“You’re right,” Sophia said, willing herself to look directly at where Blanca’s eyes should have been. “I haven’t known pain like you have. I hope I never will.”
“Your uncle has told you, then, how I earned my scars?”
She nodded, transfixed by the lines that rumpled and shifted across Blanca’s face as she spoke. “How is it that you can see and talk?” Sophia blurted out.
Blanca’s face went still as ice and Sophia’s heart jumped. She had not meant for the question to burst forth. But she could not help it: along with sympathy, she felt curiosity.
Then, to her surprise, Blanca laughed. “I have never met a child like you. I see you truly do not frighten easily. There is no doubt you are your uncle’s niece.” She shook her head. “To answer your question,” Blanca said, her voice direct, absent its former enveloping sweetness, “no one knows how it is that the Lachrima can see and speak and smell despite our lost features.”
Sophia considered this for a moment. “I have never met another Lachrima, but I didn’t think they spoke and . . . behaved the way you do.”
“They usually do not. But you see, I am different.” She paused. “I will explain how, since I respect your sense of inquiry. I have known many who felt horror at my face, but few with a desire to understand.” The Lachrima shifted in her chair, so that her face was partly hidden in shadow. “A few days ago, when I read the map your uncle drew of that place—that hell where I suffered for three years—I could not fathom how he knew of it.” Her voice dropped. “I had no wish to be reminded of it. But then I remembered his face. It was your uncle who came, in the end, and who opened the door to my freedom.”
Sophia felt her heart swell with pride.
“But your uncle does not know everything that happened to me there. Do you see this?” She held out her ungloved hand. A clear gray line was inked across the palm, tracing the long wrinkle that curved toward her wrist.
“What is it?”
“The cartologer made my ruined face even worse. He drew thousands of maps across my skin in vain. But, whether he knew it or not, he drew one true line, and this was it. When he made this line, only weeks before I was freed, I remembered everything from my past life. It came upon me instantly, and as I traced my own palm with the fingers of my other hand, it was as though I was reading my own history.”
“Everything?”
“All the memories that I had the day they were lost.” Blanca sighed. “I remembered my home—my Age.” Sophia could hear a smile in her voice as she continued. “The wondrous Glacine Age. I remembered being only a few years older than you are now when the Great Disruption occurred. The beautiful and terrible Disruption, which felt like falling into a deep pit of endless light.” Blanca stood and walked to the window. She looked out into the gardens with the glass bells tinkling quietly above her. “It was the day I turned twenty. I had gone to our Hall of Remembrances to spend my birthday among its beautiful maps.” She saw Sophia’s enquiring look. “It was a great chamber, with maps recounting the city’s history. The Glacine Age has many such edifices.” Blanca paused. “You have seen one, as a matter of fact.”
Sophia blinked in surprise. “I have?”
“The four maps,” she replied quietly. “The memories in the four maps took place in such a hall.”
Sophia recalled the long climb up a spiraling stairwell, the many people around her, and the building’s slow collapse. “But does that mean the Disruption occurred in your Age?”
“I do not know,” Blanca said so softly that Sophia almost could not hear her. “I do not know. I am still attempting—” Her voice suddenly broke with frustration. “I am still attempting to understand the maps. What I do know,” she went on more firmly, turning back toward Sophia, “is that the carta mayor will explain everything.”
She crossed the room to open a low cabinet and returned holding something which she handed to Sophia: her pack. “I believe there are other things besides the maps of value to you here.” Sophia took it in silence and held it closely to her chest. “I cannot stop the glaciers. But I have appealed to your uncle to do what he can—not only for my Age, but for all the Ages: for the world. Now I make that appeal to you, as well. You are the only one who can persuade him.” Blanca’s voice, musical and mournful, filled Sophia with a sudden sense of longing for all the things she would never see once the Southern Snows had encased the world in ice. She would never see the distant Ages she yearned to explore; she would never see Boston again, or the house on East Ending Street; and she would never, she thought desperately, see the parents she hoped were still somewhere far away, waiting to be found. “This New World is ending,” Blanca went on, as if reading Sophia’s thoughts. “But we can still determine what takes its place. If your uncle helps me to find and rewrite the carta mayor, we can ensure that the world emerging from the destruction is a whole world—a good world. Now that I have read the four maps, I am more convinced than ever. He is our only hope.”
“Shadrack will not do it,” Sophia said matter-of-factly, without hostility. “Even if he could. He said so.”
The tinkling of the glass bells mingled with the distant laughter and music that drifted up from the gardens. “Perhaps your uncle has not told you,” Blanca finally said, “how complete the carta mayor is. The map shows everything that has happened and everything that will happen. Do you know what that means?”
Sophia gazed at the scars on Blanca’s face, a slight spark of an idea forming in her mind. “I think so.”
“It means that if Shadrack read the map, he could tell you anything you might want to know. Anything. All your curiosities about the past, satisfied. The carta mayor would allow you to know, once and for all, what happened to Bronson and Minna Tims so many years ago.”
Sophia felt a sharp sting at the edge of her eyes.
“Yes, I know of their disappearance,” Blanca said gently. “I know many things about you, Sophia: I know of your illustrious family past; I know that you and Shadrack are inseparable; I know that you have no sense of time. Carlton Hopish’s memories of you are fond ones.” She paused. “I cannot give you your parents back,” she continued, her voice heavy with sadness, “but with the carta mayor I can tell you for certain what became of them.”
Sophia stared down at her lap and struggled to hold back her tears. To know for certain what became of them, she thought numbly.
As if sensing her confusion, Blanca leaned forward. “Think what that would mean.” Then she gracefully stood and walked slowly to one of the wardrobes that stood against the wall. “Have you ever seen a water map?”
“No,” Sophia said dully. “I was only starting to learn about maps.”
“It may interest you to see one,” Blanca said, returning with a white bowl and a tall glass flask. “They are rare. They require skill and a patience few possess. They are made of condensation. Drop by drop, the mapmaker encapsulate the meanings of the map in vaporized water, then gathers those vapors to make a whole. This one was made in a cave far north in the Prehistoric Snows. The mapmaker, who was also an explorer, recounted his journey there.” Placing the bowl on the table that stood between them, she uncorked the flask and poured out its contents. To Sophia it looked like an ordinary bowl of water, except for the fact that it was unnaturally still.
Blanca returned to the wardrobe and came back with the glass map, which she held over the bowl. “Do you see how it changes the appearance of the water?”