Amara Bennett's Arc

Chapter 11 of 13

Amara filled the last chamber before dawn, but she could not sleep. The tunnels ran past her stacked grain into dark she had never walked. If they opened somewhere on the ridge, the regime had a door into her camp. She lit a lamp and pulled her rifle off the shelf rig. She would not wait for a patrol to surface among the bunks. Jin-Ho met her at the arch below the animal pens. He carried a coil of rope and a second lamp. The scar over his eye caught the light. He had stood beside her against the old leader, and he did not ask why she was awake. "You mean to walk it," he said. "All of it." "Every branch," Amara said. "I need to know where it ends before someone else finds out first." They went in together. The passage forked, then forked again. Amara marked each turn with a scratch on the stone. The cow lowed once behind them, then the pens fell silent. The air stayed warm and dry. She counted her steps and kept the rope paying out behind her so they could not lose the way back. One branch narrowed and dead-ended in fallen rock. Another circled back to the grain chamber. Amara crossed both off in her head. Then a third passage began to climb. The floor sloped up under her boots. Cold air brushed her face. She stopped and raised the lamp. Ahead, gray light bled through a gap in the stone. Amara killed the flame. She crept up the slope on her hands and knees. The tunnel opened under a snow-heavy bush on the far side of the ridge, well past the greenhouse. Anyone could crawl in. A patrol could reach the bunks without ever touching her defended stairwell. "There it is," she whispered. "Our second door." Jin-Ho crouched beside her and looked out at the empty slope. "Then we hold it," he said. "Same as the gate." Amara studied the narrow gap. A grown man had to crawl through it one at a time. She dragged loose stones into the mouth until only a low crawl space remained. "We don't seal it," she said. "We use it. One rifle here can drop them as they come, single file. And it gives us a way out if the gate ever falls." They worked until the whole run was mapped. Amara marked every fork, every dead end, and the hidden mouth on the ridge. By the time they climbed back to the bunks, she carried the tunnels in her head like a floor plan. She pinned her rough map to the shelf rig where the camp could see it. No patrol could surface among her people now without meeting a gun. But the same tunnel that guarded them was an open throat on the ridge. If the regime found that gap, they would know exactly where her camp lived.