Chapter 63: A Homeland in a Different World
So, America hadn't been born yet? This was a map of the great colonial era, a time of exploration and conquest. But that made no sense. The technology, the factories, the steam-pumps—this was the age of industry. America should have long since fought for its independence. My mind reeled, lost in a dizzying fog of anachronisms. This world's history was a broken, tangled mess.
Frustrated, I skipped over the Americas and turned the page. Central Asia—a meaningless blur. The next page… ah. My breath caught in my throat. East Asia. My homeland.
The map was distorted, its coastlines warped and inaccurate, a clear sign of a Western cartographer working from incomplete information, from sailors' tales and half-remembered charts. Before turning the page, I had been filled with a cold dread, fearing I would see the familiar crimson of the British or the blue of the Franks smeared across the land of my ancestors. I had already seen the mark of the British on the map of India, and the tell-tale colours of both the Iberians and the Franks scattered across the islands of the Southeast. But the map of my homeland was a single, solid block of imperial yellow, its borders vast, even larger than in my own world's history, stretching from the sea to the great northern steppes. The label, however, was a single, simple word: Qin. Qin? That couldn't be right. The Qin dynasty was ancient history, two thousand years in the past. There was only one other possibility, a dynasty whose name sounded similar in this foreign tongue, whose borders were just as vast. The Qing.
The flicker of desperate hope that had ignited within me—the hope of a home, a familiar shore in this strange, alien sea—died, turning to cold, bitter ash. I knew the history of that era. It was the twilight of a great empire, the beginning of a century of humiliation, war, and suffering for its people. A different kind of hell from this one, but hell nonetheless. There was no going back. There was no home to return to.
“Parula, what are you looking at? We should go,” Jared said, his voice urgent, pulling me from my grim reverie.
“What’s the rush?” I asked, my voice distant. “There are so many books here. Let me see if I can find anything else useful.” I crouched down, sifting through the piles of discarded newspapers and journals, the strange script a mocking testament to my own ignorance.
“No, we have to go now,” he insisted. “Someone will be coming soon. If they catch us here, we’ll be in for it.”
“What? I thought this was just a rubbish heap,” I said, confused. “I thought these were just things no one wanted.”
“Don’t be daft,” he said, looking at me as if I were a fool. “This is the collection point. For the recycling mills. The things we scavengers sell to the rag-and-bone men, this is where it all ends up before it’s sent back to the factories.”
Of course. That explained the sheer volume of it all. These books weren't just thrown away; they were raw materials, destined to be pulped and bleached and turned into new paper. The scrap iron would be melted down and forged anew. So we weren't just scavengers; we were thieves, stealing from the thieves who had stolen from the city's refuse. A perfect, closed loop of squalor and crime. But the thought of returning the atlas, of giving up this precious key to understanding my new world, was unthinkable. "Acquiring knowledge can hardly be called theft," I muttered to myself, a line from some long-forgotten author surfacing in my mind. "For a scholar, such things are a matter of… relocation." I clutched the atlas tighter to my chest and continued my search, my eyes scanning the piles for anything else I might be able to read, anything written in a script I could understand.
And then I found it. A small, black book, its cover stamped with a simple, unadorned silver cross. It was written entirely in English. I could read it. It was a Bible.
“Quick! The foreman’s coming!” A shout echoed from the edge of the dumping ground, a lookout's warning. In an instant, the scavengers scattered, melting back into the labyrinthine alleys of the city like rats fleeing a terrier.
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