Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

We descend into a deep back alley, between two factory buildings. It's a sweet relief to be on the ground again. Takes a minute for my night vision to kick in when Mel turns off the airBike lights. She throws me a pack.

"Go get changed behind the big bins. Those clothes could be bugged."

I just do what I'm told. The thought of smart fabrics phoning home scares me. And also, I admit, fascinates me. I think about how they'd work. Even while I'm terrified. I come out in my black coveralls and brand new boots. They fit perfectly. These people have been studying me. A chill down my spine.

Mel seems a little more relaxed, takes a swig from a bottle and passes it to me. I hesitate for half a second.

"It's water."

And it is.

She puts all my things into a storage bin under the bike seat and it flies off into the night sky, another decoy.

"Follow me."

We walk a couple of blocks. Nobody bothers us. Mel is openly carrying a golf club. That prolly helps.

"Hopefully you'll get a little time to get to know your coven sisters, before we take you to the secret school."

And just as I am about to start my tirade of questions, she freezes, hand on my arm to silence me. She's getting a message on some hardware I can't see.

"Run. Now."

And we're sprinting again. We run up alongside some kinda junk yard, and we dive through a pre-cut hole in the fence.

"This was supposed to be a safe site, but someone has blown our cover. Hunters are coming."

And I begin to hear the sounds of pursuit in the wind. Shouting and barking. The whining of police drones. The constricted feeling in my chest. The dreamlike sense of not quite knowing how to move.

"Follow me exactly, move the same way I do."

She weaves through the scrap yard in a very precise pattern of turns. Enormous piles of junk tech rise up in a bizarrely ordered fashion. We skirt a mountain of printers. We round a trio of hillocks of hair irons. I see an Everest of dead fridges. I hear the dogs getting closer.

There is a stink of evil chemicals as we pass big tubs of funny coloured liquid. Weird pools on the floor make me glad of my heavy duty boots. Signs of human life. CAmps are dotted around. People live here, work here. I see the stripped circuit boards piled up near the chemical vats.

Now we arrive at the foot of a pile of broken washing machines, a monument to laundry quietly rusting. And Mel motions for me to go on my hands and knees and crawl actually inside this heap of junk. Somebody has actually built a tunnel into it, with supports and everything. And I have a wave of unease going through my brain.

Why does she send me first? Is it so she can cover my escape route? I shuffle along through the muck on my hands and knees, slowed by my injured leg, followed by a trained killer. In my head, I see the sacrificial altar at the centre waiting for me to lie down upon it. I remember the pictures Marketta showed me. I think about the Mayan tunnels I heard about from mi abuelo. But the dogs are getting closer too...

"Go on ahead, I'm going to try and throw off the dogs." Mel hisses at me, before she recedes into the distance. I push on up the tunnel, wishing I had a torch.

I hear their voices before I see them. My coven sisters.

"First time's gotta be special though."

"Yeah, especially if we all get dumped, eaten alive by hunting dogs."