Dara's Arc

Chapter 1 of 10

Dara's face was on the wall of every checkpoint in Blightmire, and she needed to walk through one of them. The poster showed her in the cracked plague mask she wore to hijack the regime's loudspeakers. For three months she had piped forbidden songs across the ruins from a stolen tower. Now she wanted something bigger. The last living musician from before the regime sat in the fortified camp, and she meant to smuggle him to her hidden studio. But the camp gate demanded transit papers she did not have, and any guard who saw her would drag her off in chains. She climbed to the old broadcast tower loft to think. Rust flaked under her boots. Broken glass littered the floor by the dead control panel. That was where she found the old man. He crouched over a roll of yellowed paper spread across a crate. His white coat was stained gray. His hands never stopped moving, smoothing the paper flat, tracing lines with one cracked fingernail. He did not look up. "You're the singer," he said. "You broadcast from my tower. Loud. Sloppy wiring." "Who are you?" "I drew these walls." He tapped the paper. "Every gate. Every guard post. The regime paid me to keep people locked in." His mouth twisted. "They never checked my work close enough." Dara knelt beside him. The paper was a map of the containment walls. Neat ink, careful numbers. Then she saw it. Near the camp, one drainage line ran under the wall and out the far side. It was marked as sealed. A small note in the margin said otherwise. "This tunnel," she said. "It's open." "I built it open." Eli met her eyes for the first time. His were sunk deep and tired. "I always meant one way out. I was too much a coward to use it." Dara's chest went tight. No papers. No checkpoint. No posted face at a gate. "Show me where it opens," she said. He rolled the blueprints and pressed them into her arms. "The mouth sits past the wall, in the wet ground beyond the wire. You crawl in from the outside. It brings you up inside the camp yard, behind the water shed." "You're giving me these?" "I'm coming with you." He stood, knees cracking. "I know the flaw better than any drawing. And I've waited long enough to spend it." That night they left the tower. They followed the blueprints across broken ground to the wall's shadow. Behind a fallen slab, Dara found the tunnel mouth, half choked with mud and reeds. Water trickled from it. The way was open, exactly as Eli had drawn it. She no longer needed papers. She no longer needed the gate. But the tunnel ran under the most guarded ground in Blightmire, and it would bring them up inside the camp, on the wrong side of the wire, with no way back out the way they came.