A Monster's Light (Kadrixan Mates #5)

I’d made it most of the way across town when I ran into my first problem. The route I was following was called Snakes and Ladders because it went through a series of unmonitored parks and alleyways. Of course, we didn’t have Earth style snakes here on Vokira—our version of elongated reptiles had tiny little legs—but it still worked. But there was a newly built surveillance tower right in front of the alleyway I was supposed to traverse. It must have been put there after they’d made the map I’d found.

It was an iffy section of the colony; one plagued not just with crimes but with secret talks of uprising and revolution. An exposé on a rebel group last year found that several of the members had come from this sector. It made sense that the colony had put extra surveillance in the area.

Ducking inside a recessed entryway, I dug out my hand-drawn map of the Snakes and Ladders Path. Too paranoid to download the map, I’d done it the old-fashioned way, copying it down the best I could by hand. It wasn’t so much a single path but a vast series of unmonitored routes spanning across the colony. I’d only copied the routes I believed most useful to me.

Now I wished I’d saved the image on my phone. But then again, I hadn’t known I’d have a functioning phone with me.