“Not yet. Olive and Claire are still downstairs searching for any Midwest geographies that resemble your map fragment, but it’s a bit of a needle-in-a-haystack situation. However, I think this fascinating new revelation could help us.” He took a heavy step toward Noor. “You lived with V until you were six, yes?”

  “Five and a half,” Noor said, and then she was nodding, already seeming to know what he was about to ask. “You want to know if I remember anything about where we lived.”

  “Yes. If nothing else, it would give us an idea of her general stomping grounds.”

  “Why would V hide in the same area she was attacked?” I asked.

  “If she’s in some secret loop, it could be very close indeed; proximity doesn’t really matter so long as the loop entrance is skillfully hidden. I just need some telling, concrete detail. The names of any towns where you lived would be ideal . . .”

  Noor’s brow scrunched. She shook her head. “I can’t remember any. We moved around a lot, lived in a lot of different places. Never stayed anywhere for long.”

  “Surely you remember something,” Millard said, a bit desperate. “Even the smallest fragment of a memory could prove essential.”

  Noor bit her lip, lost in thought. “Well, we lived in a city for a while, in a little apartment. I remember the radiator pinging all night long, and these big vents in the street that let out steam. And we used to take the bus, this old bus with green plastic seats that smelled like lemon oil.”

  “Oh, that sounds like it might be something!” Bronwyn said, sitting up.

  Millard sighed a long-suffering sigh. “The map fragment is not urban,” he said. “So, no, those memories are not terribly useful. Was there someplace else?”

  “Lots of places,” Noor said. “But none for very long.” She paused, thinking. “Except one. A little town. We used to go back a lot. But what I can remember of it is really hazy.” She let out a sharp, frustrated breath. “Weirdly hazy. Almost like . . .”

  “Someone took your memories?”

  Francesca. I hadn’t realized she’d been listening.

  Noor looked at her strangely. “I didn’t even realize that was possible!”

  Francesca and Miss Avocet locked eyes. “Ma’am,” said Francesca, “do you think Miss Pradesh could have been memory-wiped?”

  Miss Avocet was nodding, kneading her hands together. “If she has other memories from that time, it’s possible someone might have done only a partial wipe on her. To remove a specific batch of memories.”

  “Wait, what?” said Noor, her eyes getting wider. “You guys are serious about this?”

  “Memory-wipes are quite common,” said Bronwyn.

  “On normals,” Hugh said in an undertone.

  Noor was not looking reassured.

  Miss Avocet laid a steadying hand on Noor’s arm. “It sounds as if it was only a small one, to keep you safe from harm, dear. If V worried for your safety, she might also have worried that you would one day try to return to where you once lived, out of nostalgia, or some pull for a place that felt like home.”

  Noor studied her shoes. She said nothing, but her heartbreak was clear.

  “Imagine someone doing that to their own child,” Emma said, her voice solemn.

  “I had to do it to my own parents,” I said with a heavy sigh. “It wasn’t an easy choice.”

  Noor was shaking her head. “Maybe V wasn’t trying to keep me safe at all,” she said quietly. “Maybe she just didn’t want me.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” Miss Avocet cried, standing upright so quickly she pinched a muscle in her back. She grabbed at the edge of her desk for support and, wincing, slowly eased herself back down. “Oh dear. Francesca, I may have snipped a bit of muscle again. Would you be a dear and fetch me my oils?”

  “At once, ma’am,” Francesca said, and hurried off.

  Another loud throat-clearing. Millard.

  “Apologies, Noor, but I’m afraid we don’t have time for you to feel sorry for yourself,” he said. I nearly shouted at him for being so unkind, but he cut me off.

  “It’s abundantly clear,” he was saying, “that this V woman cared a great deal about you, otherwise she might’ve just handed you over to the wights. So might we please refocus the conversation?”

  Noor scowled, but somehow she seemed a bit mollified. Soon her scowl eased into steely resolve.

  “Very good,” Miss Avocet said, still positioned awkwardly in her desk chair. “Miss Pradesh, would you submit yourself to a small procedure?”

  “A procedure?” she asked, her eyebrows high.

  “You see,” Miss Avocet said, still wincing a little, “very occasionally we ymbrynes make a mistake”—it clearly pained her to admit it—“and we memory-wipe the wrong people or memory-wipe them a bit too much, and it becomes necessary to try to undo a bit of what we did. We have a man on staff, Mr. Reggie Breedlove, whose talent is the retrieval of some of those lost memories. Now, it’s not science, this, and because it’s been so long since your wipe, I can’t guarantee we’ll get much in the way of results.”

  “Oh,” Noor said, a hopeful edge to her voice. “I think it would be worth a try,”

  Miss Avocet smiled. “That’s the spirit.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Breedlove arrived at Miss Avocet’s office; Francesca had administered to the ymbryne the necessary oils for her injured back. Miss Avocet stood straight up, revived, and Breedlove stumbled in like a drunk, or at least like a man who’d just been roused from bed, his suit and tie put on hastily. He was tall and olive-skinned, and he had a wide face and even wider eyes that never seemed to blink.

  Francesca led him toward us. He continued to stumble over a pile of books, catching himself just before falling.

  “He looks a bit off balance,” Emma said doubtfully.

  “Have a little faith in your elders,” snapped Miss Avocet.

  Breedlove went to work right away. Noor, having been assured by Miss Avocet that this wouldn’t hurt a bit and wouldn’t erase any more of her memories, was seated in a straight-backed chair in front of the fireplace.

  He stood behind Noor like a hairdresser might. “Stare into the flames,” he instructed her. “Don’t think about anything.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Breedlove held his big palms out on either side of Noor’s head. He closed his eyes. A fine, thin stream of smoke began to waft out of his nostrils.

  Noor’s eyes searched the fire, as if she were seeing something in the flames. Her hair—the strands that weren’t gathered in a ponytail—rose and danced in the air.

  I leaned toward her. “Are you okay?” I whispered.

  “Please don’t speak,” Breedlove said.

  I was about to argue, then thought better of it.

  Millard paced the rug nervously. Emma and Bronwyn sat, each hugging herself on the couch, unintentionally mirroring the other.

  Miss Avocet was completely still, her eyes shining.

  I stood close to Noor, studying her face for any reaction—ready to put a stop to this if it seemed to be hurting her.

  Thirty seconds ticked by.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Breedlove.

  Francesca held up a hand to me, but this time, Breedlove allowed the interruption. “Searching for blank spots,” he explained.

  I was about to ask a follow-up question when he suddenly stiffened.

  “Yes, here,” he said. “This section is full of little holes.” His voluminous eyebrows shot up. “And one large one.”

  “Anything you can restore?” Miss Avocet asked.

  “Perhaps.” His hands drew closer to Noor’s temples. The stream of smoke from his nose thickened, and his own hair began to stand up. “Perhaps a few things.”

  And then Noor started speaking. Slowly, as if half in a trance.

  “I remember playing in a river. A deep, wide river. It had a really long name.”

  Miss Avocet cut her eyes toward Francesca. “Are you writing this down?”

  Francesca held up her pad. So did two other ymbrynes-in-training standing behind her.

  Noor said, “There was a big tree in the yard. An elm, Mama said. It had a swing. I fell once and twisted my ankle. She wouldn’t let me go on it for a month after that and I was so upset.”

  “What else?” Breedlove asked her, his voice growing melodic. The smoke from his nostrils was fast becoming a problem, rising in dense tendrils toward the rafters above us.

  Noor didn’t seem to mind.

  “Apples,” she said. “Wild apples from the woods we used to pick in the fall. They were so sweet and delicious, and the juice would run down my arms. But then . . .” She was quiet for a moment, and so was the room but for the sound of pens scribbling on paper. Then she went on. “Itchy, so itchy. All over.” She began to scratch her arms and her chest, as if feeling it again. “I got these little red bumps from playing in a briar patch. They looked like triangles,” she said. “After that we didn’t play in the woods much. Mama said they were dangerous. There were men with guns there. Men in bright orange jackets. We saw them once in the parking lot of the big store, and they had a big dead animal strapped to the roof of their truck. It was so sad. When I saw it, I cried.”

  “What was the name of the store?” I said, just above a whisper.

  Breedlove glowered at me.

  Noor’s face tightened. Her eyes wandered the flames. Then she shook her head.

  “I remember a bad smell. There was a factory, or something, and sometimes it smelled like rotten eggs.”

  The ymbrynes-in-training wrote furiously.

  “Good,” Millard said quietly. “What else?”

  “The sound of a woodpecker early in the morning. He lived at the edge of the yard. He was so small. Sometimes he’d come sit on my windowsill. It looked like he was wearing a tiny red cap right on his head.”

  “Sounds like a downy woodpecker,” Miss Avocet said.

  Noor was talking faster and faster. The smoke was positively pouring from Breedlove’s nose now.

  “A long, long road. A mountain with no top on it. Lucky Charms soaked until the milk turned pink.” She began to moan a little. Abruptly, Breedlove took his hands away.

  “That’s all,” he said. “If I go any deeper, I could risk damaging her mind.”

  Noor’s head dipped and she slumped in her chair, spent.

  Millard, Bronwyn, and I darted over to her. I knelt down by her chair. “You okay?”

  Noor looked up, surprised, as if coming out of a dream. “Yeah. Yeah, just . . .” She ran a hand down her face. “A little tired.”

  Breedlove pinched his nose closed, snorted once, and extinguished whatever fire had been smoldering in his head. Then he came around to face Noor, stumbling on the edge of the rug. “More snippets may return to you in the coming days,” he said. “But only bits and pieces.”

  “Thank you,” Noor said, smiling wearily at him. “That was”—she swallowed hard—“intense.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Millard said.

  Noor looked at him—or the place where his voice had come from. “Was any of that helpful?”

  “I’m quite confident we can make something of it.”

  “We already have,” said Francesca, and she turned to the ymbryne-in-training behind her, a shy girl nodding into her notebook.

  “From just the species of flora and fauna you described,” the girl said, “it seems certain the place you’re describing is in the eastern half of United States, not the Midwest.”

  Noor looked struck. “What? Are you sure?”

  “Are there tornadoes in those states?” I asked.

  “Some,” Millard said, nodding fast. “Not as many. But some.”

  Hugh sighed. “Even three or four US states is still an awfully big haystack.”

  “Granted,” said Millard. “But it’s a smaller one than we had before.”

  Noor was a little unsteady on her feet for a few minutes, but would entertain no talk of resting, so we all headed downstairs to the Mapping Department. It was a baffling warren of tall library stacks and ladders on wheels, and the place was filled with bright white daylight, which came seemingly from the air itself. I assumed it was some peculiar trickery, as there were no windows and no lamps anywhere. Between the stacks were open areas with long flat tables atop which maps could be spread out, and we found Olive, Enoch, and Claire at one such table, half buried in a pile of giant atlases.

  “We’re nearly done with Oklahoma!” Olive announced when she saw us.

  “Thank Hades,” Enoch grumbled.

  “Have you brought lunch?” asked Claire.

  “This is no time for a break!” Millard said. “Clear all these away, it seems we’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

  The three of them groaned.

  The rest of us piled the now-useless Midwest maps on the floor and started over. Millard began giving orders like a drill sergeant, which under any other circumstances we would’ve resented. But this was his domain, and this task too important. So we obeyed with little complaint.

  “Hugh,” Millard barked, “climb up and get every atlas from that topmost shelf there, and be very careful with the big one, it’s a real Map of Days and it’s in delicate condition. Jacob, make a list of all the loops in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Maryland with long rivers immediately to the north and west of them. And Noor, I have a special task for you.”

  The atlases of those states were divided among us. We paged methodically through them, looking for long rivers with very long names, for topography and town layouts that matched the map fragment H had given us.

  Soon we were lost in work.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Hours passed.

  The atlases piled up around us in stacks so tall they divided us like cubicle walls. Millard made occasional grunts of interest or surprise at some little detail or another he’d stumbled across. After an hour I asked Noor if she needed a break, but she shook her head. I slid a glass of water in front of her after another hour, and she drank it down in two gulps, then looked up at me, surprised and grateful, as if she’d forgotten she needed things like water to function, and dove right back into the atlas she’d been combing through. An hour after that, Claire whined, “Anyone want lunch now?” and held up a finger she’d bandaged to twice its width after sustaining a tiny papercut. “There’s a stew restaurant at the bottom of Oozing Street that got two stars from the Muckraker’s food critic.”

  “Two stars out of how many?” Hugh asked.

  “Five. Though it’s the only establishment in the Acre to have been rated above one, so . . .”

  “I guess we do need a break,” Millard said with a sigh. “They say an army runs on its stomach.”

  “You guys should definitely get something to eat,” Noor said, but her head didn’t rise from the page.

  “You’re not coming?” I asked.

  “You go ahead,” said Noor. “I’m not hungry.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Millard.

  Hugh slammed a book down a bit too hard. “If you all had only cared this bloody much about finding Fiona,” he said angrily, “we would’ve had her back by now.”

  Emma looked stung. “Oh, Hugh,” she said, but he was already hurrying out, trying his best to hold back tears. A single bee buzzed in the spot where he’d been working.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Emma said, and ran after him.

  Noor looked at me. “What just happened?”

  Millard said, “Our friend Fiona—who Hugh has long been in love with—went missing a while ago. She’s presumed dead.”

  Bronwyn picked up the atlas Hugh had been leafing through. “Oh no,” she said mournfully. “He was reading about Ireland.” She held up the book for us to see.

  “Enoch, you were supposed to be watching him!” Claire cried.

  Enoch only rolled his eyes.

  “Fiona is from Ireland,” I explained to Noor.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Noor, shaking her head. “This must be so awful for him.”

  “You know, I had a dream about Fiona the other night,” said Horace.

  Our heads whipped in his direction.

  “You did?” I asked. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I didn’t want to get his hopes up. Not all my dreams are prophetic, and it can take time to sort out which are which.”

  “What was the dream?” I asked.

  Millard went back to his atlas. “I’m listening,” he said. “But you know I don’t put much stock in dreams.”

  “I know, Millard. You’ve only told me ten thousand times.” Horace shook his head, but continued. “Anyway, in the dream Fiona was riding on a bus. There was a little boy with her, in a green tunic and a little hat with a feather in it. And she was frightened. I felt, very keenly, that she was in danger. It could mean nothing. But I wanted to tell someone.”

  “I think dreams contain lots of meaning,” said Noor. “But that meaning doesn’t have to be literally true.”

  Horace looked at her gratefully.

  “Just please don’t tell Hugh,” said Millard. “He’ll have us checking every bus in Britain, and when we find nothing, he’ll be even more crushed than before.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Emma and Hugh returned a while later with cups of takeout stew for everybody. Hugh apologized for his outburst, Emma rewarmed each of our stews with a quick dip of her pinkie into the brown liquid, and we ate while we worked.

  “Don’t any of you dare get stew on these atlases,” Millard warned us. “The official penalty for damaging a book is thirty years’ imprisonment—plus a hefty repair fee.”

  “Oops,” Hugh said under his breath, surreptitiously wiping at a page with his shirt.