Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 48

I can't help but remember how safe I used to feel when she sang it to me years ago tucked up in my bed, before the twins came.

And then suddenly I can see her, emerge along the canal path a couple of hundred yards ahead as it turns towards Regents Lock, we're in a quiet place now, away from central Camden, and the moon comes out from behind a cloud and suddenly she's so clear to me.

It's mom but it's not mom. There's a woman I recognise but she looks unplaceable in age, like she could be a thousand years old or forty-seven like mom really is. And she looks like she's half cyberWear, except her implants are made out of neon and circuit boards and they were designed by a Mayan historian.

She's La Llorona. Of course. I put it all together in my head. It clicks into place.

Mom was using folklore to feed to the AI, training her AI models on folklore. She made the shivers, and this one, this shiver was made out of LA LLORONA, and somehow, it got into her, took her over.

The old Rasta with the white dreads is staggering drunk up the canal path. He's walking towards her. And then she's begging him, can't quite hear her words but she's mad with desperation, begging him to look at something in the water. He sees it. He puts down his drink and takes off his coat and walks down to the canal side.

I call out to him, but he doesn't even look back.

The boys around me call out "Run!" Tugging at my shoulder. But I run the other way. Towards mom.

The Rasta steps into the water, but it's deeper than it looks, suddenly he's up to his chest, wading with some difficulty toward the centre of the canal. Then mom is with him, arms around his neck, pulling him under, and he's thrashing around like a drowning child.

And then I am in the water too, the stagnant reek of it nearly making me black out, I swim out to the man.

Mom rises up appearing above the water, staring directly at me. She lets the man go and he swims away in terror and panic.

"Mom it's me." I'm sobbing. "I missed you."

And she almost seems to recognise me.

"Ay mi hija."

And she puts her arms around me. And my sobs get louder, shoulders heaving into her frozen cold bosom. The smell of her on her damp hair, and neck.

And her grip gets tighter and tighter, till I feel like my ribs are cracking.

And she stares deep into my eyes as she drags us both into the pitchy blank waters.

"Ay mi hija."

And I know that I cannot breathe anymore. And I cannot move. And a series of vignettes flashes before my eyes.

Mom singing to me.

Mom reading stories to me that didn't make any sense.

Mom teaching me something, something I didn't realise that she was teaching me.

And me, suddenly seeing myself for what I really am - an indignant, self-righteous toddler. Me being so desperate to hang onto my injured innocence that I let everyone around me suffer on my behalf. All the people I failed, all the people who have suffered because I wouldn't just accept that my life had changed.

And then wild, savage panic. My body knows that the oxygen has been switched off. And the Glitching, but mom just holds me with her at the bottom of the canal.

"Ay mi hija."

Such a goddam waste. Want to just inhale. Suck the filth into my lungs. And I'm dying for what? So, I can go and lock myself into an ivory tower and hide.

Then the no comes up from somewhere deep inside me.

No.

I can feel every molecule of the Rhizome come alive. The songs. the words. They were spells. She was teaching me how to use it.

And the right words come, and I say them, with the last bubbles of stale air in my lungs, and I feel the Rhizome growing outside of my skin, out and around me through the water and up into the air, I'm mutating, and it's a beautiful agony, just as my lungs fill with water, my mind switches itself back on as oxygen particles are drawn down through my inverted sub molecular tangle of roots.

I'm breathing through the Rhizome. It has escaped the boundaries of my flesh. It surrounds me, an invisible explosion of networked hair. And it draws oxygen.

And I feel my rhizome pierce my mother's nervous system and push into the base of her spine and up through each bone into the base of her skull. The demon within her struggles, tries to hijack us both, but I am so angry, so full of power, and I can feel the Weaver and the Siren with me, and for just one second, I can hear her true voice, trapped in a cage within this monster.

But all she can say is I love you.

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