Deep Six — Chapter 1

The map was a century old, hand-drawn on paper gone soft as cloth at the folds, and missing, with what Ren was increasingly convinced was deliberate precision, the one mountain pass that would have made the whole thing useful.

She traced the gap with one finger for the hundredth time, as though the missing ink might reappear if she simply wanted it badly enough.

“He didn’t forget to draw it,” she said, mostly to herself.

Across the fire, her guide raised an eyebrow without looking up from the ropes he was coiling. “Cartographers don’t forget mountains.”

“No,” Ren agreed, folding the map carefully back along its hundred-year-old creases. “They don’t.”

Somewhere one valley over, she knew, a rival expedition was working from a very different copy of this same map — one that, she’d bet everything she owned, was missing an entirely different piece of the truth.