Foxface Maplesap's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

Foxface didn't go back to the factory. She sat in the shadow of a collapsed wall, spreading her sketches on the ground. The infected raccoon-kin. The mushroom bloom. The photograph. She needed to decide what they meant—not for her map, but for what came next. Grendel found her there, his shoulders heaving like he'd been running. He didn't speak at first, just stared at her sketches with eyes that had seen too much. When he finally sat down beside her, the silence stretched long enough that she almost asked what was wrong. But then he started talking about his wife—not the safe version he'd told before, about illness and bad luck. The real version. How she'd scratched at the walls. How her eyes went empty. How red blooms pushed through her fur in the final hours, three years ago, before anyone knew to call it The Red. Foxface's paws went still on her sketches. She'd been mapping the disease like it was new, but Grendel had been carrying this the whole time. She reached for something to say, some way to hold the pieces of him that had finally cracked open, when Hazel burst through the rubble with a journal clutched in her paws. The leather was water-stained and the pages were covered in frantic scrawls, but Hazel's face told the story before she opened her mouth. She'd gone ahead to scout the grove. The journal had been nailed to a tree at the border, left as a warning. Foxface took it with shaking paws and read the last entry: "The Red is in the roots now. We sealed the northern quarter. Don't come home." Her blood went cold. Not just infected travelers on the road—the disease had reached the grove itself, deep enough that they'd already started cutting off whole sections. The map she'd been making, the proof she wanted to leave behind, suddenly felt like something she might finish with no one left to give it to.