Marco is on the phone. The only phone in Marco's house is in the big room. It sits on a small table next to a comfortable chair. It is an older phone, and very plain. It is made of a smooth black plastic, and looks heavy. Marco rarely uses it, and I have no one to call. I have never seen Juliet go near it; if there is a reason for that, she has not mentioned it. The phone almost never rings of its own accord.

We are all in the big room, for no particular reason. We are spread out into separate spaces, each working on private projects. I have taken over the big table, covering it with a collage of maps. Juliet is curled in the opposite corner from Marco, next to the cookie jar. She is eating cookies and knitting. She is doing both things quite slowly. Marco is on the phone with someone named Privet.

"No, Privet," he says. He says it again. "Cooperate with them. Find out what is wrong." When he is agitated his voice booms from his corner of the room, runs around the rafters, shakes spare motes of dust loose and spills them down onto my maps. He seems to remember himself, then, and lowers his voice into the smiling calm of his usual self. I cannot overhear him then. I go back to my maps.

I have never seen so many shades of green as there are on these maps. I have discovered the map drawers in Marco's library just off this room, long shelves of flat treasure. They are printed on creamy paper that has begun to brittle slightly at the corners, and are made out in a thin, well-conditioned hand. The watercolor shadings bloom from embattled corners to large swaths of colored wash, mottled and grained and inconsistent. I do not think they were done without skill. The effect is pleasing.

Marco is angry again. "No, that is secondary." I look up to see Juliet, taut like a cat in her chair, legs folded beneath her, back straight, and eyes alive. "Let them go where they wish." The chair by the phone is large with a wide back, and I cannot actually see Marco. He voice returns to normal, and he is placating Privet.

I find too many of the lines before me too fine to have been drawn by a human hand, but I know all of them to have been. It is a marvel, what we are capable of with time and effort. The maps speak of strange lands on the table, some of them old enough to refer to notions of the world that have long since been broken by actual exploration. I imagine those first boots on alien sands, those impressions that marked the end of the land on the map, and the beginning of the land as it was.

Marco hangs up, and strides quickly through the room, out into the hall. Juliet's hair moves a little in his wake as he passes her, but her eyes are intent on her knitting, and the soft touch of the needles seeps into the new silence in the room. I reach for the maps and shuffle them, and they make feathery noises as they slide over the table and each other. It sounds good.

Later, I ask Juliet why she sits in that chair in the big room.

"It is easy to hear from corner to corner in there," she tells me. "I can hear someone on the phone as clear as a good day."

I do not ask her anything else.