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

find Shadrack, but he had been swallowed by the crowd. The audience behind her was expressing its collective disappointment by means of missiles—a crust of bread, a worn shoe, a half-eaten apple, and a rainstorm of peanut shells—hurled down at the members of parliament. Sophia felt herself being pressed up against the lip of the balcony as the enraged crowd pushed forward, and for a terrible moment she clung to the wooden ledge to avoid being pushed over it.
    “Down to chambers, down to chambers!” a timekeeper cried in a piercing tone. Sophia caught a glimpse of the members of parliament hurrying past him.
    “You’ll not get away so easily, cowards!” a man behind her shouted. “Follow them!” To her relief, the crowd suddenly pulled back and began clambering over the benches for the exits. Sophia looked around for the woman who had sat beside her, but she was gone.
    She stood for a moment in the thinning crowd, her heart still pounding, wondering what to do. Shadrack had said he would meet her in the balcony, but now he would surely find it impossible.
I promised to wait
, Sophia said to herself firmly. She tried to steady her hands and ignore the shouts from below, which seemed to grow more violent by the second. A minute passed, and then another; Sophia kept her eye on her watch so that she would not lose track of time. Suddenly she heard a distant murmur that became clearer as more people chanted in unison: “Smoke them out, smoke them out,
smoke them out!
” Sophia ran to the stairs.
    On the ground floor, a group of men was battering the doors of the parliament chambers with the overturned dais. “Smoke them out!” a woman shrieked, feverishly piling chairs as if preparing for a bonfire. Sophia ran to the front doors, where seemingly the entire audience had congregated, choking off the entrance. “Smoke them out, smoke them out, smoke them
out!
” She hugged the satchel tightly against her chest and elbowed her way through.
    “You bigot!” a woman in front of her suddenly shouted, flailing her fists wildly at an older man in a gray suit. Sophia realized with shock that it was Augustus Wharton. As he swung out with his silver-tipped cane, two men with the unmistakable tattoos of the Indies threw themselves against him, one of them wrenching the cane from his hand and the other pulling his arms back behind him. The woman, her blue eyes fierce, her blonde hair clinging to her face, spat at Wharton. Suddenly she crumpled into a pile of her own skirts, revealing a police officer behind her with his club still raised. The officer reached for Wharton protectively, and the two tattooed men melted away.
    There was a shout followed by a cascade of screams. Sophia smelled it before seeing it: fire. The crowd parted, and she saw a torch being hurled toward the open doors of the State House. Screams burst out as the torch landed. She pushed her way into the crowd, trying vainly to catch a glimpse of Shadrack as she inched down the steps. The smell of smoke was sharp in her nostrils.
    As she neared the bottom, she heard a shrill voice cry out, “
Filthy pirate!
” An unshaven man with more than a few missing teeth suddenly toppled against her, knocking Sophia to the ground. He rose angrily and threw himself back against his assailant. Sophia pushed herself up from hands and knees unsteadily; seeing a clear path down to the street, she hurried down the remaining steps, her knees trembling. There was a trolley stop right by the corner of the State House, and as Sophia ran toward it a car was just arriving. Without stopping to check its destination, she jumped aboard.

2
    The Wharf Trolley
    1891, June 14: 10-Hour #
    To the north lay a prehistoric abyss; to the west and south lay a chaos of jumbled Ages. Most painfully, the temporal chasm between the former United States of America and Europe became undeniably clear in the first few years after the Disruption. The Papal States and the Closed Empire had descended into