Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 27

We emerge up onto the stage, I stumble a little, Ty catches my arm and whispers in my ear,

"The Gap will respond to you. The shiver is made of code, try to see the code, try to rewrite it. You can do it, Sula."

All I can see is this ocean of faces looking up at me, and my hands frozen into a rictus impression of a long dead corpse dug up in Antarctica, just spending all my mental energy on trying to solve the incredibly important question of where to put them.

And I barely notice the other girls taking up positions in my peripheral vision, looking like they're ready to start a dance routine we've been practising for years and that I have somehow suddenly forgotten. A noise, the voice of the senior girl, the master of ceremonies, although I don't parse the words, just feel them, as a vibration in the back of my head.

Then I notice a face that I recognise in the crowd. She's staring directly at me. I feel my cheeks darken with simulated heat. And her face is a majestic sneer.

"Fail" she mouths at me, making it look like she's blowing me a kiss. I am paralysed.

It's Alice Nutter. It's only Alice freakin' Nutter.

And then an unearthly howl snaps me out of my reverie. Descending through scales into a deep murky effluence of digital noise, the shiver is getting stronger, feeding off the host, feeding off the moment. And I can hear the familiar song of my own Glitch, responding, as if it were an adopted child making contact with its birth mother. My avatar hands shimmer with distortion.

The countdown begins, and my mind is flooded with data, all of it I guess coming from Vash somehow, through the links in the coven, and it feels overwhelming, but at the same time, it's data, it's code, it's something I am damn good at and I try to get a fix on it, to extract the signal from the noise, and even just the effort of that makes screens appear in the air around me, and I somehow know that under my fingers invisible keys will translate my movements into a response.

And so, I move, trying out an algorithm I have known since I was nine years old, to try and clarify the data dump, weed out the trash and as I do it, Ty to my right dances and sings out some of the code that I am air typing, am I doing this? Are we doing this?

But it isn't right. My work. It's an imitation of something seen once, not the real thing.

I try harder. I focus so hard it's like getting an ice cream headache. All this spirit traffick, it's too much and it's not true, it's a lie, the shiver is hiding itself. Can't find the right words, the right subroutines.

But the glitching girl is getting worse, more extreme, the data flood is more bizarre, it's not just code, its words, like rhymes, like nursery rhymes.

And I'm in some kind of panic now. I just stop moving, and the other girls are left hanging, beginning to just repeat the same single word again and again, Vash is flailing around trying to keep her grip on the spirit.

And deep, deep down in my memory, there is a face at the edge of a cot, looking down at me like the sun on a new day, singing something, singing something that seems normal to me, but it wasn't like the songs that other mommies sang.

The countdown enters its final seconds, we're failing the initiation test.

And through the fog of this memory my eyes turn up to the weaver balcony and see up above the nobles of their clan, three statues, dressed like Greek goddesses, and the one in the centre, its mom, it's Amanda Loveless.

The alarm sounds, the trial is over, we have failed

And my arm is pointing out in front of me. "That's my mom", falls out of my mouth. Ten thousand sharp intakes of breath. Absolute silence in the quad. Somewhere, two dogs are barking, far away.

And the woman I notice for the first time, in amongst the finely dressed weaver witches on the balcony, in the plainest old jumper, curly salt and pepper hair, glasses, no hint of exotic weaver fabrics about her, with the quietest and most terrifying gravitas, moves her fingers in the air ever so slightly and whispers something.

The shiver leaves the body of the possessed girl without ceremony. It is there. It is gone. Others rush forward to help the exhausted host, to carry her away.

And while this happens, the woman on the balcony locks eyes with her opposite, and I follow the gaze across to the Siren tower, where the most dazzling array of beautiful creatures I will ever see glitter in a stately rage. It isn't hard to tell who is the Siren Queen, her face gives away little, but the stare is returned, the slightest note of expectation, an unspoken word of warning.

My heart barely dares take another beat.

The Weaver Queen, because it's clear now who she is, touches another woman on the arm, and then she turns away.

The master of ceremonies crows, 'You have won your place at the secret school!'

A technicolour thunderstorm drifts in, raining simulated ticker tape and diamond confetti, digital fireworks explode, a few polite claps from senior weavers but nothing at all from the crowd. My coven throws their arms around me, but I can't take my gaze away from one person.

Alice Nutter continues to stare at me, and her incandescent, glorious and stunningly beautiful rage burns into the back of my skull as we are all sucked inwards into the vortex of synaptic activity which will dump us back into the real world.

###

I open my eyes and suck in air like I've damn near drowned, Mel is literally slapping us awake, my eyes are itching, tears streaming down my face, throat dry she pours water in my mouth, spluttering coughing, vision coming back together in stages, but already on my feet.

"You bloody did it! You're in!"

We're in. The other girls are just as spaced out as me but we only have to follow Mel, just crowding around her like moths to a light bulb.

"Weaver agents out there, they've given us a window, I've got a route, they'll keep the hunters off us for long enough to break out of the dragnet."

"Uhuh."

I just assent to anything; I don't understand the details but the message is clear.

Follow me now. And we follow her.

We crawl out of the tunnel of broken washing machines, we run across the scrap yard, no hunters around, no dogs, no nothing. Even the workers and the vagrants turn away from us, instinct telling them not to be aware that we exist.

And then we're down by the river, Mel keeps checking her phone, she's getting information from the Weavers, telling her where to go next and we find a houseboat, and we climb aboard. Mel puts her phone up to the digital keypad, the door pops open and we pile inside.

It's cosy, it's beautiful, and the windows are some kinds of high-end digital glass, what you see looking in is not real from the outside, it's a safe house. And it pulls away from its moorings, completely AI controlled. A River Shiver is the captain of our ship. Welcome to the Weaver Underground. The Weavers are Rich.

And the last thing I remember is Mel singing us to sleep, all piled up like girls at a sleepover on a gorgeous soft downy bed pulled out from under the bench seating down the middle of the boat, too tired to even shower or eat, just falling asleep together in our own collective stink.

###THIS NOVEL IS IN OPEN BETA###

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