Marcus Reed's Arc

Chapter 3 of 2

By morning the copies had landed. Marcus knew it the way a soldier knows incoming. His phone buzzed once, then went dead quiet. A truck he didn't recognize sat two blocks from his place. The general knew the log was loose, and he would move to bury the man who leaked it. Marcus had nowhere to sit still and wait it out. So he drove away from town, out where the roads turned to gravel and the maps ran blank. He pulled up at a weathered trading post far from any town. Rough timber walls, bundles stacked on the porch, a hand-painted sign. Inside, an old woman stood at a plank counter, sorting rolled paper with ink-stained fingers. Elara Koss. A mapmaker. He'd heard her name from a trapper who swore she knew every stretch of forest no one else had charted. If anywhere was off the grid, it was wherever her maps led. "I need a place no one can find," Marcus said. "Deep forest. Off every road." Elara didn't look up. "Lots of people want that." She tapped a stack straight. "Few can pay." "I can pay." He set cash on the counter. "I need it today." She studied him then. Flat eyes, reading the way he held the door, the way he kept the window in sight. "Running from something." "Yes." "Men with guns." "Yes." She pulled a hand-drawn map from a pocket. Winding paths, sketched trees, a crooked cabin marked in faded ink. She slid it across but kept two fingers on the edge. "Crooked Timber Cabin. No road reaches it. Only this map does." Her fingers didn't lift. "The map stays mine. You copy the route. You don't keep the original." Marcus understood. She guarded her maps like a soldier guards a position. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a set of dark carbon sheets, crisp and stacked. He'd bought them once to copy the patrol log, before Michael found a better way. He laid a sheet under a blank page, set both on her map, and traced the route by hand. The paths pressed through in clean black lines. He lifted the copy. Hers stayed untouched. Elara watched the whole thing without a word. When he finished, she almost smiled. "You've done that before." "Copied things people wanted gone." He folded his tracing into his jacket. "More than once." He reached the cabin by dusk. It sat alone in the trees, slanted and quiet, exactly as drawn. No road, no power lines, no eyes. For the first time in days Marcus let his shoulders drop. He had a place to wait while the lawyer and the reporter did their work. Then his phone found one bar. A message from Michael: "They searched my house. Took the hard case. Original's gone." Marcus stared at the screen. The paper no longer mattered. But Michael was now the one they were hunting.