S. Grove - The Glass Sentence

Sophia—go to Veressa. Take my atlas. Love, SE

Beneath it was a glass map.

Sophia stared at the map and the note in wonder. Shadrack had left her a message after all! And he had found the perfect place for it. Between the heavy pages of her drawing notebook, the thin pane of glass lay well protected. Sophia ran her fingers tenderly over her uncle’s writing. The message sounded urgent, but not despairing or afraid. Shadrack hadn’t told her to hide or run away. Sophia felt something—not relief, but determination—course through her. She remembered what Shadrack had said before under very different circumstances: “ All you need, Sophia, is something to do.”

And now she did have something to do: she had to take Shadrack’s atlas and find Veressa, wherever that was. And perhaps when she found Veressa, she would find Shadrack!

Sophia jumped to her feet. First, she decided, she had to read the glass map. The fading sunlight from the window had no effect. She hurriedly lit the flame-lamps and held the map up to one. Once again, nothing happened. The glass had no inscription as to its time or place, and it was completely transparent. Could this simply be a plain piece of glass? she wondered. No, impossible. Why would Shadrack leave her a sheet of glass unless it was a map? She examined it carefully, holding it close to the light. Sure enough, in the bottom left corner was the etched mapmaker’s sign: a mountain range atop a ruler. But the map would not wake. She bit her lip and carefully placed the glass back between the pages of the notebook. It would have to wait. She had to find Shadrack’s atlas.

— 17-Hour 45: Searching for the Atlas—

NOTEBOOK IN HAND, Sophia rushed back down to the library. She took a deep breath, placed the book on the sofa, and dropped to her knees. Shadrack’s atlas could not be hard to find; it was tall and wide and would stand out from the other volumes. She rummaged through the piles impatiently, searching for the burgundy-colored binding. Then she realized it would be easier if she simply reshelved them.

She began placing the books back on the shelf closest to her. Slowly, the familiar white and slate-blue pattern of the carpet began to emerge. She filled four shelves without spotting the atlas. The books had fallen every which way, and some had torn pages. Sophia tried to be careful while moving quickly. She was filling a fifth shelf when she heard footsteps and looked up to see Theo standing in the doorway.

Sophia hardly recognized him. Without all the feathers, he looked like an ordinary person. He had brown hair that was a little long—just below his ears—and a small dimple in his chin. Wearing Shadrack’s clothes, he looked older. Sophia had thought he was about fourteen, but now she wondered whether he wasn’t fifteen or sixteen. He even held himself in an older way, with one hand—deeply scarred, as if from years of injuries—resting on the doorframe. But even without the feathers, he was still unlike anyone she had ever met in New Occident.

The boys her age at school were nice or harmless or erratically cruel, depending on their temperaments. None was very interesting. And the older boys, some of whom she had come to know through theater and field sports, seemed to have the same qualities in advanced form: more decidedly nice, harmless, or cruel. Theo seemed none of these. He had the air of calm authority she remembered from the circus. Sophia felt herself blushing when she realized she had no idea how long she had been staring at him.

His brown eyes met hers in amusement. “Are you cleaning? ”

Sophia blushed a deeper shade of red. “No, I’m not cleaning. I’m looking for something and this is the easiest way.” She quickly rose. “You have to see what I found.”

Sophia had not yet learned, in her thirteen years, that it is not unusual for strangers in extreme circumstances to find themselves sharing a sudden familiarity. The shock of a shared threat makes the stranger an ally. Then the stranger does not seem strange at all: he, too, is a person in danger attempting to survive. And if the stranger who is no longer a stranger happens to be someone likable, someone who has seemed appealing and intriguing from the very beginning, then he will fit all the more readily into place, almost as if he was always meant to be there.

Having no internal clock exaggerated this effect for Sophia; a brief moment with someone could feel much longer. Theo was a stranger who was no longer a stranger: an intriguing and unexpected ally. If someone had asked her at that very moment whether she had reason to trust Theo, she would have had difficulty answering. The question did not occur to her. She liked him, and so she wanted to trust him.

Sophia opened the notebook to show him the glass map and the message. “It is a—”

“Map,” Theo said, picking it up carefully with his scarred right hand. “I figured.” He held it up to the light, just as Sophia had, while she looked on in surprise.

“How did you know?”

He carefully replaced it, seemingly not hearing her question; then he frowned thoughtfully over the message. “Is this supposed to be the map to Veressa?”

“I thought it might be. Or Veressa might be in the atlas.”

“You’ve never heard of it before?”

“No. Have you?”

Theo shook his head. He glanced around the room. “What’s the atlas look like?”

“Large—about this tall—and fat, and dark red.”

“All right, let’s hunt it down.” He smiled. “And then, when we find it, maybe you can get me a map of New Occident.”

He crouched by the closest pile and began shelving books alongside her. They were almost halfway done when Sophia dove toward a pile a few feet away, exclaiming, “There it is!” She hadn’t recognized the book because it lay open, pages facing upward.

“This is it,” she said excitedly. “This is Shadrack’s atlas.” She flipped through it quickly. “It’s fine—all in one piece.” Then she showed Theo the cover, which read, in gold script, An Annotated and Descriptive Atlas of the New World, Including the Prehistoric Ages and the Unknown Lands, by Shadrack Elli.

“You mean it’s his ,” Theo said, clearly impressed. “He wrote it.”

“Oh, yes—it is the best one. The others haven’t half the information.” Sophia opened the atlas quickly to the index. “Veressa,” she murmured. She ran her finger along the V column, but Veressa wasn’t there. “How strange. Every place in the atlas is listed here.”

“You’re looking at cities and towns,” Theo said, pointing to the page header. “Maybe it’s a lake or a desert or a forest or something else.”

“Maybe,” Sophia murmured. She was going through the index again when a sudden noise made her heart jump. Someone was rattling the side door of the house, the door that Sophia had closed behind her. She and Theo stared at each other, and for a few seconds neither of them spoke; they waited. Then they heard the sound of the door opening.

1891, June 21, 18-Hour 07

New Occident’s northern border with the uninhabited Prehistoric Snows—also called the Northern Snows—remained an unprotected and undefined area. The western and southern borders, however, increasingly became contested zones between the people of the Baldlands and New Occident and its Indian Territories. Though determining an actual border would have been impossible, this did not prevent the inhabitants of the borderlands from going to extreme lengths to defend the boundaries where they imagined them to be.

—From Shadrack Elli’s History of New Occident