The city had been removed from every map for ninety-three years. Iola Vesper had been a cartographer for eleven of them, and in all that time the rumor had been the same: that the streets were still walkable, that the wells still held water, that someone — somewhere — still lit lamps at dusk.
She had not believed any of it. Belief, her grandmother had said, is the cheapest currency a cartographer can spend.
By dusk on the third day she was within sight of what the old surveys called the absent quarter.
She had expected ruin. She had expected, at the most generous, a kind of mournful emptiness — perhaps a lone shepherd, perhaps a child throwing stones at a leaning wall. What she had not expected, what no surveyor's letter had prepared her for, was the smell of bread.
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Warm. Recent. Coming from somewhere just beyond the hedgerow, where, according to every map of the last ninety-three years, there should have been nothing at all but grass and a few tilted milestones.
Iola Vesper, eleven years a cartographer, raised her three-degrees-east compass and watched the needle do something it had never done in her custody: it spun, slowly, and stopped pointing in the wrong direction altogether.
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