Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 12

Ty is gone. And nobody else in the building wants to acknowledge my existence. It's early, before first lesson. The doors to the stairs are locked. I sit with a book waiting for someone to open them. I've seen other people do this. Slip through the doors when a teacher comes through. I have to get up there and speak to Ms. Grigore before she starts work.

The hunter from the assembly is back. I've seen her up on the elevated walkway with the principal. They went into the offices together. But so far everything is calm. The accusers are not here in the soulSpace. Right now, it feels like everybody is just trying to be invisible.

The doors swing open, a teacher comes through at speed, holding too my things and jangling keys. I hurry toward him, head down.

'Where do you think you're going?'

'Oh er, I need to get to my locker, sir.'

I brace myself, but he's grunted his assent and is already gone. I slip through the door and run up the stairs. I'm highly visible up here on the raised walkway. Nothing for it but to walk as fast as possible, hope I never find myself looking at the CCTV footage. There are cameras everywhere. Who knows how many of them actually work. All the tech here looks ancient.

Ms. Grigore's room is dark. I try the doors. Locked. I'm starting to panic. I'm banging on the doors of a locked computer lab, an accused witch, up on this balcony like I'm on stage at a rock concert. I've got to get out of sight.

I look to my right. Ms. Fortune, the principal, emerges from her offices, deep in conversation with the witch hunter. I turn left and half walk, half run to the double doors leading to the downward stairwell. And I walk right into a body in a dress.

"Good lord!"

It's Mrs G, my pastoral manager.

"It's a good job I bumped into you my lovely."

She takes me by the arm and steers me down the stairs, away from the hunter. She can probably feel the tension in me. I'm like a cornered cat. So, she says.

"It's OK Ursula, I'll look after you. Come and have a chat in my office."

Relief floods my chest.

###

"I gotta talk to Ms. Grigore."

"I'm sure she'll be here later. There's no rush. Are you joining code club?"

"Um, yeah kinda I guess."

"Good for you. Follow your interests. You had a rough first day my love."

I'm silent. Too spaced out to even cry about it. But I want to trust someone so hard it loosens my tongue.

"It's all so strange. None of this is happening back home. Like I didn't think it could you know. I thought things like this were ancient history."

"The witch hunts? Yes, we still can't believe it. But it's just the latest in a long line of things we never believed would happen again. We thought we were so modern, we just thought progress would go on forever."

"So why can't you stop it?"

"When I was kid, I wondered why they couldn't stop the civil war from happening. I thought all the adults had gone mad. I thought I would never let such a thing happen. Now I'm an adult, I can see things coming from a decade away, like a slow car crash, but there is no steering wheel."

She sips her tea and spends a moment reliving something in her mind I cannot see.

"I shouldn't say things like that to you of course. But I can see that look in your eye. I find there's no use sugar coating the truth to young people with trauma. We carry on Ursula. We look for the love in the world."

Sounds like something mom would say. And there is a line of them at the office door, waiting for their sanctuary. It's her I realise, Mrs. G is the safe space, not the little room she sits in.

"What happened to those girls yesterday?"

"We've kept them off school for a little while. We're working with their families. Don't you worry about them."

Mrs. G sips her tea and looks at me for a long time. I look right back at her. She takes a deep breath.

"Someone made a report to the Witch Hunters yesterday."

I go cold.

"You were named. Someone accused you of having illegal implants. Lights under your skin."

She has her hand on my lower arm. I can feel myself trembling under her touch. I'm holding on to her kind eyes like a life preserver.

"The school wanted to handle it; Ms. Fortune has been arguing all night on the phone. But I'm afraid we had to agree to a visit from the chief of the Restricted Technologies Agency, a woman called Marketta La Fey.'

The RTA. The hunters. I've heard this name before, whispered, and another name for her too - the Witch Finder General.

"You'll get through this. Listen to me. This is just a blip. You've got a great future here Ursula."

"They want me to talk to her right?"

"She just wants to ask you a few questions. You're not the only one, those silly girls making accusations, they've brought it all on us."

The world takes on that dark clown show vibe, every tiny detail contains some element of hostility. I recognise this. Everything is suddenly alien, from the smell of the carpet to the slogan on her mug.

"I'm... scared."

"I'd be worried if you weren't. Listen, you'll have to get through the morning as normal. Someone will come and pick you up in third period. Ursula if there is anything you want to tell me, now is the time."

I'm digging my nails hard into the skin of my left wrist. My jaw is so tight I'm amazed the words come out. A kind of static rage bleeds into my fear.

"I'm not augmented."

And I'm repeating it in my head, because it's true and surely, it's enough to make this nightmare go away. I'm not a witch. So why fear a witch hunter? And that's what I'll say. Because it is true. Even if it isn't everything.

"You can come back here anytime you need to."

She hands me a piece of laminated card. It's a hall pass.

"Thanks."

I leave the sanctuary of her space like a dead man walking.

I don't know how I manage to act as if I'm even in the room for the lessons that follow. But I do, until the woman comes to take me away...