Alice's Arc

Chapter 17 of 20

Wednesday inside the chamber, Alice ran a wait-and-recall drill down the side tunnels she had not yet mapped. Biscuit and the tall creature took the scent from a wool square and moved off together into the dark. She counted to twenty and lifted the stick to signal recall. White pulse, red pulse, white. The light hit the tunnel wall thirty feet in and stopped. The passage bent left. Her signal could not turn corners. She waited. Nothing came back. Rose stood at the doorway with her hands loose at her sides. "They're past the bend," she said. "They can't see you." Alice stepped into the tunnel and tried again. The beam died against stone. She could hear Biscuit's nails somewhere ahead, faint, moving further. Her chest went tight. She had built a signal system that worked in open air and failed the first time the ground curved. A small bird dropped from a crack in the ceiling and landed on the shelf beside the satchel. Blue wings, white breast, red head. Alice knew it. It had shown her the wool cap in the grass the night of the rescue. Rose watched it a moment. "He'll carry the light for you," she said. "Down the bend. Around corners. As far as they've gone." Alice looked at the bird. The bird looked at the stick. She lifted the ball close and pulsed the recall pattern slowly, twice, so it could see the sequence. The bird lifted off and flew into the tunnel, quick and low, flashing the pattern back from its own bright feathers as it went, red and white and red, alive in the dark where her beam had died. Alice heard the nails stop. Then turn. Then come. Biscuit trotted out first with the wool square in his mouth. The creature ducked through the low arch behind him, the raccoon riding his shoulder. The bird landed back on the shelf and shook itself. Alice knelt and took the square from Biscuit. He sat, then lay down at her boot. That was her signal. She wrote in the notebook: recall works past the bend. Bird carries the signal where the light can't reach. Then she closed the book and looked at the bird on the shelf. She had a third tracker now, and a way to run the tunnels without losing her team. She still did not know how deep the tunnels went, or where they ended, or what her team would find at the bottom.