Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 21

It's so dark I can't see my fingers in front of my face. I can't sleep because of sea sickness and vertigo. Sea sick because I'm swaying, suspended in the air by a crane. At least they untied my wrists before they threw me in this giant tin can. It's a shipping container. This whole place is built out of them. I guess it helps to disguise the operation as a shipping yard. Now I know that even the Witch Hunt has enemies.

One of the girls from school ratted me out. She tried to use magic! I saw her! I don't blame the kid, she's like eleven. She almost died of terror when she saw that they were going to throw us all in tin coffins and leave us in the pitch black. I hear my own voice, giving Ms. Grigore to Marketta, desperate act of self-defence.

So now I'm the scariest witch in witch jail. And they have to hang me in the air while they process us all, waiting for the transport to take us to the prison ship.

The woman with the different coloured eyes, her voice comes back to me. If they get you on that ship, we can't help you.

I don't know what to think anymore. So I try to think about mom. Try to sleep.

Hours pass, almost passing out, then it slips through my fingers. Dreaming awake, dreaming asleep. Can't tell the difference.

A soft light appears in the far corner of the shipping container, it reveals the strangest face. A face with milk white skin and thin purple lips. A sharp smile and a glimmer in its pitch black eyes. My blood runs cold. The light emerges from the pages of a thick old book. It illuminates the man in the black hat. Casts a glow on his tall slender body, folded up into a sitting position, he gives me a wink and flicks through the pages with his long white fingers.

I'm literally shivering. I can smell the smell of ancient books. Musty, damp old leather. I'm both repulsed and attracted, like a confused pair of magnets. The book calls to me. It whispers my name.

Then I'm angry, all of a sudden, like a switch being thrown. I'm on my feet and running at him. I think I want to put my hands through him, to prove he isn't real. But I just run headlong into the wall, as the container rocks in a gust of wind. He's gone, but I know before I even look that he's behind me.

Did you sign your name in the black book?

Is this an initiation test? Are they still trying to recruit me, even here?

They had the chance to take me when they wanted. But they didn't. It's like they had to wait for me to ask. It had to be a choice.

And what do I choose?

Do I go to the boat and disappear just like mom? Or do I enrage Marketta, and bring her fury down on my sisters by joining the witch cult?

Now he sits cross legged in front of me, holding the book open. There is an enormous feather in my left hand, it's quill poised above the page. As I look at it it seems to change into every different writing instrument that has ever existed all at once.

A thought takes me, I grab the book, surprised at how real it feels. I flip back through the pages scanning name after name. I notice Beatrizia Grigore. I flip back a few more pages, and there it leaps out at me. A signature I recognise in an instant. Amanda Loveless. Mom.

Lucifer Morningstar takes his hat off and bows deeply. I realise I have impressed him somehow. Although I'm still half certain he is made of code, a hack in the brain implants I never even knew I had. Or maybe just a glitch in a terrified brain.

Then he swiftly turns my wrist over like a nurse, and slips a needle into my arm. In a moment he has pulled a vial of blood and injected it into a refillable ink cartridge, which he clicks into a fountain pen and passes to me.

I hesitate for one last moment. Feeling like I'm standing at a split in the timeline.

But I know my mind is made up. I can't surrender to the Witch Hunt. I just can't. Forgive me.

And it's done, I have signed my name in your book. I will be there for you.

And it's all gone.

But I don't have to wait long. Because there is a storm brewing in my nervous system. The glitch comes like a flood breaking a dam. I'm switched on in a way I never knew. I'm hyper aware. I can feel the location of other systems around me.

I can reach out through the air along the radio waves of wireless communication. I can hear the cacophony of all data flying through the night. I can send my mind along its pathways. It's overwhelming.

But something is helping. There is another intelligence in me, sitting next to my conscious mind, sorting through the data streams. It finds something, it shows me the operating system of a nearby drone, some two hundred yards from the crane, a large delivery quadcopter carrying building supplies. It's AI piloted. No user control. It's vulnerable.

It's not vulnerable to me, what I know about hacking you could write on the back of your hand. I'm a coder, not a hacker. The thing, the spirit, it knows. It knows what to do.

And it's like we're playing a game together. But it's Russian Roulette. Because it's really a strong chance that this plan will get me killed. But I'm so angry and tired and kinda high on this intense glitch wave that I'm feeling reckless.

So we pull the drone towards us, urging it on and on to its maximum speed, and I can see it almost, just as a thing of pure data, as it crashes into the crane.

The sound of metal giving way, twisting and tearing, bolts popping out. A sudden and violent lurch through open air.

All this sound energy, and all this kinetic energy, hits my meat body, passing through the water and blood and bone, firing every nerve, rocketing signals into the brain, and it is too much for me, and I black out. 

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