Map of the Impossible Read online

Zippy, her golden cocker spaniel, whined a little and nuzzled up to her leg before settling on the rug in front of the stove. He put his head on his paws and looked up at her with patient eyes. Mila knew he would love to be out there running along the towpath, splashing in the puddles. They would go out later, whatever the weather.

  She reached down to stroke his soft ears, scratching the places he loved. “Good boy. You sleep there for a bit.”

  She stretched as much as she could in the tiny space, raising her arms up so they pressed against the ceiling. The sound of rain on the roof and the smell of wood smoke and Zippy’s rhythmic breath could usually anchor her, but Mila couldn’t escape her sense of restlessness.

  Was this truly her home, or would she feel more at ease somewhere else … with someone else? She thought of Ekon, his lithe, muscular body slipping ahead of her through the waters beneath Ganvié Island. The touch of his liquid skin under the waves as they swam together to the sunken tomb with the buried map.

  Mila smiled at the memory, a bubble of joy welling up at the knowledge that there was someone else like her out there. Perhaps there were more in other corners of the Borderlands. In discovering the Mapwalkers, she had found a family and a purpose to her life, but in finding another Waterwalker, Mila had glimpsed a possible future. She couldn’t go to Ekon now, but there was something she could do to feel closer to him.

  She bent to the woven rug in the middle of the canal boat and pulled it back, revealing a trapdoor surrounded by a waterproof seal. She tugged it open with a squelch of rubber and looked down into the dark water of the canal lapping beneath. Zippy put his head up at the sound, ears perked, eyes questioning.

  Mila reached over to stroke him again. “It’s okay, boy. I won’t be long.”

  She slipped off her clothes and sat on the edge of the hatch, dangling her legs for a moment. The water was cool against her skin in the moment of change, but as her limbs shimmered, she became part of the liquid and pushed off to sink below the surface.

  As a Waterwalker, she could travel in the spaces between ripples along the watercourses of this world and beyond, her magic turning her into almost another being. But every time she used it, Mila felt that drop of shadow remain. Even now, lying here under the canal boat, she could feel it seep further into her. Each time she turned, it was harder to emerge into the world of air above.

  As she sank into the canal, Mila felt a sense of relief, a welcome coolness as her body changed. She was increasingly out of place in the world above and she wondered if perhaps her people had never disappeared, but merely stayed in the water, invisible to those above. Did they become pure liquid after a time?

  She had no real knowledge of the bloodline from which she came, raised by a foster mum in the high-rise blocks of East London. There were hints that her father had been a student from war-torn Sierra Leone, her mother too young to keep her. In London, her mixed-race heritage was normal, but here in Bath, her dark skin and almond-shaped eyes stood out. Yet under the water, she shimmered and became all the colors of the rainbow and yet, no color at all.

  Mila slipped out from beneath the shelter of the boat into the channel of the canal. She darted up toward the lock, her body reveling in the freedom to move, however brief her time could be here. She gazed up through the green light to the world above, watching as the rain dimpled the surface. It was a moment of beauty but the canal was a tame playground, protected and safe with only a short distance to roam. The only danger was the discovery of her true nature which she kept hidden by her daily routine as a resident of the canal.

  But this dual existence was becoming harder to maintain. Should she embrace life on the edge of this elegant city of Bath and truly make her home here? Or was she really a Waterwalker, meant to live under the waves in a land on the other side of the map? She could not do both, for that way, madness would lie in the constant longing for a different life.

  A choice loomed ahead, and it would come for Sienna, too. Something had shifted for both of them on the last mission, and Mila sensed her friend was even more torn than she was. They both had one foot on either side of the border and it was slowly tearing them apart.

  2

  Perry Mercator pulled himself up once more, muscles bulging as he touched the lintel of the door with his chin.

  “14 … 15 …”

  Sweat ran down his back, his breath ragged as he counted the repetitions, embracing physical pain as the best way to dull the screaming in his mind.

  “29 … 30.”

  He dropped to the floor and bent over with exhaustion as he fought to regain his breath. Nausea rose in his stomach as his body rebelled at the harsh treatment, hours every day, pushing himself to physical extremes.

  For most of his life, Perry’s fire magic had been out of control — sometimes a tiny flame, sometimes an inferno — and yet on the last mission, he had finally found a way to channel it. He had saved the Mapwalker team at the Eagle’s Nest, and in those moments, he had felt most alive. But the stench of burned maps still hung in the air of the corridors of the Ministry, a reminder of how fire had destroyed the very heart of the Mapwalker domain. Fire started by his father, Sir Douglas Mercator, a Shadow Cartographer, a traitor — a murderer.

  After the death of the Illuminated Cartographer, Perry had helped John Farren take the body out to an ancient Somerset hill overlooking Glastonbury. Under the light of the full moon, they built a pyre of old English oak and piled up the tattered remains of the ruined vellum and paper maps and burned books, the scraps of what had once been his home.

  Perry lifted the body of the old man onto the logs and placed him in the middle of a nest of map fragments, his frame so wasted and thin that there was hardly anything left before the flames devoured what little remained. The Illuminated had always seemed so vibrant, so strong, but clearly, the maps had sustained him. His blood ran with ink and when he relinquished their hold, there was nothing left but a husk of flesh. He had lived many generations For Galileo, his name lost to time, but whoever he had once been, his legacy was certain in the strength of the remaining Mapwalkers.

  Perry had started the fire with his magic, kindling the remaining pieces of the maps around the corpse. As the flames rose, he contained its heat and strength, making sure everything was destroyed. The stars shone brightly overhead, the air crisp and chill, and the smoke formed symbols and pathways as it rose, as if the old man traveled through a new map toward the heavens.

  Now, weeks later, Perry ached to get back to the fight. The Mapwalkers had stopped the invasion and won the battle, but they had lost so much. Earthside itself was wounded and Perry knew the time ticked away until he would cross the border again. There was no way to regain what they had lost, only a path forward to a different future.

  He jumped and hung on the doorframe once more before pulling himself up to start the next set.

  “1 … 2 … 3 …”

  When he faced his father again, he would be ready.

  Bridget Ronan sat at her desk in the library surrounded by a billowing sea of maps. As she reached for the next volume of the Mapwalker annals, the vellum and paper moved with her. She could feel their weight on her body — pressing down against the mercurial flights of her mind.

  An anchor some days. A prison on others.

  Some days her new role as the Illuminated Cartographer didn’t seem real, and she tried to walk out the door of the library, striding toward freedom, only to be jolted back, held tightly by the maps that wound themselves into her flesh. The ink that now ran in her veins meant she could never leave this place again. She had traveled the world and the lands beyond and yet, she could now only sense it through the maps here in this room. Her world was at once constrained and yet also of unlimited possibility.

  After the night of the fire, Bridget wondered if the Ministry was wounded beyond repair. But not all the maps had been destroyed in the flames that Sir Douglas had set, and the memory of many more ran through the ink that now mingled in her veins. In th
e weeks since, she had questioned her choice many times. But had there really been a choice? The maps could not live without an Illuminated, a Blood Mapwalker, and the death of the old could only mean a new one must be bound to the cause.

  John had told her of the pyre he and Perry built under the stars for the old man. How the smoke had carried his spirit away. Bridget wondered if one day someone would do the same for her, whether she would last as long, and whether her name would also be lost over the generations ahead.

  It wasn’t clear how long the old man had been the Illuminated, but the line was unbroken, the position assumed and lived with no record of who each had been before. Eventually her own name would be erased. She would only be the Illuminated, tied to the maps for generations to come. Perhaps she would even forget what she had once been.

  Memories came to her through the ink, memories held by the Illuminated Cartographers before her, remnants of what they had seen. Bridget understood that each time she accessed them, part of her own life crumbled away, dissolving into the ink.

  Some days she raged against her captivity, wishing she had a flame so she could finish what Sir Douglas had started. Other days, she closed her eyes and roamed into the maps, traveling in her mind further than she had ever been able to do in person.

  Over the last weeks, Bridget had called for a renewal of the map library. She sent requests to the other Ministries around the world, asking for copies of everything they had. She had used funds to buy originals from antique map houses in Istanbul and Amsterdam, needing to build the library back up but also to expand her world once more.

  Truthfully, she did not know what she was doing, but she trusted that the maps of the world held everything she needed. There was wisdom in the maps and a vestige of magic in the ink that flowed through her. She just didn’t know how to wield it yet.

  Had the old man learned his role from a previous incarnation of the Illuminated? Or did he have to learn as she did from the very beginning? Perhaps her predecessor had not chosen this path either. Perhaps it was only ever unwillingly pressed upon the next.

  Bridget sighed and opened the volume of annals, turning the pages and scanning the text as she continued her search for a way to open the border once more.

  Suddenly, she stopped, her attention caught by a drawing sketched on the ivory paper. Its bold lines portrayed a figure whirling within a vortex of shadow and light, the face obscured by a silver mist surrounded by drops of scarlet. A faint scent wafted up, a memory of flame. Bridget bent closer to the page to examine the medium and then drew back with a frown.

  Ash and blood. Smoke and magic. But what did it mean?

  “Look what I found.” John’s voice interrupted her from the outer room of the library and Bridget turned in greeting.

  He pulled out a rolled map as he walked around the corner, still limping and bowed, his injuries a permanent reminder of how the Mapwalkers had failed once before.

  “It’s Buondelmonti’s Constantinople from 1422. The only surviving map predating the Turkish conquest.” John placed the scroll down on the desk and gently unrolled it. “The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris sent it over. On loan, of course, but I thought it might brighten your day.”

  He smiled at her and in his blue eyes, Bridget saw a glimmer of the man he had once been, his head thrown back in laughter as they danced on the edge of a silver lake in the Uncharted, together for a brief magical moment. She smiled at the memory, bittersweet with the knowledge that they would never again walk those trails together. She was trapped here and the man he once was had been bled out of him, cut away by a Shadow Cartographer in the dungeon of a dark castle.

  John had lost more than his blood down there and he could never cross the border again. Even if he could, Bridget didn’t think he would go. He once had the confidence of the true Blood Mapwalker, one who could wield his power against the Shadow and win — but no longer. She only hoped his daughter could find her way to true power.

  Bridget bent down to examine the map more closely, the waters of the Bosphorus in a faded green with ramparts of the walled city of Constantinople ringing its shores in shades of umber.

  “It’s beautiful, thank you.” She gestured toward the racks of newly built shelving. “Put it on the third shelf down. That’s my to read pile — once we get through the rest of the annals.” She pointed to the stack of thick books by her desk. “We’ve still got hundreds of years to trawl through.”

  John carefully rolled the map up with gentle fingers and laid it on the rack. He sat down next to the desk and pulled the next volume off the pile of annals.

  “We’ll find something. The answer has to be in these somewhere.” He dusted the cover off, opened the front page and began to read.

  Bridget watched him in companionable silence. John came every day to sit in the library and read by her side as they scoured the archives for anything that might help with the border. When it closed, they had not realized the ramifications. But the world beyond deteriorated, earthquakes, tsunamis and people dying because they couldn’t cross over. The Borderlands were home to many; they were an escape to many more. Now they knew that Earthside needed an escape valve, a way to release the pressure — and neither world could exist in isolation.

  Bridget stared down at the figure sketch in ash and blood. John had barely glanced at it in the excitement of the rare Constantinople find, so perhaps it was nothing. But blood had always been at the heart of Mapwalker history.

  There were family trees in the scrolls, but over time, many of the bloodlines had dwindled in power. Those on Earthside truly had nothing to compete with what the Shadow Cartographers did on the other side of the border: forcible breeding across magical lines to create original forms of magic. There were also tales of a drug given to pregnant women to encourage mutation in children born away from the Fertility Halls, in the hope that nature would produce new kinds of power.

  As abhorrent as the practices were, Bridget understood why they did it. Every day more children of magic were born over there, some powerful, some destined to work the mines or fight as soldiers, some discarded as worthless. It was relentless and if things didn’t change, those on Earthside would be outnumbered within a generation.

  But the border was the most immediate problem. They closed it to stop the plague coming over in a wave of refugees, but now that seemed like a terrible mistake. In closing the border, they doomed Earthside to an acceleration of natural disasters. They had to find a way to open it again.

  Bridget pulled the next volume from the stack and began to read once more.

  3

  Finn Page pulled his cloak tighter against his body, wrapping the black material around his sword to hide any glint of metal. He stood motionless in the shelter of a temple wall as a band of soldiers ran past through the narrow streets, the half-moon of the Shadow Cartographers tattooed on their faces, the banner of the wolf’s head held high above them. As they rounded the corner of the street and their footsteps faded into the noise of the trader town, Finn shook his head and sighed. That had been much too close.

  The price on his head was so high now that he had started to doubt even close members of the Resistance. His father, the Warlord, Kosai, offered riches and status to anyone who would turn him in, alive or dead, so he had to remain vigilant, only walking the streets when he really needed to.

  Finn pulled out the vial of blue liquid from within his shirt pocket and swirled it around, inky darkness mixing with a lighter teal within. He hoped this had been worth the risk.

  He set off through the warren of dirt streets, staying away from the thoroughfare of the trader town. The city was said to have no name because no one stayed long enough to call it home. Refugees arrived on its stinking shore, drifting across the ocean from Earthside to be swept up by the slave traders and sold to the mines or sent to the Fertility Halls — at least, they had arrived that way until the border closed a month ago. The trader town had emptied after days of watching the becalmed sea and now
only a few slavers waited by the beach just in case, while the rest had gone to raid villages on the outer edges of the Uncharted. The tide of new arrivals had stopped altogether on that fateful day.

  The last time he had seen Sienna.

  Finn remembered her face that night, bruised and muddied but still beautiful, her titian hair streaming down behind her as she told him of her plan. The only way to stop the plague crossing over to Earthside was to close the border.

  He had not believed it possible, but she had surprised him once again. Just as she had in the dungeons of the Fertility Halls where she had helped him find his sister moments before her bloody end. It was possible that Sienna’s magic was much stronger than even she knew, and as much as he wanted more, Finn felt the distance between them might now be too wide a gulf.

  He had fled the camp that night, guilt chasing him even as he ran through the sea of rats, leaving behind thousands of refugees to die of the plague. There was nothing he could do for them and it was better to live another day than die from the bites of plague-ridden rodents or under the swords of his father’s men.

  Flashes of memory from that night still haunted his dreams. Hordes of rats gnawing on the half-dead. A silver-haired girl with arms raised high, clawing life energy from those around her while mutants from the Shadow roamed the corpse-strewn camp, finishing any left alive. There was powerful magic on both sides of the border, but he was one of the majority who were merely human. Finn could only think that his role was to stand against the darkness as much as he could. The Borderlands were his world and he could not wait for the Mapwalkers or anyone else to save his people.

  The Resistance had grown in the wake of the plague and mass murder of those in the camps. News had spread of the culling of infected refugees, the indiscriminate destruction of those considered useless once the invasion proved impossible.