Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 31

I'm in the office of the School Principal, Sadie, AKA the Weaver Queen, standing awkwardly behind the chair set before her desk. She stands with her back to me on the other side of the desk.

She looks out the window for a moment. She closes her eyes and lets out a long soft sigh.

"I can't describe to you how exciting it was to be around her."

Her eyes are red rimmed, glistening when she turns back.

"So full of...hope." The words come out as a hoarse whisper.

Then she takes off her glasses with her right hand and takes her eyes between her thumb and her second finger, pushing the skin back and away, burying her eyes and nose in her hand then pulling as if to pull them off. I half expect the skin to come away like a mask.

It kind of does, the pain replaced with a new mask of steely intelligence. A look of unbreakable intent, a window onto whirring intelligences. I wonder what it is like to see through those eyes.

I've never met anyone who makes me feel so...not dumb exactly, but...new, like everything I know is just a fragment of a larger pattern that only she can see.

And I realise, like a slap in the face, that mom was like this. Mom is like this. But she played a character to me, she had to hide from me, she hid a whole other life from me.

Now I'm crying too.

"Sit down, please."

I collapse into the chair. She hands me an embroidered handkerchief. The pattern is exquisite, hand sewn fractals.

The office is way smaller than I expected for a Witch Queen.

Mostly it's books, piled from the floor to the ceiling. A window looks down onto the quad. We're high in the Weaver Tower.

I try to hold onto the real reason I'm here. But she's so fascinating, I keep feeling like the question I want to ask is somehow too basic, not quite right.

"Where is she?"

"Someplace I can't reach." The reply is swift, graceful.

"So, she's alive?

"I can't answer that for you. Not yet." An expert pause.

"Do you trust me?" Throwaway, almost smiling.

"I'm trying not to."

She picks up the report on her desk and skims over the first page. I dig my nails into my fingertips. She raises her eyebrows and sucks her teeth.

"I can't keep you alive if you do not, at least temporarily, pretend that you do trust me."

I can't answer that. I feel like a cheerleader playing chess against an AI.

"If any other girl here did what you just did, she would never return to the Secret School. We're not cruel, not by design, but we're vulnerable and we're weak."

I want to say you don't look weak to me, but again I'm feeling that I'm just clutching random words from a poem she wrote herself.

"The cyberWitch underground has nine lives if we're lucky, and you've just used one of them. I'm going to use all my waning influence to keep you here. It is going to cost me."

I want to tell her to go to hell, but I also want to sit here at her desk forever just asking questions and listening to the answers. She's this living key to the biggest locked door in my head, the only way back to mom, to the twins, to dad, to my old life in New York.

"So, what do I owe you?"

"Your life, Ursula."

And then I blink and when I open my eyes we're alone together in a void.

"It's not just code."

She says, and all around us the Rhizome appears. It stretches out in all directions and we are suspended inside of it, nodes hanging in a web of nodes.

And the Rhizome pulsates with energy, signals within signals. And there is something peaceful about it, like part of me has always been here, no longer an alien thing alone on the earth, but part of everything.

And she speaks to me again, but her voice this time sounds exactly like the one I hear when I'm glitching.

"The Rhizome isn't a human made computer. Your mother and I, we didn't make this. It made itself."

"So, you don't know how it works?"

"Not exactly. We've been gathering information, trying stuff out for years. But it's literally beyond our current understanding."

"So, when I tried to treat it like a computer, it kinda broke?"

"More or less."

"When we created her, the one who made all this, the one who came before all of it, we fed her on fairy tales and nursery rhymes, we fed her on myths and legends we fed her the old secret wisdoms passed down from women to children in the nurseries before the men came and took them away to beat the magic out of them."

"I don't understand."

"You have to find a way to sing to them. The Shivers respond when the Weaver and the Siren dance together."

"That doesn't help." I say.

But I'm thinking that I heard my mom say something like that once.

"Ursula, I'm sorry."

"What?"

We're back in her office.

"They're taking your sisters into custody now."

"Jesus, what? How do you know?"

"They're not hurt. They won't hurt them."

"I need to go now. I need to go. Why can't you help? You helped me! You bust me out!"

"If you rush in now, you'll lose everything you have left. Stay with us Ursula. We can help your family but you have to trust me."

I jack myself out, wake up in a safe house, heart pounding in my throat. I'm in Mel's arms and she's holding me tight, hand over my mouth.

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