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would be reincarnated, so they made it illegal to try to kill me. The law extends to the other newsouls, but Deborl, Merton, and their friends—they don’t care. They think any punishment is worth it. They just want us dead.”
    “Why?” Lidea held Anid to her chest. “I just can’t understand why.”
    I didn’t want to explain Janan and their misguided devotion to him. Not right now. So I shrugged and leaned against Sam’s shoulder. “The Council is working to protect newsouls, but this is the truth: they won’t succeed. They can make rules, assign guards, and lock up everyone they think will cause trouble, but there will always be someone they miss, some hole in their security they overlook. Newsouls aren’t safe in Heart. And neither is anyone else.”
    “What are you saying?” Orrin leaned forward, darkness in his eyes.
    “I’m saying I’m not the only one who needs to leave Heart. We all need to get out.”
    After changing into the spare clothes Geral and Orrin had brought, Sam and I headed upstairs to where the maps were kept.
    “I thought you knew where we’re going.” The dusty air of the library smothered his words. “Back to Menehem’s lab, right? For the sylph?”
    “Yes, but then where? We can’t stay there.” We could , I supposed, but there had to be something better. “I don’t know. I think the sylph will have answers. I’m sure they’ll be there. They were before.”
    Sam nodded.
    “I need a better idea of the world surrounding Range. There’s so much of it. I need a plan.” I slumped into a chair when we entered the map area. “Sam, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to stop Janan.”
    He looked at me, all longing and sadness, and said nothing of my confession. “What maps do you want?”
    I gazed around the space, filled with rolled sheets of paper and large books. There had to be a hundred maps. Maybe more. “I don’t know.”
    “Perhaps let’s start with Range.” Sam drifted around the small, closed area until he found a rolled map. Together, we spread the thick paper across the table, smoothing the corners with our hands. I didn’t know how to read it, not as far as figuring out distances or elevations, but I recognized familiar locations.
    Rangedge Lake was in the south, near where I grew up in Purple Rose Cottage. Midrange Lake was a huge body of water right by Heart. Small X s marked geysers and fumaroles, while O s marked mud pools and hot springs.
    Mountains were everywhere, continuing northwest in a line of jagged peaks. Forests covered the map, all across Range, and everywhere beyond the human haven.
    I dragged my finger eastward, until I found the twin peaks visible from Menehem’s laboratory. “The lab should be somewhere here, right?”
    Sam nodded and pointed at what looked like a random spot. “There.” He moved his finger. “See, here’s the road.”
    Now that he pointed it out, I did. It had almost been lost in the other lines and splotches of ink. While I bent to study the land surrounding the lab, Sam fetched more maps and laid them on the table.
    North of Range, the forest grew denser and the details less frequent, as though few people had bothered to explore and chart that area. A line of writing warned of dragons in the frozen north, though I wasn’t sure how far out one had to go in order to see them. Would it take a week to get there? Probably more.
    “Sam.”
    He paused next to me, arm around my waist.
    “Remember when you told me about how you died in your last lifetime? You went north, saw a huge white wall, and there were dragons?”
    He hesitated. “Yes.”
    “Where would that be on this map?”
    “I . . .” His bandaged hand drifted over the map, but never paused. “I’m not sure. You don’t want to go there, do you?”
    “Of course not.” The last thing I wanted to do was put Sam in the path of dragons. He’d died by dragons thirty times. By some fluke, I’d managed to save him from dragons twice this