The Cartographers Novels & Stories

- He spoke without losing the seriousness that characterized him. - Yes sir," he took some papers out of a black carob box, which he kept in one of the living room furniture, "here I prepared a possible bovine route in cartography. She approached him and explained to him -as a teacher- one by one the maps she had written, she compared them with a big map of Argentina and at the same time she prepared her own map for each province, she talked for hours. Very enthusiastic, she explained a route, which she had no idea had been traced and idealized by the Mexican chief. She still could not understand his sudden approach to her. However, everything flowed naturally.

As I left the facility on shaky legs, Lucian’s warm cum still leaking from me and my body marked with the memory of every deep route he had charted, I realized how thoroughly I was being explored. I had come here as a professional cartographer. Now my body was the most intimately mapped territory in existence. And I was becoming addicted to every new discovery.

“Your notes. Your readings. Combine them with this.” His eyes practically glowed. “I—I can feed data into the Cartograph! I’ve dreamed about this!” “Then do it,” she said. Rian fumbled with his satchel, pulling out scribbled sheets and glowing shards, then touched his luminous tool to the edge of the platform. The map reacted instantly. Faint red veins appeared in several regions of the glowing world—thin lines of corruption threading through the clean luminous. “That’s from the architect's last pushes,” Rian said, voice shaky with excitement. “Before and during the Gate of Collapse.”

"Okay, okay. So, tell me, Beautiful, who was the one responsible for creating this stupid plane in history?" "Haha. It was the French mathematician, Rene Descartes. I think you can see now why it was named Cartesian coordinate plane? It was based on his last name, Descartes. Although his last name was pronounced as "dee-kart", he used the Latin version of it, "Cartesius", to derive the name Cartesian coordinate plane for his discovery," Ash explained as he decided to give Alexander a little trivia about the late great scientist. Alexander in turn wiggled his eyebrows as he grinned at Ash.

"It said: *how long has it been.* And then: *I have been waiting.*" Rael looks at the river through the window. "Something old has been waiting at the edge of your territory," he says. "Yes." "And the city — our city, the anchors, all of it — is the visible part of something larger." "Yes." He is quiet for a long moment. "The cartographer," he says slowly, "built the record of the city. Not the territory. Just the city." "Yes." "Because the city was what they could see," he says. "The territory was too large to map."

Carr finished his map of the joint territory in the autumn of the tenth year. Not the runner coordination maps — he had made three of those, one for each camp and one for the joint border zone, all of which were in active use by the wolves who needed them. This was different. This was something he had been building for two years, privately, in the in-between spaces of his days, and which he brought to Kade on a Thursday afternoon without announcement. Kade told Zara about it that evening.

“Yeah, that’s Logan Carter.” There was a round of Oh's and ahs from the group at the window. I heard my phone buzz on the table with a notification. I closed my laptop down and grabbed my things. A lot of the office stayed at the window watching as I exited. I must admit they were correct; he looked exceptional. He was wearing dark jeans, a crisp white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. He was leaning against the bonnet of a car I didn’t recognise.

By the eleventh day, two of those people were quietly no longer in their positions. The cartographer was unexpectedly cooperative. She had been working under coercion, trapped by a debt arrangement that had long outlasted any reasonable expectation of its end. The arrangement had been maintained by people who understood that documented debt could be renewed indefinitely. When Luca and Calder’s network arrived at her door with the information that the debt holder was now facing inquiry charges, and that the arrangement was legally and practically dissolved, she sat down and produced every map she had made.

’ ‘Sorry I didn’t mean to break your focus, it’s just your map is outdated’ ‘What do you mean?’ I went to her side ‘There is supposed to be a river here’ she pointed ‘and over here a valley’ ‘How do you know that?’ ‘I been to this part of the forest before’ ‘Former Luna turned Cartographer, has a nice ring to it’ She chuckled ‘I’m glad you’re still able to make jokes’ I trailed my hand across the map from my location ‘where are you hiding?’ I stopped short when I reached the forest ‘what if the reason I can’t find him is because he’s not hiding somewhere in the city’ I turned to her