Darcy is Not Dead

8: Lesson Number One - Who done it

Reading through their dad's schematics used to be one of Alice's favorite pastimes. Back when she hadn't yet come to terms with her mediocrity in math, her dad's schematics were rosy lenses into her future.

She and Darcy used to face Legend of Zelda maps on the back of used scraps of these grid papers. They didn't have internet at the time, but they did have access to their grandma's old drafting table in the basement. They'd fill massive sheafs of paper as thin as a hangnail with legends, notes in the margins, and color-coded dungeon levels.

Looking at Julius' floor plan of the Mausoleum called upon these memories and made it difficult for Alice to breathe past the lump in her throat.

The schematics illustrated what Alice could only describe as a maze on the scale of a road map. There was a star sticker on one such road, and when she leant in to check the note, she found "Alice Olvera" written on the Mausoleum channel like a street name.

If her corridor was a country mile, then there were others like hers, and ones far longer than that, too. There were pockets of dense streets, neighborhoods of branches, but these all broke away within a few blocks of Julius' grid paper.

Alice puzzled over it all, eyes stinging. She forgot to blink.

"It's somethin', huh?" Arlo said. He had taken to leaning over his knees, and she realized she had spent so long studying the paper that all remaining apple slices were gone.

"It's... something," she uttered in two long breaths.

Julius had only filled out one quarter of the map, and even that quarter bled off the page—or came damn near close to bleeding. Her finger ran along the margin as she looked to him.

"Is this the end of the Mausoleum?" she asked.

Beside her, Theo snorted.

Julius looked far more dire when she focused back on him. "There isn't an end," he said.

The air dampened on her exposed skin. She crossed her hands over the prickle of goosebumps spreading up her arms.

Their ma had a fascination with the universe that she gave up on late into her bachelor's degree to study architecture. There were still remnants of it in the telescope on perpetual display in her office at the Bar Harbor house. On clear summer nights that overlapped with an astronomical event calendar her ma kept on the refrigerator, Alice fancied herself a look through the lens.

The universe would never be something she could wholly grasp. There was only so much a home telescope lens could show her. A mortal equivalent, though, and one she could circle back to the Mausoleum, might be the Louvre. Within two visits, she had yet to explore the entire structure. Surely no manmade building could be larger than that.

"Who... built it?" she asked.

"Ah, the eternal question," Theo said with a wistful sigh. "And if we ever find out, I have several theories on which baser instinct Julius will succumb to."

"Theo," Julius said, voice pitched near a growl.

Theo flopped his hands this way and that, and labeled each stop with, "The pendulum fluctuates between kissing the bastard senseless and killing them in cold blood."

"I'll kill you if you don't keep your asinine theories to yourself."

"That is to say—" Arlo interrupted. His voice was a calm intrusion between the two. "—we don't know for sure that it's made by anyone."

"It must be," Alice said, which prompted all three pairs of eyes to rest on her. She faltered. "I-I just mean—this isn't like a cave system. It isn't..."