As promised, Anne's armored ant minions led the way down the twisting passages to the zone that she had designated as being rich in embercores.

To my surprise, this tunnel was slightly more spacious than the tunnel that had led us into Anne's ant lair. It wasn't exactly huge, but I didn't have to worry about hitting my head.

"Careful," said Octavia, tapping the ground ahead of me with two of her eight legs as I followed behind. "More loose ground here."

"This?" I swept the ground with my tail and sending a bit of sand flying. "This is nothing."

"Alright," she said. "I'm just saying, the last time we were in an ant-made tunnel like this, you kept tripping –"

"Hold on. 'Kept' tripping? I tripped once, and had zero tripping incidents after that."

"Well, she said, "I'd like to keep it that way."

"Just tell me when we get to the dangerous part," I said.

"What part do you consider to be the dangerous part?" she asked.

"I mean the part where the ants kept dying."

"Okay," said Octavia. "Are you worried?"

"I'm not sure if 'worried' is the word I'd use, but I obviously want to be prepared for whatever is waiting for us down there."

"Hopefully," said Octavia, "there will be an embercore waiting for us."

"By the way," I said, "how do we know that this place Anne is sending us to is going to contain an embercore?"

"We don't know for certain," said Octavia. "She estimated the odds at 80 percent."

"Really?" I said. "I must have missed that part of the conversation. I got kind of distracted by all of the other stuff in the room. Did she mention how she came to that assessment?"

"Something about the depth, and the type of rock there," said Octavia. "The ants carry rocks back, and she analyzes them and tries to extrapolate the surrounding geology. I'm surprised you weren't paying attention when she told us that."

"I guess I was more interested in what she wasn't telling us," I said. "It seemed like she wasn't showing us everything. Lots of her maps were covered up. It seemed deliberate. I wonder what she thought was worth hiding."

Octavia raised a spidery claw to her mouth in the universal sign for 'not so loud.'

"In case you forgot," she whispered, "her ants are escorting us."

"They're not intelligent," I whispered back. "They have limited communication capabilities."

"Maybe that's just what she wants us to think."

"Fair enough," I said. Octavia's hush order did seem a bit paranoid to me, but we did seem to be in agreement that Anne was withholding some potentially important info, and it wouldn't be out of the question for her to lie. If Octavia wanted to play it safe, that was fine with me.

We followed the ants in silence. For the next several minutes, the only sound that filled the tunnel was the sound of claws tapping on the rock floor of the tunnel, until the sound of something else filled the air.

"Is that wind?" I said.

"I'm not sure," she said. "I don't feel a draft, though."

As we continued forward, the sound echoing off the walls of the tunnel grew louder and more recognizable.

"Running water," said Octavia.

"Yes," I said. "White water, from the sound of it. It has to do with flow rate. Turbulent flow conditions –"

"I know what white water rapids are," said Octavia. "Though I've never encountered it here, not during this lifetime. The river that runs through the Shimmergrove is quiet, barely more than a babbling brook compared to this."

By the time we reached the end of the tunnel, the roar of the river had reached an intense din.

I could barely hear Octavia's voice over the sound of the river. "Careful! There's a bit of a drop. Several feet."

I stuck my head out of the tunnel to judge the distance, and felt a fine mist coat the scales of my face. I glanced down, seeing first the rock floor of the chamber, and beyond that, the river that ran through it, several feet wide and frothing white. The spray covered the rock floor of the chamber.

"Don't slip," Octavia called up, as I lowered myself down from the tunnel, hind legs first.

I watched as Anne's ant minions surveyed the area, entering what appeared to be some kind of sentry or 'patrol' mode, scouring the ground. One of the ants wandered up to the edge of the slippery rocks near the river, and appeared to slide for a moment before it got lost in the current.

"Mystery solved," I said. "This is why the ants always get stuck here."

"Seems so," said Octavia. "Do you think there's a way for us to send these ones back home?" She scooped up one of the ants, holding it in her two front claws as it attempted to wriggle free.

Octavia carried the armored ant back to the tunnel, facing it back toward where it had come from, but the ant immediately turned around, scurrying as if being chased by something, until it barreled head-on over the slippery rocks before getting sucked into the river's turbulent flow.

"I think there's a lesson in that," I said.

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"Yes," said Octavia. "Don't get too close to the river."

"Well, yes," I said. "But also, the ants only take instructions from Anne. Whatever it was she told them to do, they'll do to the best of their abilities until they get killed. I guess 'avoiding slippery ground' and 'staying away from water' wasn't part of the instructions she gave them."

"She did say they had a survival instinct," said Octavia.

"Apparently, their natural-born survival instincts didn't prepare them for white-water rivers," I said. "Not surprising, considering that they were made to live in a desert."

We watched as two more ants attempted to climb the wall closer to the head of the river. They both kept falling back down to the ground, only making it to a certain height before sliding back down to the bottom. Eventually, one of them strayed close enough to the river that it was hit by a stray splash of water and swept away, swallowed up by the river. The one remaining ant – the last ant of the bunch – continued its attempts to climb the slippery wall, caught in a constant cycle of climbing up and slipping or falling down.

"This is all very interesting," said Octavia. "But it doesn't change what we have to do. As long as we're cultivating an alliance with Anne, our job is to find her an embercore."

"Right," I said. "Got a plan?"

She pointed across the river. "This hollow area extends further in that direction, just like Anne predicted. Assuming the rest of her map was accurate, that's where we'd find the embercore."

"Okay," I said. "How do we cross the river?"

"That," said Octavia, "is a very good question."

I cautiously edged my way up to the river, staying away from the wet and slippery rock around it where the ants had slipped in.

"Looks more than ten feet across," I said.

"I think you're underestimating it by a significant amount," she said. "At least fifteen feet for the river itself. And if you're trying to get a running start to jump across, you're probably not going to want to jump before you get to the slippery part, so add another five or ten feet to that."

I laughed. "I don't think I'm going to try and jump across this river."

"Good," she said. "Let me try something."

Octavia walked up the river toward its source, where the rushing water emerged from a massive hole that didn't reach quite as far as the ceiling. "Here," she said, pointing. "If we can cling to the wall overhanging the river and edge our way across, we'll be golden."

"Do you think that's practical?" I said. "Even if we hang from that part of the wall, we'll be hit by the spray of the river."

"I'm not worried about getting wet," she said.

"It's less the fact that we'd be getting splashed, and more the fact that the wall is getting splashed," I said. "Look. Even the ceiling is wet."

"We won't know until we try," said Octavia.

"Trying could very well result in falling into the river and drowning. I know we're trying to play nice with Anne, but I'm not willing to risk my life for her embercore quest."

"I'll stay safe," she said. "Watch."

Octavia attached a bit of web to the dry portion of the wall further from the river, then fashioned herself a silk harness, almost like a mountain climber getting ready to belay. Then, she began climbing up the dry part of the wall, slowly moving horizontally along the wall until she got to the damp part. At this point, her movements became more slow and deliberate, hunting for claw-holds in the rock, but she ran into the same problem as the ants, sliding down the slippery wall. Fortunately, the taut thread she'd fashioned caused her to swing in an arc away from the river as she slid down, and she landed directly below where she'd affixed her thread to the dry portion of the wall.

"You're right," she said. "It's not just the slickness of the wet rock. The rock close to the river doesn't have enough places to grip. There's not enough rough edges."

"Erosion will do that," I said. "It's the same reason that the stones you find in riverbeds are always smooth."

"And the water makes it hard for me to attach any kind of secure webbing," she said. "It won't stick to the rock. I can't make a bridge for us."

I nodded.

"So, what do we do?" she asked. "If we can't climb across, and it's too wide to jump, then how do we get to the other side?"

"Well," I said. It is too far to jump, but…that does give me another idea."

"What," said Octavia. "You're going to try to grow wings and fly across?"

"Not that," I said. "Though the thought had entered my mind. But no, if I'm going to grow wings and learn how to use them, I'd prefer for my test flight not to be in a location where falling means getting swept away by the current, either to drown or get dashed upon the rocks. I was thinking more about the idea of inertia. A running start might not be enough, but maybe a machine of some sort…"

"You mean like a catapult?" said Octavia.

"Not exactly like a catapult," I said. "The ceiling is probably too low for an arc. But there are probably mechanical solutions that could generate enough horizontal momentum to fling an object across the river."

Octavia shook her head. "If we're going to talk about building some device for crossing the river, my first thought would be to build a bridge, rather than trying to slingshot you across."

"Either way," I said, "I don't think we're going to be getting to the other side without Anne's help."

"What are her ants going to do for us?" asked Octavia.

"I don't think her minions can help," I said. "At least not directly. But getting to the other side of the river is going to require an engineering solution of some sort, and that seems like Anne's wheelhouse. You saw her map room. She's a builder. Not only that, but she has access to building materials. She can figure out a way to get us to the other side."

Octavia looked back toward the tunnel we'd come from. "You're saying it's time for us to head back? Anne sent us to get an embercore. I'm not sure about how she's going to feel if we return to her empty-handed."

"But we're not coming back empty-handed," I said. "We're researchers, and we've gathered lots of new information. We solved the mystery of why her ants keep getting lost. And giving her more data that she can use to draw a more accurate map would be very useful to her, I imagine."

"Oh," said Octavia. "We're doing that?"

I looked at her, slightly confused. "Why wouldn't we?"

"I thought we'd just deliver the embercore," said Octavia. "I didn't realize that we were helping her build her next map."

"One of those seems significantly easier than the other," I said. I tapped my head. "We already know everything we need to make a field report right now."

"Yes," said Octavia. "But what do you suppose she's going to do with those improved maps that she assembles with our help? Remember how she was talking about 'expanding her domain?' If we're still worried about her becoming some kind of villainous conqueror, maybe giving her new maps about all of the new lands she can explore isn't the best idea."

"Oh," I said. "You're still worried about that? I didn't realize that this was going to be a non-starter for you."

"No, it's not like that," said Octavia. "If giving her an accurate picture of the river we found is what's needed to defeat the fire ants, then I'm willing to do it. Just…let's not forget that's what we're doing, okay? We're going to a wannabe-conqueror, and giving her a more accurate map of all the lands that there are for her to conquer. Maybe it's still worth it in the long run, but remember what we're giving her."

I nodded "I see your point. I guess I wasn't fully thinking through what we might want to strategically withhold when reporting on our expedition."

"I'm surprised you wouldn't think about that," said Octavia. "You were the one who seemed to notice that Anne was withholding information from us in her map room. If she's going to hide facts from us, I see no reason we shouldn't do the same to her."

"True," I said. "I guess I'm under-practiced in the art of strategically concealing information. Subterfuge was never one of my strong suits."

"In that case," said Octavia, "let me do the talking when we report back to Anne. For one thing, I'll be better at it. I can already envision Anne's map in my mind's eye. If our goal is just to communicate the river's location, I know exactly what details we need to give her. And…"

"And what?" I asked.

Octavia's eyes narrowed. "I know which details to withhold."