The bureau of sleep opened at dusk, when the rest of the city was learning to forget the day. Maheen arrived before the lamps were lit, as she always did, and let herself in through the narrow door behind the cartography hall. The drafting tables waited in their rows like patient animals. She did not turn on the overhead lights. She preferred to work by the glow of the survey lanterns, which threw the coastlines of other people's dreams across the ceiling.

Every citizen surrendered their dreams now. It had been law for eleven years. You slept, and in the morning the collectors came with their soft machines and drew the night out of you like water from a well, and what they took was charted, indexed, and sold. There were buyers for everything — the pharmaceutical houses, the advertisers, the ministries that liked to know what the population feared before the population knew it themselves.

Maheen was the best cartographer the bureau had. She could take the raw recording of a dream and render it as a map so precise that a stranger could walk it. This made her valuable. It also made her dangerous, though no one had noticed yet, because somewhere in the work she had learned to do the opposite — to take a map and leave a part of it off. To make a place unfindable.

The unmarked districts

She kept her private atlas in the hollow of a drafting table, beneath a false bottom she had cut herself. It held the places she had refused to surrender: a grandmother's kitchen that no longer existed in any waking city, a beach where the tide came in backwards, a man whose face she would not let the buyers have. She had stolen them back one fragment at a time, and each theft was a small unmappable wound in the great record.

"A map is a promise that a place can be found again. She had spent her life learning how to break that promise gently."

The danger, of course, was the audit. Once a season the inspectors came through with their reconciliation engines, comparing what had been collected against what had been charted, looking for the gap between them. A discrepancy was treason. Maheen had survived three audits by feeding the engines decoys — dull, plausible dreams she manufactured herself, grey little things about queuing and rain.

But the fourth audit was different, because this time the inspector was someone she knew.

He came in out of the evening with frost still on his coat and stood at the threshold the way the drafting tables stood, patient and waiting, and when he said her name it was in the voice from the map she had refused to surrender — the one place in her atlas with a human face. She understood then that the bureau had not sent a stranger to find her gap. It had sent the very thing she had been protecting, to see whether she would chart it at last, or let herself be found instead.

She reached beneath the drafting table. Outside, the lamps were coming on across the city, one by one, the way they did every night, lighting the streets that everyone could find and none of them remembered choosing.