Free The Glass Sentence (The Mapmakers Trilogy) by S. E. Grove Page B

map. But you’ll learn to do that with time. This map I know for sure has nothing too alarming in it. You can savor all of its memories without concern.” He carried the glass back to the main table and gently placed it face up. Then he slid pebbles onto both of the 10s on the two clocks at the left-hand side of the map. “Try the quill,” he said encouragingly.
    Sophia wrinkled her brow. She felt strangely reluctant to plunge into the memories that she knew were stored before her.
    “Go ahead,” Shadrack said. “How about here, near the market?”
    She held the quill over Quincy Market and set it down. She felt a sudden rush and a powerful wave of recollection. People were talking all around her, laughing and shouting and gossiping in low voices. A woman standing next to her carefully counted her money. A boy walked past with a crate full of flowers, and she had a sudden memory of their powerful, hothouse smell. She could remember seeing the clouds of warm breath in the cold air and the sleepy face of a potato farmer who had driven his cart into the city from far away. It all seemed incredibly vivid—as if she had lived through it herself. The space around them remained blurry. It was as though she had erased all the buildings and streets and the very ground beneath her feet. Beyond the people, her memory was dim.
    Sophia lifted the quill and blinked a few times. “It’s odd. As though I can remember people, but nothing else. It feels like I could be anywhere.”
    “I know—it’s strange to see ourselves without the world around us, isn’t it?” Shadrack gently moved the glass pane aside. “I’ll show you what makes it better—what makes them all worthwhile, really.” He picked up the cloth, gently blew against, it and placed it face up on the table. With the tip of his finger he drew water onto the clay tablet and placed it on top of the cloth, their corners perfectly aligned. Then he added the metal sheet, with its map still intact. And finally he set the glass pane, with its pebbles on the 10s, on the top of the pile. “Have a go,” he said.
    Sophia took the quill and hesitantly stared down through the glass. She could see the silver traces of the metal map lying beneath it. Then she took a deep breath and placed the quill at the corner of Beacon and Charles.
    All of it—a whole world from February of 1831—came back to her clearly. In Boston Common people were hurrying down the walkways, stamping their feet against the cold. The bare trees nodded gently in the chilly breeze, rattling a little against the gray sky. A small group of skaters whirled over the frozen pond. Along the streets people rushed with their baskets full of purchases or rode past on their Goodyears, the rubber wheels spinning soundlessly. And in all the windows of the houses people moved through their endless routines of eating and talking and working and sleeping.
    It was like plunging into another world, but the world was her own. She knew the memories did not belong to her, and yet they were there—so vivid, so lucid that they seemed to be entirely hers. Sophia lifted the quill with a sigh. “My memories are never that clear,” she said. “They are always so patchy. But these are so perfect.”
    “We are all like that,” Shadrack agreed. “That’s why it helps to make the maps in layers. We cannot all remember everything at once. In fact, it’s surprising how little detail people actually remember. But if you add together what everyone remembers about each piece, it comes together.”
    Sophia said what had been on her mind since she had first discovered the purpose of the glass map. “Do you think—is there any way . . . Could it be that Mother and Father might have left memories this way, stored in a map somewhere?”
    Shadrack ran his hand through his hair. “Perhaps,” he said slowly. “They did not know how to make memory maps when they left Boston. But they might have learned.”
    “Or someone else might