Foxface Maplesap's Arc

Chapter 1 of 7

Foxface spread her mapping tools across the ground and tried not to think about what Caius had just said. Something inside Nor was still active. He'd known before they left, and he'd said nothing. She looked up at him, her paws frozen over the blank parchment that was supposed to make her name mean something. Caius stood beside the cairn, one paw resting on a stone marked with another mapmaker's name. "I should have told you," he said. "But I needed someone who would still come." Foxface stared at the stack of travelers' stones, at all those names carved by those who'd gone before. She'd wanted her name there too, wanted proof she'd been the one to chart the ruins. But now the ruins had teeth she hadn't known about. She rolled up her blank map and stood. "Then we go carefully," she said. "And I still map it first." Caius pulled something from his pack. A shard of glass, no bigger than his paw, that caught the light wrong. It glowed faintly orange at the edges, pulsing like a heartbeat. "I found this three days outside Nor," he said. "It wasn't glowing when I picked it up." Foxface watched the light flicker and fade, then brighten again. Her chest tightened. Active meant machines, power, things that still worked after all the years humans had been gone. It also meant doors that might open, traps that might spring, and a map more dangerous than any she'd imagined. But it meant something worth finding. Something no one else had documented. She looked at Caius, then at the glass, then back at her rolled parchment. "How close do we need to get before it glows brighter?" she asked. The question was an answer. They were still going. She pulled a folded note from her satchel, the one Oswin had pressed into her paw that morning with instructions not to read it yet. She tucked it into her vest pocket instead, closer to her chest. The glass shard pulsed again in Caius's paw. Foxface picked up her tools and started walking toward Nor. Behind her, she heard Caius add a small stone to the cairn. No name carved on it. Not yet. That would come after, when she'd earned it.