Dara's Arc

Chapter 10 of 10

Kael slept through the night, but his breath went ragged again by dawn. Dara counted the pills. Four left. She needed a doctor, and she needed one today. She pulled the checkpoint list from her jacket, the fresh poster Eli had torn from a wall on the way in. Her own face stared up at her. Beside it now: Eli's, Wren's, Elara's, Kael's. The regime had named her whole group. She could not walk one street to find help without a guard knowing every face. Eli spread his blueprints on the floor. "You can't go out that door," he said. "None of us can. They'll have your route memorized by noon." He tapped a thin line at the map's edge. "But I built more than one way under this city. There's a trail past the old rail cut. It runs behind the checkpoints, not through them. A doctor keeps a shelter at the end of it. Holt Prine. He owes me." "Then I take the trail," Dara said. "Alone you'll walk right past his door. You've never seen it." Eli rubbed his jaw. "He hides it well." A small voice broke in. "I know the trail." Dara turned. In the corner sat the girl who had followed them from the tunnel and then vanished into the dark. She had come back in the night. Her shaved head caught the gray light, the barcode dark on her neck. Her feet were still caked with swamp mud. She had not spoken a word since the tunnel. Dara had thought she never would. "Calla," Dara said softly. Calla did not look at Kael. She looked at her own muddy feet. "They marched us down it. To the shelter. I remember the turns." Flat, plain, each word set down like a stone. "I watched people cry on that trail. I did nothing." She stopped. "I can walk it with you." Dara knelt in front of her. "You don't have to." "I want to." They left through the tower's base drain, out of the guards' sightlines, and found the trail past the rail cut. It wound through packed earth and dead leaves, roots crossing it like ribs. Calla led. At each fork she paused, then chose. Her bare feet made no sound. Twice they heard boots on the road above and froze against the stones until the sound passed. The trail ended at a low mound of earth. Calla pressed a root aside. A door showed behind it, and Dara knocked the pattern Eli had made her memorize. A hollow-eyed man opened it, took one look at Dara's masked face, and went pale. "Eli sent me," she said. "A man is dying. Bad ribs, bad lung." Holt Prine looked past her at Calla, at the trail, at the empty road. Then he grabbed a bag. "Show me," he said. Dara had her doctor. But he had seen her face, and the trail ran both ways now.