Cora Bane's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Cora Bane had planned her whole route around a stone tower she had never once found. Her map named it the starting mark. Every line she trusted began there. But the tower was a rumor she copied from a dead man's notes, and now, three years later, she still could not point to it on the sand. She unrolled the map inside her camp, a shelter she'd built in a dried riverbed from bleached wood and stretched cloth. Rags hung from the beams. She smoothed the paper across a plank and pressed her ink-stained finger on the empty spot where the tower should stand. "You're the last water at the world's end," she said to the map. "But I can't reach you if I can't find your front door." Guessing had nearly killed her twice. She refused to walk blind again. So she rolled the map, strapped the tube to her back, and climbed the ridge above her camp. From the high rock she could see farther than the riverbed ever allowed. A white eagle circled over the eastern flats. Its feathers caught the sun like polished metal. Cora watched it drop, then rise, then drop again over the same patch of ground. Birds that size hunted where prey drank. Prey drank near shade. Shade meant something tall. She followed the eagle for half a day. It led her to a strangler fig with ash-gray bark, its roots wrapped around each other like knotted rope. She almost turned back. Then she saw what the tree had swallowed. Under the vines stood cut stone. Weathered blocks. Narrow window slits. A wooden door bound in iron. The tower. Not a rumor. Real, and half eaten by the fig that hid it from every traveler who passed. Cora pulled the map free and knelt in the dirt. She lined the tower's true position against her drawn route. Her hands went cold. The starting mark sat far south of where she'd placed it. Every angle after it was wrong. Her whole route bent off course by miles. She could have wept. Instead she took out her pen and began to redraw. The tower was found. That part was finished. But the map she'd trusted for three years was a lie in ink, and she would have to rebuild every line from this door outward. A low hum rolled across the flats behind her. Cora turned. A machine sat parked in the tower's shadow, part road-worn camper, part something she had no word for. Blue light ran along its hull. Someone had reached the tower before her. And they had come in a way no map could explain.