The Cartographers

by Peng Shepherd

All 212 copies of the same map were missing from every collection. Not a single one remained. And she had just entered their own into the public record.

“What the heck would cause over two hundred of you to be missing or stolen?”

So she noticed that 212 documents were missing. I wonder if dad had stolen them and added to his collection personally or if he found out that someone was stealing them and they killed him because of it.

But his line just rang uselessly a second time and went to voicemail.

I think Swann had been killed too

“I’m very sorry about Mr. Fong,” he said. “The hospital said they did everything they could.”

Henry was dead. Kind, funny, patient Henry, who always let her skip in the hallway even though it wasn’t allowed, or take more books off the shelves to read than she should, or interrupt him anytime at the front desk and ask where in the building Dr. Young or Swann was—and he always knew—was dead.

Nell’s blood ran cold. It couldn’t be. There was no way that what the burglars had been after was her father’s map.

The robbers are after the gas station map

He nodded placatingly. “I’m not accusing you of anything. We just have to cover all our bases, like I said before. First your father’s death, then the same library where he passed away was violently burgled, and I find you in the lobby—”

“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “I wish I knew. We really didn’t speak again after I left the library.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I shouldn’t have said anything at all. You just lost your father, and I’m complaining about business. Forgive me.”

Suddenly, Nell spotted Swann as he emerged from the back offices, flanked by police still asking questions. He looked even more haggard than yesterday, like he might faint at any moment.

“Do you really think this is what the burglars broke in for?” she asked. “It just makes no sense.”

“They’ll just take the map into evidence, and we’ll never see it again.”

“This is the last thing my father worked on. The thing that ruined my life, and that he kept for years after, for some inexplicable reason. I can’t just let it go like that, without knowing why.”

“I ran into Irene out there. I let slip that I knew about the library’s financial situation, and she told me she thought my father might have been obsessively working on something just before he died. Something she hoped could save the library. Maybe it was this.”

“What if he didn’t die of natural causes?”

well. Her father used to ask it all the time when she was too caught up in the academic minutiae of a specimen, to the point of accidentally offending other researchers she was supposed to be cooperating with as she forced a project off course to follow her own vision. The answer was “to bring people together,” but the older she’d gotten, she’d found his saying more and more odd, considering that he could never learn his own lesson.

“But he was right, even if he could never put it into practice himself. I just want you to be careful. To do this for the right reason.” He looked at her. “This place isn’t everything.”

“Now, we need somewhere safe to keep it in the meantime. Bring the map back here, and—”

“The library is the least safe place for it.” “But security will be double for weeks!” “Yes, double. Which means just barely inadequate instead of woefully inadequate,” Nell said. “And now the

burglars will be watching like hawks for any change. The minute I bring you the ma...

“Anyone who knew my father well enough to know he had a daughter also knows about the Junk Box Incident. Knows that the two of us hadn’t spoken a single word to each other since.”

a black Audi sedan oddly parked along the same curb where taxis pulled up to let passengers out for the library. It stuck out darkly in a river of yellow, pristine except for

Then Nell had seen another black Audi, idling at a stop sign on the street before her own. She had no idea if it was the same one—could that be rust on the wheel wells, if she squinted?—but it didn’t matter.

Seven years since they’d last seen each other.

Nell’s father had done. In addition to ruining her own career in the Junk Box Incident, he’d also ruined Felix’s—and their relationship.

She and Felix had met in grad school at UCLA. He’d asked her out by drawing a map leading to a restaurant he’d chosen. It was so unbelievably corny, but until then, Nell had never met anyone who loved cartography as much as she did, except her father and Swann. But Felix was better with computers than all of them. The data, the modeling, the algorithms.

Nell’s father had demanded Irene Pérez Montilla fire Nell in one breath, and Felix in the next.

she’d spent so many years desperately missing Felix,

Because there definitely had not been a spark when she’d first opened the door and seen him.

“Well, your father was right the first time—it seems like a regular old piece of junk. I don’t know why he would still have it after all these years.”

“The NYPL was burgled last night,” she whispered, as if saying it too loud might make it happen again. “You’ll probably start seeing the news stories anytime. That’s why I messaged you.”

“What they were looking for wasn’t there. This was the only thing not on display or in the back collections last night.”

“It’s a business card,” she said. It was faded and creased from where it had been stuck for years. There was a scribble on the back, a hastily sketched map of some city streets downtown in the Chinatown area, she guessed, perhaps done by her father as a way to remind himself of where the business the card advertised was located. She turned it over. RW Rare Maps By Appointment Only

“The Cartographers?” Nell murmured. “Who is that?” “I don’t know. A collector’s group, maybe?” Felix guessed.

“The portfolio is a personal item. You can just say you didn’t realize anything from the library was inside at first. You won’t be in trouble.”

He wouldn’t understand how stuck she was at Classic. How much she still missed the library. How much she missed real maps. “It’s like closure, okay?” she said instead. “I

just want some closure.

but she knew that he remembered how complicated her relationship with her father had been, even before he’d destroyed their lives. “What’s your next move?”

“Ramona Wu is shady. Crooked. Can you imagine, if anyone saw you together? I wouldn’t be caught dead—” But Nell shrugged. “I don’t have a reputation to lose anymore, remember?”

And they almost always did. Felix’s team had become so good at tracking things down that the FBI often ended up asking them to consult on especially difficult or time-sensitive cases.

To perfect the Haberson Map’s algorithm, so it could operate on a scale the world had never seen.

A symphony. A geographical program capable of containing in one massive depiction every single stream of data from every single arm of the company. Haberson Global had medical consultancies, urban planning teams, mass transit tracking, interior design apps, weather charts, internet search programs, social media, food and grocery delivery, sleep monitoring, flower bloom patterns, endangered species migration routes—all of it would feed into the map, more information from more sources than ever possible before, through the algorithm Felix’s team was designing.

William to go on creating behind the scenes, his genius safe from even the slightest hint of fame.

“There’s value in every failure,” a voice behind them said then, as if on cue. “It shows us what doesn’t work, and gets us that much closer to understanding what will.”

“The failures don’t concern me. A hundred, a thousand, a million, doesn’t matter. We’ll get there.”

“We’ll keep adding until everything is mapped. In fact, I have some good news on that front.”

Did he know about the attempted robbery that had just happened?

“That’s great,” Felix said, comforted. He knew it would be a rocky start, but once the NYPL’s scholars saw how much care Haberson put into its work, they’d come to appreciate the company.

“Their Map Division must have thousands of maps in its archives.” William was grinning now—a jolt of excitement rushed through Felix as he realized why. “And after we finish, so will your algorithm,” he said.

“I actually heard about the break-in last night. I would have said something earlier if I’d known we were taking over security.”