The City's Two Maps

Cities are not used by humans alone.

Every city has two maps. The daytime one records roads, administrative districts, the station names along the Rivermag Line—everyone can see it. It is revised once a year, the city government puts it up for download, and if a single lane is wrong someone will phone in to correct it. The other one is called the night map. It records the earth-pulse, the wards, the old temples, the territories of the yaoguai, the corners where resentment silts up, and the things that keep watch over the nodes. It has no official edition and no scale; mostly it is drawn on a folded sheet of paper, a few positions circled in red pen, a crooked line running from circle to circle. The person who drew it usually cannot explain why that line has to bend the way it does.

The overwhelming majority of people see only the first one their whole lives. They believe a city is held up by roads, electricity and networks, and this city does indeed do that part well: 15 stations end to end on the Rivermag Line, and if a train runs more than 3 minutes late someone complains in the commuter group chat. The system that runs at night has no customer service line, and nobody complains on its behalf.

The two maps fail to line up in a great many places. A whole row of newly built housing on the daytime map; turn to the night map and the same patch is drawn as a river. A lot on the daytime map that has been given a street number and left empty has a temple standing in the middle of it on the night map. The old people of the Old River District talk about this in the tone of someone discussing household registration: the land was filled in, the numbers were reissued, but the ledger underneath was never amended. The residents over on the new fill will not accept that account. They will tell you that when this area was rezoned every temple was relocated according to regulation, the paperwork is all there, and the firecrackers were set off too. Both sides can produce evidence. Neither can move the other.

The two maps lie over the same city without disturbing each other—until someone, in the middle of the night, boards a train by mistake that should not exist.