“What happened to you?” Sam asked.
Lidea and Geral glanced at each other, and Lidea started, “Well, there was the earthquake.”
“Ariana wouldn’t go back to sleep,” Geral said, “so I was already awake when Stef sneaked into my house. Orrin was with me. We had to pack in the dark, in case anyone was watching the house.”
Orrin took up the story. “We went to Lidea’s house, and then Stef activated the labor drones and told us to ride to the library.”
“Clever.” That sounded like the kind of plan Stef would come up with.
“Are you worried they’ll attack newsouls now?” Lidea asked. “I thought the Council promised to protect newsouls. I thought your demonstration worked.”
I shook my head and repeated what Councilor Sine had told me once. “There’s a law about killing me. Murder is frowned upon, of course, but with me, they didn’t know whether I would be reincarnated, so they made it illegal to try to kill me. The law extends to the other newsouls, but Deborl, Merton, and their friends—they don’t care. They think any punishment is worth it. They just want us dead.”
“Why?” Lidea held Anid to her chest. “I just can’t understand why.”
I didn’t want to explain Janan and their misguided devotion to him. Not right now. So I shrugged and leaned against Sam’s shoulder. “The Council is working to protect newsouls, but this is the truth: they won’t succeed. They can make rules, assign guards, and lock up everyone they think will cause trouble, but there will always be someone they miss, some hole in their security they overlook. Newsouls aren’t safe in Heart. And neither is anyone else.”
“What are you saying?” Orrin leaned forward, darkness in his eyes.
“I’m saying I’m not the only one who needs to leave Heart. We all need to get out.”
After changing into the spare clothes Geral and Orrin had brought, Sam and I headed upstairs to where the maps were kept.
“I thought you knew where we’re going.” The dusty air of the library smothered his words. “Back to Menehem’s lab, right? For the sylph?”
“Yes, but then where? We can’t stay there.” We could, I supposed, but there had to be something better. “I don’t know. I think the sylph will have answers. I’m sure they’ll be there. They were before.”
Sam nodded.
“I need a better idea of the world surrounding Range. There’s so much of it. I need a plan.” I slumped into a chair when we entered the map area. “Sam, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to stop Janan.”
He looked at me, all longing and sadness, and said nothing of my confession. “What maps do you want?”
I gazed around the space, filled with rolled sheets of paper and large books. There had to be a hundred maps. Maybe more. “I don’t know.”
“Perhaps let’s start with Range.” Sam drifted around the small, closed area until he found a rolled map. Together, we spread the thick paper across the table, smoothing the corners with our hands. I didn’t know how to read it, not as far as figuring out distances or elevations, but I recognized familiar locations.
Rangedge Lake was in the south, near where I grew up in Purple Rose Cottage. Midrange Lake was a huge body of water right by Heart. Small Xs marked geysers and fumaroles, while Os marked mud pools and hot springs.
Mountains were everywhere, continuing northwest in a line of jagged peaks. Forests covered the map, all across Range, and everywhere beyond the human haven.
I dragged my finger eastward, until I found the twin peaks visible from Menehem’s laboratory. “The lab should be somewhere here, right?”
Sam nodded and pointed at what looked like a random spot. “There.” He moved his finger. “See, here’s the road.”
Now that he pointed it out, I did. It had almost been lost in the other lines and splotches of ink. While I bent to study the land surrounding the lab, Sam fetched more maps and laid them on the table.
North of Range, the forest grew denser and the details less frequent, as though few people had bothered to explore and chart that area. A line of writing warned of dragons in the frozen north, though I wasn’t sure how far out one had to go in order to see them. Would it take a week to get there? Probably more.
“Sam.”
He paused next to me, arm around my waist.
“Remember when you told me about how you died in your last lifetime? You went north, saw a huge white wall, and there were dragons?”
He hesitated. “Yes.”
“Where would that be on this map?”
“I . . .” His bandaged hand drifted over the map, but never paused. “I’m not sure. You don’t want to go there, do you?”
“Of course not.” The last thing I wanted to do was put Sam in the path of dragons. He’d died by dragons thirty times. By some fluke, I’d managed to save him from dragons twice this lifetime. I didn’t want to risk him a third time. “I’m just trying to get an idea of the rest of the world, since I won’t be able to come back here.”
Sam sighed a little, like relief. “I didn’t mean to be suspicious. We’ve learned a lot about sylph in the last few months—enough to know they might not be as evil as we’d thought—but dragons still terrify me.”
Thirty times. I couldn’t imagine dying thirty times because of dragons. “I wouldn’t put you in danger.”
He gave a weak, exhausted smile, and we both dropped our attention back to the table. “Stef can put maps on your SED for you. It’s not as good as seeing the whole land on paper, but it’s better than nothing.”
“Oh, good.” I found warnings of trolls in the east, centaurs in the south, and rocs in the west. And these things were only the creatures that citizens of Heart might encounter on the edges of Range. There were more creatures beyond, though this map didn’t show that far. “I think I need a bigger map.”
Sam produced a globe, the whole world on a piece of polished stone. Continents were outlined in gold and silver, dressed in green and brown and beige and white, depending on the vegetation or lack thereof. Oceans and large lakes were brilliant, beautiful blue.
I caressed the globe, stone and metal smooth beneath my palm. “I had no idea there was so much beyond Range. Where are we?”
“Here.” He pointed toward the middle of a northern continent. “Range is smaller than the space my fingertip takes up.”
“Oh.” I turned the globe. It was tilted—one of my teachers had told me the world was tilted, but on what, I wasn’t sure—and gazed at continents that suddenly seemed so far away it was pointless even thinking about them. “Range feels so big.”
“It is big.” Sam smoothed hair off my face. “The rest of the world is even bigger.”
“It makes me feel small. I don’t like it.”
“Me neither.” Sam sat on the edge of the table and watched while I looked through more maps, dismissing some and moving others into a pile. He answered whenever I had questions, but for the most part, he kept his eyes closed and seemed lost in thought.
I yawned as I finished with the maps and rolled them up again. “Let’s go to sleep, Sam.”
“Right here?” He eyed the floor. “Right here looks good.”
I helped him off the table and we headed downstairs, dousing lights as we went. As we reached the stairs, my SED buzzed with a message from Stef.
Get down here. Big news.
4 GATHERING
HEAD ACHING FROM lack of rest and too much mortal peril, I slumped down the stairs to find that Stef had arrived with several other friends.
“So much for sleep,” Sam muttered.