Amanda Lynn's Arc

Chapter 6 of 14

Amanda Lynn returned to the ridge at first light. She had learned the route in darkness. Now she had to see it in daylight, before the race. She climbed the first bend and stopped cold. The road was not the road she remembered. Sun struck the slope and threw hard shadows across the trail. What she had walked as a smooth curve now split into ledges and drops she had never seen in the dark. Her stomach dropped. She had trusted the birds' line. But the birds flew over the ground. They did not touch it. Where they had held straight over a gap, the path below cut left around a broken shelf. She had memorized air, not earth. If she ran this blind on race day, she would break an ankle at speed. A swift shot past her, low and fast. It banked at the same bend, drawing the same line it always drew. Amanda Lynn watched it climb toward the aviary above. The wooden tower stood against the morning sky, its roof tapered to a point, its long eaves swept back like a bird about to dive. The swifts poured from its high windows in a steady stream. She understood then. The birds' line was still true. She just had to match it to the daylight ground. She climbed to the aviary and set her back against it, the same spot as the night before. This time she could see everything the dark had hidden. She traced each swift down the ridge and marked where its line met a real ledge, a real gap, a real drop. She walked the six miles a second time. At every hazard she stopped and fixed it. Loose scree after the third bend. A slab that overhung a fall near the fourth. A gap where the trail pinched to one boot's width. She stepped each one until her feet knew them without her eyes. Near the base she found the worst of it. A wide crack split the trail, hidden at night by shadow, hidden now by a low fringe of grass. A runner at full speed would drop straight into it. She marked a stride pattern that carried her clear, then ran it three times to be sure. When she reached the bottom the sun stood high. She had the route twice over now, dark and light, air and ground. No hidden hazard could take her lead. Then she saw fresh boot prints in the dirt beside the crack. Not hers. Larger, pressed deep, made after dawn. Someone had stood over that same gap while she worked the upper ridge. B.A. Ware had not gone to the guild hall after all. They had come back down to study the exact hazard that could have finished her. Now her rival knew where the ridge could break a runner. And they knew she had found it too.