Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 34

I slip the tapestry needle into my fingertip and try not to scream. The whole scene glitches suddenly, and I hear the wolf chorus in the black woods beyond this gothic castle tower. And it lurches out into jarring digital noise before finding it's melody again. I look out the window. The ravens flying across the moon start flying upside down.

My head jerks violently to the right, blood rushes to my left cheek.

The teacher hit me. She actually hit me.

"Don't glitch my lesson." She says, low and cold.

She remains sat so upright you could imagine her spine was a bolt of iron, perched on a stool by the fireside. She's the only person in the room who appears not to be freezing.

Ty can barely manipulate the needle with his white and purple, shivering fingers.

Vash is so focussed it's like we're not even in the same room.

And I am painfully aware of the sand slipping through the centre of the hourglass on the wall. I feel like we've been here for hours already.

And tonight, tonight is the only chance we have to make our run on the school. Mel made that very clear, if we don't come back tonight the deal is off, and we won't have any chance of following up on the lead, finding out if we can shut down the whole witch hunt and free my sisters.

And who knows maybe I can even free my mom and get the hell out of the Secret School, out of London, and back across the Atlantic to the real world, my real world of Manhattan apartments, high above the world where people hunt witches and worship AI goddesses, clutching their silicon crystals and their AI generated horoscopes.

I can tell by Ty's breathing that he's tipping towards a panic attack. The teacher snatches her work out of his hand and inspects it with immense disdain. She speaks, in what I know now is Norman French, but I understand it.

"Still, you have not understood the task my pretty idiot!"

I wince at this; the French is gendered female. Ty is too frightened to comment. And I'm too caught up in my own problems.

This lesson, they told me, would teach me how to control the Glitch. And I need that skill tonight, I need that skill like yesterday. But I can't even focus on the next stitch.

For the thirteenth time this session she paces the floor intoning the lesson. It's like a chant.

"You must weave the image, you become a channel for it to come into the world of objects, and each point shall be made up of 16, 777, 216 stitches. And each inch of the tapestry shall have 300 points. And the tapestry will show the secret history of our clan."

Vash is holding a square inch of something impossible in her fingers, a tapestry that looks like a square inch of a 24bit image. Her breathing is so slow I almost think she isn't breathing at all. She doesn't notice me looking at her.

"And now I have spoken too much. Again! We focus." Cries the teacher.

She seems to have successfully slapped me out of my glitching, but my panic is still there. What she's asking us to do is impossible. It would take millennia. Doesn't anyone else see that? Ty is trying really hard, but I can feel the anxiety coming off him in waves.

And I have a sudden flashback of my mom working. Like sometimes she did when dad was away on some poetry tour, she would sit at the breakfast bar with her hands on a super fancy ergonomic keyboard, staring into the middle distance.

She used no screens. I always assumed she had Bluetooth contacts. Now I realise maybe you don't even need an AR overlay when you have the Rhizome. You can be in two worlds at once. And she was so focused it was like I was invisible.