Alice Hatter's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The vault lid was the size of a barn, and Alice had two sticks of dynamite. She needed a wall of them and a bomb strong enough to set the whole wall off at once. But she had no plan. She stood in her workshop, staring at the tools on the wall, and felt the size of the problem press on her chest. "I can build the frame," Roper said. He leaned in the doorway, mud still on his boots. "But I've never wired a blast this big. Timing kills men who guess." Alice pulled a red-tipped sprout from her pocket. "So we don't guess. We copy someone who knew." She had heard the old tales. Whoever sealed the vault had left drawings behind, hidden where thieves wouldn't dig. She grabbed her lantern. "There's a tree. A hollow one, big as a house. My gran said the marsh folk kept their secrets in its roots." They walked until the trunk rose black against the sky. A rounded mouth opened at its base, framed by roots thick as her arm. Alice ducked inside. The air smelled of wet wood. Her lantern found a metal box wedged in the roots—a rugged safe with a numbered dial and a heavy door. "Locked," Roper said. Alice grinned and packed both sprouts against the hinge. "Not for long." She lit the fuses and pulled Roper behind the trunk. The blast punched dust from the hollow. When the smoke cleared, the safe door hung crooked. Inside lay a single folded sheet. Alice smoothed it against her knee. It was crisp and clean, covered in precise diagrams of a vault door—dials, measurement marks, arrows in red and blue, notes crammed in every corner. A blueprint. Exactly what she needed. Roper crouched beside her, studying the lines. His grin faded. He tapped a corner where the paper was too white, the ink too bright. "Alice. This paper's new. The real vault's older than both of us." He pointed at a wiring loop. "And this. It goes nowhere. It's decoration." Alice stared at the crisp sheet. The measurements looked real. The arrows looked real. But Roper was right—the whole thing was a costume, a drawing made to look like knowledge. Someone had left a fake here. Maybe to fool robbers. Maybe just for show. She had blown her last two sprouts to open the safe. Now she had no dynamite left in her pocket and a blueprint she couldn't trust. Roper folded the sheet slowly. "We can still use it. Not to copy. To warn us." He met her eyes. "Every trick a real vault-maker feared, they hid in this. The false wires. The dead loops. If we can spot what's fake here, we'll know what's real out there." Alice took the paper back. Her plan was gone. But the marsh still grew sprouts, row after row. She just had to harvest enough—and learn to read a lie before she read the vault.