“Why so quiet?”
But then his face fell and his fork paused in midair. For a long time, neither of us spoke. He put down his fork and squeezed his eyes shut. “There was a party.”
I shrugged as if I didn’t care. “It’s fine.”
“I’m sorry, Nixie.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Captain.”
“Kashmir told me, but I forgot.”
“I can see that.”
“I said I was sorry!” He threw his hands up, suddenly defensive. Then he clenched his fist and brought it in front of his mouth. “And I am,” he added quickly. “I was distracted, is all. The map is very distracting.” He set the plate aside and smiled hopefully. “But it’s beautiful, isn’t it? And it’s almost like a gift.”
“A gift?”
“To you.”
I couldn’t help it; my lips twisted like a juiced lime and the response was too bitter not to spit out. “To me?”
“Well . . . don’t you want to meet your mother?”
His question seemed designed to induce guilt, and it cut deep enough to reveal a splinter of cruelty, hard as bone. “My mother’s gone, Slate.” I put the map down on the drafting table, smoothing it with my palm. “On the map I came from, she’s dead.”
Slate blanched, but he answered evenly. “That’s why we’ve got a new map.”
“A new map . . . a new version.” I traced the line of the Tropic of Cancer. “A new wife?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. The map where you met is the map where she died. A different map means a different version of her.” And of me, but I did not bother saying it. I doubted it would matter to him.
He stood, arms crossed, drumming the fingers of his right hand on his left arm. “It’s the exact same place.”
“So?” I opened one of the cupboards—the fairy-tale maps—and unrolled one at random. “Greece with gods on Mount Olympus, Slate. And here.” I pulled out the map right beneath it. “Two hundred years later, the next cartographer replaced Zeus with Jupiter. And then we have—” I opened another cupboard, the less-fanciful histories, and pawed through them. “Mount Olympus during the Ottoman Empire, where you’ll find brigands and highway robbers and no gods at all.” I let the map roll itself up. “Going back to the same place doesn’t mean you’ll find the same thing.”
“It does if it’s the same time!”
I smiled grimly as he started to pace. A perverse part of me was enjoying myself. “Remember where we found Kashmir? That French map of Persia in 1740, in the Vaadi Al-Maas, but here, a historical map of Nader Shah’s empire, 1740, look,” I said, pointing. “Same place, same time, but there’s no such city. The shoreline’s different. Do you think Kashmir exists there, somewhere in the middle of the Persian Gulf?”
“Those are two completely different mapmakers. You can’t compare some Frenchman’s fantasy of Arabia to—”
“Mitchell and Sutfin are two different mapmakers.”
“But they were mapping the same version of Hawaii.”
“Which version? My history? Or your fairy tale?”
“It is not a fairy tale!”
The volume of his voice brought me up short. His eyes were wild; I could see the whites all the way around, and suddenly none of it was amusing. “And if you succeed?” I said softly. “Then what?”
“What do you mean, then what?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. In Sanskrit mythos, they say breath is life, and I didn’t want to give life to my fears; I didn’t want to say it aloud. Then what will happen to me?
After our shouting, the silence rang in my ears. He took a deep breath, then another. “Then we all live happily ever after,” he said finally, calm once more. “You’ve done a lot of studying, Nix, and you know the maps, but I know what I believe, and that’s all that really matters.”
My breath hitched in my throat to hear it stated so plainly. “Good to know how insignificant my thoughts are to you,” I said bitterly.
“That’s not what I meant.” He reached out an uncertain hand, as though I was a bird in the bush. But he let the hand fall back to his lap, and cupped it in the other, squeezing until his knuckles cracked. “If I tell you a secret, will you feel better?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not twelve, Captain—”
“It’s about Navigation.”