Parallel 667

Chapter 3

Sable wiped the sooty lead from her fingertips on the bottom of her pillowcase, nearly black from a week's worth of work. She dumped the book bag on top of a handmade quilt, covering a bed that looked the same as it had last Sunday- the Institute of Cartography at Inhaven only opened the laundry room on Sunday afternoons- when she had last changed the sheets.

Pencil shavings, bits of unused lead, erasers used down to nubs, and all the other scraps of her day tumbled out with the rolls of thick, blank parchment, heavy textbooks, and the even heavier collection of paper weights she refused to keep in her drawer at the institute. She took a moment to gaze at the remains of her day, lying there on her bed looking quite like a rubbish pile she had passed on the way to her dorm. A cartographer, indeed. Her mother would have laughed.

"Sable," she would have shaken her head, "you're almost as messy as your father. You must be becoming a true artist."

The flicker of a smile that ghosted Sable's lips was not enough to stir the dust particles suspended like grains of sand in the depth less sea. They drifted in the faded light of a single window, held aloft by an invisible current as she drew in a slow breath, but upon her release they scattered, dancing and swooping and soaring. Sable knelt beside the bed.

She shoved aside the thoughts of her mother, the kind that required deep breathing and tears long since run dry. Her mother was never coming back. She tried to focus instead on the task at hand, flinging her arm about wildly under the bed, searching for something soft and familiar.

A sharp reverberation rippled down her arm. Drawing her arm back, she cursed, glancing into the gloomy underside of the bed once before reaching her hand back under.

Frustration swept through her, cold and resolute.

Her mother would have been wrong.

She partook in the art of map making as the caged animal partook in being beautiful. To please her captors. It was a fact she had known since she starting schooling here last fall- that the art of drawing places she could never go was for another pair of lead stained hands. If she was being honest with herself, she had known before she signed that thick piece of paper that she would not be happy here.

But her father had smiled at her. Her brothers had beamed up at her when she revealed the news she would not leave to see the world. That they would still be close to one of the women in their lives, the other beyond the reaches of the fastest ship.

As they packed her bag of pencils and erasers and clothes and coffee mugs, her father had pulled her aside.

"Is this really what you want?"

"Of course," she had replied with as much false enthusiasm as her wavering heart would allow. She wrapped her arms around his thinning frame. "How could I not want to follow in the footsteps of the greatest cartographer this generation has seen?"

She had been aware of the question in his eyes when he pulled away, but it melted after a few hours. When she left, his eyes were shallow pools beside her brothers as they wished her luck and to see her soon.

For them, she had thought, as she walked the two steps down to the worn footpath, waving until she reached a bend in the road and could no longer see them. It was a burden unlike any other, to love your captors so much there was nothing you would not do for them.

A soft thump jogged her from her reverie. The object she had been seeking clung to her palm the way old friends do, and she helped it out into the light.

Another bag, identical to the one she had dropped unceremoniously beside her rubbish heap, stared up at her with quiet relief. It had been too long.