When Felix realized he wasn’t going to get more from the man, he’d tried to guess. He could not fail—it had already been six months since he’d been fired from the library, and he’d heard back about none of the hundreds of job applications he’d sent, cursed by the Junk Box scandal. This was not only the best, most incredible mapmaking job he’d ever have the chance to interview for—it was likely also the only one. “Accurate? Diverse? Historical? Beautiful, even?”
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“Purpose,” Felix had said then. It was something he’d heard Dr. Young say often in the library, whenever he was lecturing new researchers about their collection. “That would be what I’d start with first. Nothing else matters about a map unless you know its purpose. What it’s trying to tell you.”
“And how do you know its purpose?”
“By figuring out its secrets,” he replied, desperately parroting more of Nell’s father’s sayings. “Every map has them, but you can only know them by knowing what the mapmaker had intended when they first put pen to paper.”
The line had hung in silence for ten excruciatingly long seconds—so long Felix worried that William had simply hung up on him, the ghost vanished, the interview over.
“Interesting,” he’d finally said instead. He paused again, and Felix tried not to faint from the horror that he’d humiliated himself with overly romantic scholarly nonsense in front of the savviest tech mind in the industry. But then William added: “That was not the answer I was expecting, by far, but I think I like it.”
In the next breath, he asked Felix to start on Monday, and just like that, Felix’s life had changed. No more exile. No more grieving for the field of his passion. He was working with maps again—the most powerful one of all.
If only it had worked out as well for Nell.
Instead, she’d gotten Classic.
Felix stood up with a frustrated sigh and walked over to the window. The Haberson building was deep downtown, but it was one of the tallest skyscrapers in Manhattan. And within it, his and Naomi and Priya’s office was so high, sequestered in the private, secure-access upper levels of Haberson where William haunted, pedestrians far below just appeared as tiny dots, and cars as tiny rectangles. Sometimes, when he stared too long at the view, it started to look a little like the simulations HabWalk and HabDrive were running over in their department. Almost like he could be looking at a map of the world rather than the world itself.
He tried not to gaze toward where he knew the NYPL sat along Fifth Avenue to the north and fixated instead on the dark sea amid all the nighttime lights that was Central Park.
He wondered how William got into the building unseen by the rest of his thousands of employees, on the days that he was here. Maybe he had his own secret entrance and elevator. Or maybe he just lived here, and never left, like a true ghost.
Should he text Nell, to apologize? Felix was still hurt by what she’d done, but he also felt terrible about how he’d handled it. Or would that just draw him back into things?
He’d spent seven years feeling bitter that she’d chosen the map over their relationship the first time, unable to let go, and it had cost him so much to hope that this time around, it could be different. He didn’t know if he was a bigger fool for having fallen for that hope, or for having cut and run again as soon as he realized their second chance at a fairy tale wasn’t going to go exactly the way he’d dreamed.
He wished everything could be as clear as it was on the Haberson servers, within their minute calculations.
“Well, aren’t you just the poster boy for hard work,” a voice called from the doorway. “Didn’t you have a party or something tonight?”
Felix jumped and turned around. “Oh, hey,” he said, nodding at Naomi and Priya as they came from the darkness of the hall into the office. He’d shrugged off his tuxedo jacket and left it on the coatrack, but he was still in the crisp white shirt and black slacks. “I left early.”