Kendra the navigator

Again Mara jogged in the lead, and again they trotted and walked down endless passages, reversing at numberless dead ends. Mara became increasingly frustrated as it seemed she recognized nearly every intersection they reached.

  Finally, when the latest corridor had led them to an intersection that forked in three directions, Mara brought them to an exasperated halt. Kendra had trouble recognizing most intersections, but she remembered this one.

  "Maybe I was wrong to lead us," Mara apologized. "By my reckoning, all three of these halls will take us into networks of loops and dead ends that will eventually lead us back here. I must have missed something. I don't know how to go forward. "

  Kendra had never seen Mara this unsettled. An idea occurred to her. "Mara, maybe we have to treat this intersection like a dead end and go back down the passage that brought us here. "

  Squinting her eyes shut, Mara rubbed her knuckles against her forehead, a grin spreading across her face. "Of course, of course, that has to be it. I've only experimented with doubling back from dead ends, never at intersections. "

  "Good thinking, Kendra," Trask acknowledged.

  "I was about to say the same thing," Seth complained.

  Mara led them back the way they had just come, and they reached an area where the tunnel forked in two directions, one slanting up, the other down. "This is new," Mara said with renewed vigor. "Follow me. "

Chapter 4