The map didn't show a city or a coastline. It showed the layout of a "Data Vault" built into the bedrock of the Appalachian Mountains—a physical backup for the very digital world Arthur lived in. At the bottom of the image, a handwritten note had been captured by the scanner:
Arthur found the file on a mirror site that shouldn't have existed—a flickering remnant of a 1990s web directory. It sat there among broken image links: sc22825-QBC.part01.rar .
As the extraction bar crawled across his screen, Arthur felt a prickle of anticipation. Part 01 usually contained the index or the introductory plates. When the folder finally popped open, it wasn't a spreadsheet or a document. It was a single, high-resolution scan of a hand-drawn map.