Taer crept as softly as she could down the hallway, past the Edge of the World Maps, with her back against the wall to protect herself, like she had seen in movies. She tried each of the white doors on the left side of the hallway; each one of them was locked. She didn’t want to move away from the wall to check the ones on the right. At the end of the hallway, she grabbed the brass knob on the red door and pushed it open. Luckily, she didn’t immediately step through the doorway, because the door didn’t open into another room. Instead, it opened into empty space, into nothing. The Edge of the World maps weren’t just decoration; they were a warning.
Taer cautiously peered through the doorway. The floor was a level below her. In the sunken room, a young man sat at a desk covered in papers and a large Mac desktop monitor. Nicolas Berliner was glaring at her.
Taer hadn’t often encountered violence outside of a movie screen or television set. She wasn’t well acquainted with action. As Taer teetered on the edge of the trap door, the break-in at her apartment and the gun she got out of it should’ve been at the forefront of her mind. Instead, she stared dumbly at Berliner, until, fuzzily captured by the audio recorder in Taer’s pocket, he shouted at her:
“Caitlin Taer?”
With that, she was unstuck.
“Where’s Molly Metropolis?” Taer shouted into the huge room. Her voice echoed. “Is Molly down here?”
Berliner laughed. “There’s a staircase to your left, through the door. Come down here.”
“How do I know you don’t have a gun?”
“I lost my gun.”
“Yeah, I know. At my apartment. How do I know you don’t have another one?”
“This isn’t a gangster movie. Get down here.”
Curiosity overrode caution. Taer decided to risk descending to the bottom of the big room. She found the door to her left, which opened to a staircase that descended into the office.
“You’re Nicolas Berliner, right?” Taer said, taking in the giant two-story room, enthralled with the high ceiling and at the huge painting of The Ghost Network on the wall.
“You’re Caitlin Taer.”
“Cait.”
“I’m Nick. What do you mean, ‘at my apartment’?”
“What?” Taer said.
“You said I lost my gun at your apartment, but as far as I know I’ve never been to your apartment.”
“I’m not going to make you pay for, like, my plates or anything. We don’t have to fuck around about this. You left your sketchpad, too.”
“No, listen, I’ve never been to your apartment,” Berliner said, “Someone took my gun from me. Someone took my gun and my sketchpad weeks ago.”
“Sure. You just want me to give up her notebook, or something. You can’t have it.”
“Caitlin—”
“No one calls me Caitlin.”
“Cait. I didn’t break into your apartment. Where’s Gina?”
“I’m not here with anyone.”
“I talked to Irene, I know you’re with Gina. Where is she?” Berliner asked.
“She’s at home. Can you just shut up and tell me what happened to Molly?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, too.”
“Yeah, right!”
Their argument continued, until Berliner coaxed Taer over to his computer and showed Taer an e-mail from Molly that had arrived in his inbox a few days after she disappeared:
My dearest friend,
I hate to leave you alone in the middle of a battle. I’m writing in the hope that maybe the last thing you’ll remember about me is this e-mail, and not the fact that I abandoned you in the dead of winter (both figuratively and literally).
I’ll leave you with this:
I promise that leaving now was, in fact, an act of war against the people and things we’ve been fighting (including: Ali and Peaches, the secrecy of the members of the N.S., our own personal failings and foibles). And I’ve left the means for you to pursue a similar act of war — if you choose. I hope you’ll strike as I’ve struck. Do you understand what I’m writing to you?
Berliner lamented, “Molly always liked a good rhetorical question.”
Berliner had hired several private detectives and securities experts to trace the e-mail, whose names and numbers he had conveniently forgotten by the time he acquiesced to an interview with me. The experts found that Molly had sent the e-mail from her phone; she had typed it the day she disappeared, and scheduled it to send at a later date.
“Holy shit,” Cait said several times as she was reading the letter. “I have to text Nix to come over here. She’s next door.”
“I thought you said she was at home,” Berliner said, with an alarmed tone.
“She’s searching the building next door, we didn’t know which one you were in.”
“Shit. Okay. Did you notice if anyone was following you?”
“No! Who would be following me?” Taer said.
“Can we go get Gina?”
“Why? Who was following me?”
“The people who took my gun.”a
Taer checked her phone, but didn’t have service in the basement, so she couldn’t call Nix. She scurried back up the stairs with Berliner, back through the long hallway with the Edge of the World maps and screen prints, through the steel door, up the building’s main staircase to the second floor, down the elevator to the lobby, and back out into the cold. Taer tried to zip her coat at the same time as she jogged between the two buildings, and Berliner shouted at her to hurry.
The door to the second building was again locked. Taer pulled out her cell phone, and called Nix, who answered with a hint of annoyance in her greeting.
“Stop bitching at me and listen,” Taer said. “Come out of the building. I’m outside. I’m with Nick.”
Nix appeared a few minutes later and Berliner greeted her.
“You motherfucker,” Nix said. “You broke into our apartment.”
“My apartment,” Taer said.
Berliner said, “I swear to god, that wasn’t me.”
“Who the fuck else is there?” Nix asked.
Berliner ushered them back to the other building, to tell them about their real enemy, a pair of young women named Ali and Peaches — who were watching them from the coffee shop across the street.
* Details from this Saturday were pulled from Cyrus’s interviews with Nix, and a close examination of Taer’s belongings — none of her socks or gloves were in matching pairs. — CD
† While Taer’s behavior exemplifies some of the symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder, she was never formally diagnosed.
‡ I retained Cyrus’s digression into the Edge of the World maps here, hoping it ramps up rather than cuts tension. — CD
§ Ziphius was probably invented by the naturalist and cartographer Conrad Gesner (sometimes spelled Konrad Gessner). Steipereidur was invented by the scientist and artist Abraham Ortelius.
ǁ Ancient Maps and Drawings, Volume 3: The Age of Exploration, ed. Gerard Gumpert (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 269.
a It is telling that Berliner and Taer’s first exchange reads like a conversation between people who already know each other. Each had occupied a space in the other’s brain for weeks before they actually met. They very quickly developed a shorthand.