Britta Stonefoot's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Britta pushed her head into the crack. Cold air breathed out at her. She wriggled her shoulders past the first bulge of stone. Then her pack caught. The buckles snagged on both sides, wedging her tight. She twisted. The rock held her fast. Dark stretched ahead, and behind her the passage was silent. She could not go forward. She could not pull back. Her heart slammed against the floor. "Trikar," she said. Her voice came out thin. "I'm stuck." His three heads pressed close to the crack. "Don't jerk," one head said. "You'll pin your arm. Then we can't reach it." But his fingers were too thick to fit past her. He pulled at her ankle. She only slid an inch, then stopped harder. A new voice came from the tunnel behind them. "Stop tugging. You'll break her." An old woman stepped out of the dark. She was hunched, with long legs and long ropes of gray hair. Beads clicked at her throat. Britta had seen her once, giving orders to the flat sea outside a corn-covered outhouse, where she guarded the shore alone. Everyone said she was mad. No one went near her. "I called 53 tides," the woman said. "I know a body that's wedged wrong. Girl. What holds you?" "My pack," Britta gasped. "The buckles." "Then lose the pack." Marlena knelt at the crack. Her long arm reached past Britta's shoulder into the dark. Her fingers found the strap across Britta's chest. "I can reach one buckle. Not both. You reach the other." Britta's map was in that pack. Every tunnel she had drawn. She had come so far to fill those pages. If she dropped it in the crack, it fell into the black below. "Choose," Marlena said. "The pack or the dark. I've watched the sea take slower things than you." Britta found the buckle at her hip. She thought of the beast sealed behind her, and the tunnels still unmapped ahead. She could draw a new map. She could not draw one dead. She snapped the buckle open. Marlena pulled hers free at the same moment. The pack dropped away. It clattered down the crack and vanished into the black gap below. Britta shot forward, free, sliding onto cold flat stone. She lay there, breathing hard, safe on the far side. Marlena's face filled the crack behind her. "You're through," she said. "You're lighter now. Good. Down here, light things live." Britta sat up in the dark. Her hands were empty. No pack. No map. No food, no rope, no charts. Ahead, the passage ran on into deeper black, unmapped, waiting. She had wanted to map every sealed tunnel in Icefang. Now she stood inside a new one, with nothing to draw on and no way back through the crack.