Sierra Ashwood's Arc

Chapter 6 of 8

The rain slowed to a drizzle. Sierra tucked her chart deep inside her jacket and turned back toward the old camp. The floodwater had swallowed the lowest pool. Her landmark was gone. But a worse doubt sat in her chest. Someone had built this camp long before her. If they had mapped this valley too, her whole atlas might be a copy of paths already charted. She had to know. She climbed onto the plank platform. Canvas hung heavy with rainwater. Ropes sagged from the beams. Inside, a wooden desk stood against the back wall, its top buried under papers and folded maps. A compass lay among them. Sierra's breath caught. She had walked into another mapmaker's workshop. A small orange and white cat darted from under the desk and shot past her boots. She flinched, then laughed once, short and tight. The cat stopped at the doorway and watched her with steady eyes. Sierra lifted the folded maps. The ink had faded to brown. The creases had gone soft. She spread the top sheet across the desk and leaned close. Rivers. Ridgelines. A grid of careful marks. Her stomach dropped. This person had drawn Gourdhollow before she was ever born. Then she looked harder. The maps showed a city. Streets ran in tight rows beside a wide river. Bridges crossed it. There were no falls here, no ridge crest, no cave. This was somewhere else entirely, some far place the builder had come from. Beside the maps sat a stack of worn books, spines cracked from use. She opened the top one. The pages held sketches of jungle trees, notes in a language she could not read. Sierra sat down in the chair. Her hands were shaking again, but not from cold. Whoever had lived here was an explorer like her. They had carried their old world into this valley. They had not mapped it. They had only passed through and moved on, or died here, leaving their tools behind. The valley was still hers to chart. No one had beaten her to it. A black cat slipped in through the doorway and joined the orange one. Both sat and watched her work. Sierra pulled her own chart from her jacket and laid it beside the faded city maps. Hers showed the falls, the cave route, the river's bends, the camp. Every line she had measured herself. It was real, and it was first. She copied the abandoned camp onto her map as its true owner: a foreign explorer's rest, not a rival's claim. Then she noticed the loose plank under the desk, lifted at one corner. Something pale showed beneath it. A rolled bundle, sealed against the wet. Sierra worked her knife under the plank and pried it up. The bundle was heavy. Whatever the last explorer had hidden, they had wanted it kept. She reached in and drew it out.