Black Bead: Book One of the Black Bead Chronicles Read Free Page B

to be your Second and who is the Third?” he asked again.  
    “Alain is beta, I guess, because he’s oldest,” Tam ventured. Connor squawked in protest. Tam quelled his outburst with a glare.
    “Fine,” Phillius said, as he keyed the information into his form. “Pick up your tools and weapons at the weapons locker. Don’t forget to check with the Weapons Master. Do not lose your tools. Return them cleaned and undamaged or there will be dire consequences. Where is your foray form?”
    “Uh,” Tam grunted, looking over at Megan. She sighed in exasperation and grabbed an empty form and a stylus from a stack on the corner of the desk. She turned on her heel and crossed the room to the row of seats set against the near wall. The Pack followed her.
    “That’s alright,” yelled Phillius after them, “Take your time. I’ve got all day. Maybe the sun will set and you won’t have to bother going outside.”
    Cheobawn’s head was spinning. She could hardly believe it. Her Da was letting her go. More importantly, Mora was allowing it. The world was so full of surprises. She floated across the room, barely aware of her feet touching the floor.
    Megan unfolded the form and laid it flat on the low table in front of chairs. The boys gathered round. Cheobawn squeezed in past Alain and sat next to Megan, snuggling up close to see what was printed on the paper. Most of the paper was covered with a map of some kind. Words and numbers and lines of every color and weight swirled and coiled in upon
    themselves. None of it made any sense at first glance. Then she spotted the black circle in the center of the paper labeled Home Dome. She leaned in closer, studying the drawing. If you ignored most of the swirly twirly stuff and just looked at the black lines, it became intimately familiar. This was her miniature world, only instead of being modeled in dust, someone had committed it to paper.
    They did not teach map reading to six-year-olds although she knew maps. A beautiful map was tacked to the wall in her classroom. It had little cartoons of mountains covered with cartoon trees and cartoon rock jumpers, with cartoon domes strung like beads in the spaces between the mountains and the edge of the world. She liked to trace the roads that connected the other domes to the Windfall dome, reading the names of each village, imagining how magical it would be to live someplace so far away.
    The map on the foray form was different. Familiar lines marked West Road, Waterfall Trail,  Orchard Trail and East Trail that split around a ridge and formed North Fork Trail and South Road. The paler lines curled and coiled in a confusing way until she realized they marked the places she knew to be high ground and ridge lines. She puzzled over the lines that formed a pattern of chevrons and then decided they matched the ravines in the model in her head.
    The map had more secrets. Scattered across the paper were little numbered boxes of various colors with a key along the side to decipher their meaning. Cheobawn studied it intently, enraptured by the cleverness and precision of the mind that had invented it. The key indicated that a red box with the number nine represented dubeh leopards. She looked back at the map, letting her eye follow the black line labeled Orchard Trail up the page. A pleased smile touched her face. There was a red box at five clicks just as she had told Tam. The dubeh leopard’s den was known to the Elders.
    “Where do you want to go?” Megan asked.  
    “Two clicks,” moaned Connor. “Where is the fun in that? I thought the whole point of a foray was to get out from under the thumb of all the adults. We’re going to be bumping into patrols every time we turn around.”
    “What do you say, Cheobawn?” Tam asked softly, ignoring his newly designated Third. “Shall we show Connor a good time?”
    “Why are you asking her?” Connor snorted.
    Tam punched him in the shoulder. Connor scowled and rubbed the doubly injured