Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 36

We come off the main road and into a collection of low-rise buildings, what they call a 'housing estate' here. They're 'projects' to me, but in a kind of English way, not so large. The sky has a pre-dawn edge of grey light to it, and we pull up in an almost empty car park.

The buildings are three storeys high, wide and squat looking, all red brick and red tile, like someone took a little English house and copy-pasted it three times up and a dozen times across.

We're in a race now, somewhere in a Corp tower downtown Marketta's command team will be working around the clock. Trying to figure out who attacked the school and why. Only a matter of time before they come here.

Looks like the kind of place that was once considered 'nice enough'. Though it's nothing like the grandiose Peter Pan streets my grandma resides in. Now every other flat has boards hammered over the windows. Someone must still be washing grey paint over the graffiti once a week, but the graffiti is winning.

As we jog through the estate, the ad drones begin to come awake, waiting for the legal watershed to start singing their jingles. A tall young person, framed in scraps of high fashion leans against a flickering lamp post, doom scrolling an invisible phone, must have optics, and probably some kind of body temp mod, to keep from shivering in their pre-dawn semi nudity. They see us and slink away laconically, sensing trouble.

"Up there."

We follow Mel up the central stairwell and along the exterior corridor that runs in front of all the apartments, a brick half wall to our right, above the car park. I feel exposed. So many windows. We crouch behind the half wall and send Ty to do his thing.

As I watch, Ty changes into someone else. He's suddenly a very nervous looking girl. And she rings on the doorbell of the Bishop sisters (the very same ones who gave her name to the Witch Hunt), looking for all the world like she's calling on her friends to come out to play.

Ty isn't just acting, he's using the Rhizome to reprogram his entire physicality, like taking a black box recording of someone else's proprioception, the pattern of information passing between the world and their nervous system.

These shivers came alive somewhere deep inside a medical database. Ty specialises in speaking their language. Ty is a shapeshifter. Has a talent for reading social and emotional cues, a talent for broadcasting precisely the right messages to get the response desired.

And now the required response is simply, open the door.

It takes an age, and Mel is just about to move to plan B, when the door pops open a crack, held shut by a pathetic chain. I never saw something so antique in all my years in New York.

"Ty! What the bloody hell are you doing here at this time in the morning?"

"Omigod Anna I'm so happy to see you! I'm clear! They let me out!"

"What d'you come here for then?"

"Mum has kicked me out. Says I'm a bloody queer and I can go back to the witch cult where I belong."

Long pause.

"Please Anna, I'm so cold. I just want a cup of tea and I'll phone my cousin. I didn't know where else to go".

The shink-jingle of the chain sliding across barely has time to register before we're all in, hard and fast. I shut the door quietly behind me, Vash holds Anna up against the wall, hand over her mouth, taser in her other hand.

"Don't move. Don't make a sound." Matter of factly.

Mel sweeps through the house and returns with Kath looking white as a sheet in her pink robe.