
“If whatever you planted ever appeared on someone else’s map, you’d know they had stolen from you, instead of done the work themselves,” she mused. “It is genius.”
“The trick is hiding it well enough. An incorrect altitude on a minor mountain, a misspelling of a small body of water, a slight bend in an out-of-the-way river that’s actually straight. In small-scale maps, which depict buildings and floor plans, we tend to refer to these phantom settlements, these secrets, as just that: trap rooms.”
Nell couldn’t help smiling despite the somber reason for their meeting. Ancient maps had always held more prestige and wonder for her, but she had to admit that there was still some magic in modern maps, too. How many times had she opened a tourist guide to some city or another while traveling, and glanced right over some cartographer’s little secret just like this, without ever knowing?
Their gazes both drifted back to the Sanborn map.
She was about to ask where the secret was on it, but all of a sudden, Eve looked as though she was about to cry. “I’m sorry,” she laughed, embarrassed. “I should be comforting you.”
“It’s really all right,” Nell smiled.
“It’s so good to see you again—even under such sad circumstances. I’m just a little overwhelmed. I wasn’t expecting . . .” Eve wiped her eyes and searched for something to distract her from the moment, so she wouldn’t begin weeping again. “I’ll be right back, I need to get a transport envelope and some padding.”
As she went to the other side of the exhibit where a few storage cabinets had been set up, Nell took her last chance to study the map as much as she could. Her eyes roamed over every line and label. She examined the streets, then the buildings, checking each one carefully before finally finding herself in the NYPL all over again, this time on the page instead of the world. She went hall by hall, noting each window and wall, until at last she ended up in the room she knew best.
Excerpt, Sanborn Insurance Map from Manhattan
Suddenly, there it was.
The secret.
There was a false room in the Map Division.
It was tiny and unobtrusive, no bigger than a closet. She hadn’t noticed before, when trying to take in the entire city block the map covered as a whole and not knowing what to look for, but it was clear now. During the production of this seventh edition, some draftsman had inserted a little nonexistent space right in her old stomping grounds.
It definitely wasn’t there in real life, Nell knew. Where the false room had been hidden on the page was a smooth wall in the main reading room.
Why would her father want a map of the building where he worked, where he was murdered, with an intentional error on it in the very same office?
She didn’t know yet—but then an idea came to her.
Was this the connection between the two maps?
Everything else was similar about them. They were both old, both out of print, and very rare, despite their seeming lack of value. The gas station map was just bigger, covering nearly the entire state of New York and its neighbors—so its secret would have to be bigger.
Like a whole building, or a street.
Or maybe, an entire town.