Alice's Arc

Chapter 18 of 20

Thursday morning Alice sat on the chamber floor with her notebook open on her knee. The bird could carry her signal past a bend, but she still had no map. Every side tunnel looked the same. Biscuit had come back yesterday with the wool square, but she could not have told anyone the shape of the passage he ran. Rose leaned in the doorway. "You need to see all of it at once," she said. Alice looked at her stick. The white pulse threw a narrow beam. The red pulse threw a narrower one. She had built the light to point, not to fill. She turned the stick over in her hands and thought about the glass ball at the top. She unscrewed the cap. The filament sat in a small cage, wired to a switch she had modified twice already. She had never pushed all the current through it at once. If she crossed the two channels and held the switch, the ball would dump every watt in a single flash. It would probably burn out. It would probably light the whole chamber and every tunnel mouth that opened off it, long enough to see. She brought Biscuit and the tall creature in from the arch. She had the blue-winged bird on the shelf and the raccoon on the creature's shoulder. She told Rose what she meant to do. Rose signed it across to the creature, who nodded once. Alice tore three blank pages from the notebook and set them on the floor with a pencil. "When it flashes," she said, "draw what you see. Every opening. Every turn you can catch." Rose translated. The creature picked up the pencil in two thick fingers. Alice knelt at the center of the chamber, crossed the wires at the base of the stick, and pressed the switch. The ball flared white, so bright the walls went flat and every crack showed. She saw seven tunnel mouths where she had counted four. She saw a low arch behind the shelf she had never noticed. She saw the floor slope down toward the far wall. The flash lasted maybe two seconds. Then the glass cracked and the light died. The chamber went black except for the small red backup she kept in her satchel. Alice fumbled it on. The creature was already drawing. Biscuit sat at her boot. She looked at the three sheets on the floor: her own quick lines, the creature's careful marks, Rose's short notes at the margins. Between the three of them they had the shape of the room and every mouth that led out of it. Alice wrote in her notebook: map by flash. Then she wrote: stick is dead. She closed the book. She had a map now, and no light to walk it by.