Read The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy) for Free Online Page B

an apologetic look.
    “Yes, of course. I should write to Dorothy, anyhow.”
    “A good idea.” As Shadrack and Mrs. Clay retreated to his study, Sophia made her way upstairs.
    — 16-Hour 27: Upstairs at East Ending—
    S OPHIA SIGHED AS she climbed the stairs. She passed the room that had belonged to her parents, which had remained almost untouched for so many years, and she tapped the door lightly as she did every time she walked by it. When she was very small she would often take refuge there, curling up with the comfort of her parents’ belongings all around her. A portrait of her parents drawn by Shadrack sat on the nightstand, and when she was small Sophia had believed it had magical properties. It seemed an ordinary drawing, made with passable skill, since Shadrack was more draughtsman than portrait artist. In the first years after their disappearance, Sophia often picked it up and traced her finger along the inked lines, and somehow she could hear her parents’ laughter and sense their presence—as if they were truly in the room beside her. But over time, she visited the room less and less; it came to remind her more of their absence then of their presence. It recalled to her all the times she had gone in and, as always, found the room empty.
    There were enough reminders of them elsewhere: the silver star earrings that she always wore, which they had given her on her first birthday; the colorful ribbons her mother often used as bookmarks; her father’s pipe, still sitting next to Shadrack’s in the study downstairs. These small objects made tiny anchors all around her, reminding her quietly that Minna and Bronson had, indeed, once existed.
    Sophia’s bedroom had fewer of these anchors. It was filled instead with the objects that made up
her
life: a potted magnolia that grew in miniature; a watercolor of Salem given to her by an artist friend of Shadrack’s; a wardrobe with carefully ordered clothes; a desk with carefully ordered papers; and a bookshelf with carefully ordered books—school books on the bottom shelf and her own on the top shelf. The popular novels of Briony Maverill, the poetry of Prudence Lovelace, and works by Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson all accompanied the picture books that she still cherished and sometimes read.
    Sophia unpacked her satchel, taking out her drawing notebook and her pencils. As she did, she found a stray piece of paper, folded in half, and she smiled, knowing already that it would be a drawing Shadrack had somehow sneaked into her satchel that morning. She opened it and laughed at the little sketch of Clockwork Cora, sleeping soundly through a boring speech at parliament, her tiny feet propped up on someone’s lap. Unfortunately, Sophia thought, putting the folded paper in a tin box, today it had been anything but boring.
    Before sitting down at her desk, she opened the window above her bed to let the air in. She leaned on the sill to look out over the city. From her second-story window, she could see mostly rooftops. She had a narrow view of East Ending Street, where at that moment a boy was slowly pedaling along the cobblestones on a Goodyear. The sun was finally beginning to set, and though the air was no cooler, a breeze had started up.
    After unlacing her boots and placing them neatly under her bed, she sat at her desk. She began by writing a letter to her friend Dorothy, who had moved away at the end of the school year. Dorothy’s father had an important position in the trade industry, and he had taken a job in New York that inconveniently deprived Sophia of her best—and in many ways her only—friend. Dorothy’s easy good humor had a way of tempering Sophia’s seriousness, and with her gone, the days of summer vacation had so far been very long and rather lonely. Dorothy had written of her loneliness, too, in the noisy bustle of New York City, so much less civilized than Boston.
    But now they both had more pressing concerns. Dorothy’s father had