Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 29

We're in a vast hall, cannot see to the horizon, can't make out the ceiling, stone like a cathedral.

Gotta find mom, gotta find mom. Try to keep her face in my mind. It's all so much to drink in. Alice is walking so fast I'm in danger of losing her, I scurry after, just about catching onto her monologue.

"Dangerous. Every part of it is dangerous. This school is made of all the secret places, where women had to hide and whisper their secrets to the girls, secrets to keep them alive."

She gestures around herself, a strange and captivating twist and flick of her wrist and fingers.

"Never go off on your own in the gap. Never get lost on your way to class. There are girls here who have been gone for years wandering the halls, never making it back to their meat. Pretty little vegetables in Weaver safehouses hidden all around the world."

She's savouring this bit, trying to scare me away.

The immense hall has become a staircase, so magnificent I feel like an ant, we have to pull ourselves up each step, like the steps were not built for humans at all.

"To get to class you will need to learn the patterns, the Weaver ways. On our side of the school, it's different. We use Desires to navigate."

"Look if you want to get rid of me all you have to do is tell me where my mom is." My voice comes out weak and needy, damn, didn't sound like that in my head.

She doesn't respond, plunging up and ahead into the darkness, I can barely keep up.

And we're in a room full of monstrous noise and heat. It's so loud I can't think. The shock is literally stunning. But I have to keep up, she's nimbly darting around these great machines, I nearly catch my hair in some huge and brutal mechanism when I notice the children.

We're in a cotton mill, huge industrial looms, ceaselessly thundering. Children running underneath them, pulling out scraps and fluff.

I run now, to keep up with Alice, just noticing a group of young women huddled around an older woman, hidden behind one of the looms, she's teaching them something. Then the foreman comes and they scatter.

Scene change.

I'm breathless now, just catching up to Alice as she turns and steps backwards over the threshold of an old cottage in a wood.

"The Secret School is endless, unmappable. There are rooms here bigger than the nations of men. But none of it will survive if you stay. It will all be destroyed, if you stay."

We're in a cottage kitchen, fire burning in the hearth, big black pot over the fire, stone floor, warped oak for a table top, animals everywhere. A family of women stand staring at us. Girls at the table look up from their studies. Books lay open in front of them, full of tiny spidery writing and elaborate drawings of root networks tangled together.

Alice walks directly into the fireplace and dives head first into the eternal stew.

I feel a slap across the back of the head, heavy cuffing hand.

"Never wait!" The woman shouts, in some long dead English accent.

I run and dive into the hot nothing and then I'm sitting on a stool.

Around me are women and girls of many ages, working at a tapestry together. Alice is sitting opposite. They all whisper to one another, oblivious to us, I think it's some kind of French.

"Please Alice, I'm just some dumbass little girl who wants to find her mom, this is all way over my head, just tell me where she is. One of you must know something."