Octavia and I left the underground river and began our journey back through the ant-made tunnels, retracing our steps to report back to Queen Anne. With Anne's ant minions now all drowned or otherwise dead, the only sound that filled the tunnels was the echoes of our claws hitting the ground. Gone were the constant quiet chittering of ants that usually filled the tunnels, a sound I hadn't realized I had grown accustomed to until now.

"Anne will have nothing but our eye-witness report to go on," I said.

"That's what I'm counting on," said Octavia. "What was it that you once told me? 'Information is a resource.' We can use that to our advantage."

"Withholding information isn't necessarily to our advantage," I said. "To the extent that we consider Anne to be a potential adversary, it makes sense to hold our information to ourselves. But if it stymies our ability to collaborate and meet our mutually beneficial goals, withholding information would hurt us."

"Just because someone is your ally doesn't mean you have to give them everything freely," she said. "You can be on good terms with someone, but not necessarily want to give them free stuff. Ask any merchant."

"Sure," I said, "but information isn't like that. Telling Anne about what we've seen doesn't mean we lose that information."

"And yet," said Octavia, "when people discover the location of a gold mine, they don't always rush out to tell others about it."

I nodded. "I see your point. And I'm well aware that there are benefits to having trade secrets, or other forms of information that become less valuable as you share them. But even if you have the hypothetical location of a gold mine, you can't keep that information to yourself forever. If you want to effectively mine a mineral deposit, you'll need a large team of people. Embercores might be the same way. We are, after all, returning to Anne specifically for the purpose of asking for her help in getting across the river."

"A river that we need to cross specifically because of an errand that she gave us," she said. "Don't forget that this is ultimately serving her interests."

"As long as Anne's interest is in thwarting the fire ants, I don't see any problem with that," I said. "One problem at a time."

"Okay," said Octavia. "Just as long as we're in agreement that Anne might become a problem in the future."

"I take your point," I said. "Just because Anne is on 'our side' doesn't mean she's one of the 'good guys.' But–"

I let out a yelp as my snout collided with the cave wall. "We need to climb here," she said.

"I gathered as much," backing up from the nearly vertical slope in front of us. "Maybe you should lead the way. Evidently, I can't see as well as you can down here."

"It's not about vision so much as memory," said Octavia. "I have what you might call a photographic memory. I know every twist and turn of this tunnel. Anne's ants are probably the same way. That's why she didn't feel the need to cover every part of this tunnel with glowstone lanterns."

"Does that photographic memory of yours recall the details of the map that Anne showed us?" I asked.

"Yes."

"How accurate was her map?"

Octavia considered the question for a moment before she began climbing. "It was mostly accurate. There were a few specific details that her map missed, like places where a tunnel had slight deviations, mostly places where hard stone got in the way. But the major turns were correct."

"That's interesting," I said. "It means she was willing to share real information with us."

Octavia nodded. "It would seem that she wasn't trying to deceive us, even if she was concealing her other maps."

"Maybe they're not actually maps," I said. "Maybe they're blueprints."

"What's the difference?" Octavia asked.

"A map is something that you create to detail the environment as it exists. A blueprint is a planning document. The blueprints would be her ideal vision for the tunnels. But in the process of digging out those tunnels, her ants encountered some problems along the way. They encountered unbreakable rocks that they needed to dig around, or other issues like that. But Anne didn't update the floor plans."

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Is that a problem?" Octavia asked.

"Maybe a problem for her," I said. "Might be an advantage for us. Maybe we know more about her tunnels than she does."

I followed Octavia back to Anne's lair. As we neared our destination, Octavia spoke up. "Don't you think it's odd that there are no ant sentries waiting for us?"

"Why would there be?" I asked.

"I just assumed she would want to know. We got an escort on our way into her lair for the first time."

"We can't expect the red carpet treatment every time," I said, trying to keep my tone light.

"Oh, I wouldn't expect a warm welcome," said Octavia. "But Anne seems an individual who's very interested in knowing what happens in her tunnels. I wouldn't bet on her to leaving much up to chance."

When we finally arrived at Anne's audience chamber, a pair of ants stood in the middle of the room. I squinted in the darkness, scanning the walls and ceiling for more signs of life, but they were vacant.

"What happened here?" I asked. "Where are all her other minions? There must have been hundreds, and now…" I stared again at the two ants in the middle of the room.

"No signs of violence here," said Octavia. "They must have left."

The two small ants in the center of the room, sensing us, walked around us in a circle, and then marching down one of the passageways. The previous time we'd been here, the passageway had been completely covered and concealed by ants, but now I could see a hole. It was smaller than the one we'd just come from, but still big enough that I would fit if I crawled on my belly.

I turned to follow the ants. "Shall we?" I glanced back at Octavia, and saw that she was staring at a different passageway, the one that led to Anne's map room.

"There are no guards," she whispered. "We could see what she's been hiding."

I shook my head. "I'm going with the ants."

Octavia looked at me with disbelief. "You don't want to see what she was hiding?"

"I do. But there are two possibilities here. One is that this is some kind of loyalty test, or a trap of some kind. In that case, entering her map room to look through her stuff would probably be failing the test. The other possibility is that something's actually wrong, there's an 'all hands on deck' situation, Anne had to take all of her minions to deal with it, and now Anne is summoning us to help. Either way, I think we should play by her rules."

Sensing our hesitation, the two sentry ants turned around, waiting at the entrance to the new tunnel.

Octavia paused, then began scuttling toward the map room.

"What are you doing?" I shouted.

"Let's say you're right," said Octavia. "Maybe Anne is in a bind and needs our help. She's having her ants lead us to some kind of crisis situation. Suppose she really has gotten herself into a pickle. In that case, I want to look at her maps."

"Can we spare the time?" I asked.

"I told you," said Octavia. "I have a photographic memory. If you give me a minute, I promise it will be worth it."

"And if there's a trap waiting for us…"

"If it's a loyalty test like you said, then I can tell her exactly what I just told you. If we want to help Anne, the best way to do it is to arm ourselves with knowledge before we follow her ant sentries into the unknown. Looking at her records isn't an act of disloyalty. If anything, she's the one who's withholding information that could have allowed us to help her better."

I glanced back at the ant sentries, then followed Octavia into the map room.

The room seemed brighter than it had before, now that there were no ants to cover the glowstone that was built into the walls. "It's empty," I said, looking at all of the sculptures that stood around the room, each serving as a three-dimensional map. "It's kind of eerie."

"Quiet," said Octavia. "Let me focus." She slowly shuffled around the room, drinking it in with her multiple rows of spider eyes. I did the same, though I was pretty sure that whatever mental notes I was making weren't nearly as detailed as Octavia. Looking at the complex 3D maps, I couldn't even tell which structures or tunnels they were supposed to be mapping, apart from the one I had been shown earlier

I walked up to the first map I'd seen, looking at the shape of what Octavia had observed as the Shimmergrove the first time we'd seen it. Even knowing what it was 'supposed' to be, I couldn't fathom how Octavia had managed to recognize it the first time. Everything looked so abstract.

It was a reminder of just how new I was to these tunnels. I had been down here less than two weeks. Octavia, meanwhile, had lived here for decades. She'd had an entire lifetime to acquaint herself with the geography of the desert's underground. She could spot patterns that would be completely lost on me. In fact–

"Let's go," she said. "I've seen everything there is to see."

Octavia and I scurried back to the audience chamber, where the two sentry ants were still dutifully waiting. The ants turned and began leading the way. I lowered my head and began crawling through the low-ceiling path after them.

"Is this passageway they're leading us down something that you saw in Anne's maps or blueprints?"

"Oh, yes," said Octavia.

I squinted in the dark, trying to quicken the pace of my crawling to keep up with the scuttling ants. "Where does it lead?"

"Up," said Octavia.

"How far up?"

"All the way," she said. "These ants are leading us to the surface."

I glanced at Octavia. "The last time I saw the surface, I seem to recall there being a massive storm, and a massive elder dragon to go along with it. If I remember events correctly, it went to considerable effort in trying to break its way into the underground."

"Yes," she said. "I was thinking the same thing."

I stopped walking. "Do you think it's safe to go up now?"

"I suppose we're about to find out," said Octavia, scuttling on ahead.