Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 33

I'm staring at the cracked and yellowing ceiling of the attic an old Victorian town house. I'm watching a tiny spider make an epic journey to some unknown paradise.

I'm tired and wired. Been tossing and turning in this single bed for hours, listening to the sounds of an impossibly loud mini-fridge, probably three times my age, clinging on to life at the foot of the bed.

Ty and Vash snore blissfully, top to toe in a flimsy double bed, and Mel has been locked in the bathroom since we got here. I get out of bed to try and shake the memories of the twins from my head. Their soft, warm bodies snuggling up to me in the months after mom disappeared. They slept with me for the best part of a year.

And for some reason that little spider, I just have to set it free, so I'm rustling around in the tea and coffee set up on top of a little chest of drawers to find a glass and an ancient flyer for some long-closed London attraction. It's cold. Heating packed up decades ago. This thing used to be a hotel. Abandoned.

I get the spider inside the glass, up on tip toes on the bed, and just as I begin to slip in the card, I stumble slightly and spread the spider across the wall with the rim of the glass.

I sit down, deflated.

It's a long minute before I get up again. Not sure even why, I pull up a chair and open the dormer window, suddenly it's real windy, but I need the wind, stick my head up into it and see London from the top storey of what was once a four storey home. This thing was built two-hundred years ago for a family anxious to display their wealth, and here we are, huddled up where the serving maids once slept.

And I'm looking out beyond the rooftops of this area, must be back west again because the real city is to the east of us, and I see the blinking red lights atop dozens of abandoned monstruous cranes, building projects stopped halfway through when the great disasters hit, the civil war, the money disappeared, one of the richest cities in the world went broke.

But they still maintain the lights up there, warning the air traffic, even though it's mostly unmanned these days, the strange recovery, the new-old-new-old world. And I'm wondering if I can climb out onto the roof without slipping.

"Don't even think it."

Mel is standing in the doorway of the tiny bathroom, reminds me of some of my old friends New York apartments.

"I've read your file backwards kid; you better believe I've rigged all the windows with sensors."

She smiles, but it's a sad smile. God, she looks tired.

"Come and sit with me a while. I could use the company."

So, I come into the bathroom, and perch on the edge of the empty bath, Mel sits in it cross-legged, fully clothed, drinking something that smells like hairspray out of a can. In front of her, some kind of game board, all projected in hologrammatic red light.

"This is a little game us Spider's play. They call it Lech."

I watch her make a move. The board is a map, three layers of map, and there are pieces on it. And a number of cards layered around the table, all of them made of projected light coming from an ornate little box on the edge of the bath.

She waves her hand and several pieces move, they're Hunters. I see that now, there are three witches and a Spider, four Hunters, two dogs and a handful of 'mooks' (neutrals). The witches are lying on the floor with their eyes closed. They're in the Gap. And I see that the game is kind of a sim, she's practising defending a coven.

"So, what is keeping you up?"

"My sisters Mel. I can't stop thinking about them. It's driving me crazy. I can't function anymore."