Keeper of the Lost Cities: Rebuild [COMPLETED]

Chapter Nineteen - WYLIE

They were so close; Wylie felt it. Yet it had been three hours, and they had gotten no further than they'd been at the beginning.

Maybe he just wanted to be close, so he told himself they were. So close... and yet we're missing something...

He bored his eyes into the map, laid on the table he and Sophie had sat at two meetings ago. Now, everything had changed. Now, they knew where the Purities had met—but the map told them nothing about where they were going to meet. All they had to go on was the one paper—the others Linh and the Wayward had found were coded, so they couldn't help.

"I envy your ability to be so still," Linh murmured, contorting her fingers to call the fountain's water to her. "You're steady. A contrast to my turbulence."

Wylie frowned. She'd been oddly quiet since she had hailed him, all her thoughts bottled up inside. Usually when she spoke like this—in riddles—something was bothering her. But he'd also learned that the way to help her was to do the same.

"Does that scare you?" he asked.

"Quite the contrary. You're..." She searched for the right words, and that was what Wylie loved about her; she always thought before she said something. He knew at least a dozen people who could use the same quality.

"You're balanced," she finally said. "The storm inside you has calmed."

He wanted to argue, wanted to comfort her—you're not alone—but sometimes the greatest comfort was to know you were alone, yet there was still a way out. A way to find peace.

That was all Wylie wanted: peace.

A perfect world, where no one got hurt.

He knew it was impossible, yet there was still a tiny part of him that pushed on, that didn't care how crazy the dream was. He could still reach for it. He could still be better. He could get as close to it as possible, and perhaps even reach beyond that.

But the first step was figuring out this map.

He studied it some more, as if he had missed something the previous twenty times. It was simple, hand-drawn, upside-down V's indicating mountains and W's representing lakes and rivers. Each landmark was labeled with initials, as well as each Territory—those were separated by thin gray lines.

W.W. stood for Wildwood; B.G. for Bosk Gorge; M.M. for Merrowmarsh; and on the list went. About ten of the Territories were marked with big black dots—clearly places where the Purities had met.

And in three hours, this was all they had figured out.

"Why would they keep track of where they've met?" he asked out loud, knowing Linh wouldn't answer, but also knowing these kinds of questions prompted deep thought in her; it wasn't that she was ignoring him, just considering. "I mean, if it's so random—as Councillor Emery said—then what purpose would a map like this have?"

He almost wondered if it wasn't a map of the meetings at all—but no. It was too much of a coincidence—them finding out the Purity meetings occurred in the Neutral Territories, then finding the map.

The treehouse descended into a thoughtful silence, the kind that caused Wylie's mind to wander rather than speculate.

So he asked another question: "What do we know about the Purities? Their goals, what they stand for... Maybe that can help."

Proffered with an inquiry she could answer, Linh said, "They're nonviolent."

"As of right now."