“Get up. You’re coming for a walk. No, stop that. Who cares who sees you crying? It’s dark out anyhow. Look, we’ll walk in the courtyard.”
Into the corridor, and finally away from her apartment.
For some reason Terese’s mind drifted back to the hideaway that she’d shared for one night with Patzer and his friend Drool. Something about the stories they’d told about their infected and cadver hunts. She must have been very drunk that evening, because she couldn’t remember even one of those stories. Why was she thinking of that?
“I’m sorry,” Jools sniffed. “I’m not like this. You know that, right?”
“You’re going to be making the defining choice of your entire life in six months, Jools. I’d be acting like you as well. Let’s talk about something else. Um, I know you like Polis Sumad, could you tell me about the places you go when your complement leaves? Tell me about the architecture.”
The other woman nodded, smiling at Terese’s efforts to strike up a conversation on her pet topic. Holder Moorcam had said that in the early stages, the conversation had to be directed or the subject would fall asleep within minutes. He’d also told her not to waste the solution, for the volume of ‘nail lacquer’ and ‘perfume’ she’d brought with her was as much as Armer Stone’s ancient artifacts could produce within a year. Moorcam hadn’t needed to tell her how worried he was the chapterhouse’s actions would be discovered.
At Terese’s persistent prompting, Jools detailed the distances, roads and paths with unusual precision. The places they’d slept, the strange antiques from Hem Kader, its artists and entrepreneurs gentrifying and developing the district’s forgotten spaces.
Jools spoke about the statue by the open square, the strategically vast open spaces of the Hem Kader, the curious antique shop with its odd clients who spoke so little. The abandoned area the shop operated in with similar shops spread nearby, and the dual-function nature of the new housing and commercial spaces being slowly developed, the sun reflecting off the RimWall at eventide, bustling suburbs where trade was healthy and the people dressed so creatively and in such colors. It was a pity they couldn’t sample any of the food on these runs, but one day she and Gam would sample everything out that way.
The courtyard’s lights had dimmed as night crept on, and their quiet whispers and footsteps drew no attention.
Jools sighed in frustration when Terese asked about her complement’s interest in old things.
“That’s why we’re always out there. Only the Gods know what the powerheads left lying around.”
Terese grabbed her shoulders. “Jools Teeber, as your commanding officer I order you to go back to your room and not communicate with Head Kedden until the sun has risen. If you went now, you’d tell him everything on your mind. And he’d blame me for interfering. Go to sleep, Missionary.”
Jools giggled, gave a sarcastic salute, lunged forward and wrapped Terese in a bear hug, leaving her feet dangling. “Thank you, Terese, for everything!”
“Anytime. But I think you already have your answer.”
As Jools skipped to her apartment. Terese’s smile dropped away.
From the few spare walls devoid of bookshelves, frescoes of the twenty-four Polis in their human forms, including the still-dying Polis Ceneph, looked down on Terese as she entered the library. Its colored-glass windows climbed to the ceiling, where they met the tops of the tall bookshelves and the sliding ladders.
Of all the library’s sections, the map room was the most spacious. Large folders lined the room, inlaid within the white stone walls. Each folder was taller than Terese and contained a dozen maps at large scale.
Terese rifled through the folders. A librarian passed through the map room, her footsteps coming close, stopping then receding. Perhaps just checking if Terese needed help? After all, map preparation was the map room’s very purpose. Terese even had a reason for her presence. Creating the paperwork for such a requirement had again kept her late at the office, re-writing some of Miss Hung Over’s schedules so any scrutineer would believe Terese’s cover story: That she was correcting her colleague’s errors.
Some map folders were dedicated to topography, some tracked the tram lines, and others kept precise notes on the locations of each growth hexagon and water pipe within the Polis. Many folders contained detailed diagrams and layout structures of the Walls in the Refugee Territories. One never knew when such details might be needed.
She stopped at the well-maintained ‘Southern Polis and Territories’ folder. Terese turned each map, the wooden page borders rattling against one another, until she found the map she needed: a large, recent street map of the area surrounding Sumad Reach, including the local suburbs and tram lines. There were the major commercial centers, and there was the Hem Kader.
She retrieved a sheet of waxen, transparent grid paper and a ruler from the library’s supply, then knelt with a graphite stylus to draw the map she’d memorized while Jools had spoken that evening.
Old ruins, street shops, stand-out architecture, artworks, public buildings, hills, gardens, pipes and hexes and every feature Jools had mentioned gradually came into being. Using her subtlest encouragement, Terese had convinced her deputy to imply distances, features and directions until she was certain she could easily find her way through the Hem Kader with this map.
Other than the tall clock in the corner, the only other sounds were her stylus’s grinding scratches and her own loud sighs.
As the warning bell chimed five minutes before closing, Terese lifted her map to the grand parchment in the folder on the wall. She overlaid Jools’s transparent route over the land west of Sumad Reach, stretching out to the Hem Kader, hoping the coinciding points of interest would find one another and hint at whatever Jools’ dark ops unit was up to.
Nothing matched.
Terese hissed and shifted the sketch back east over the map, in
