Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 41

It's so quiet in the cemetery which is strange because there are so many people here.

I turn from Vash and Ty, faces wet with silent tears and scan across the procession of witches in all their finest mourning avatars. Someone is wailing somewhere. We didn't know the dead coven. But it's easy to cry here. Just another subroutine.

We carry in our hands scraps of things to drop into the three open graves up at the crest of the hill. And I guess we're all thinking about other people that we lost. I see mom everywhere. Now Ms. Grigore too, and Sienna.

This place is like a city of the dead, it seems to go on forever. It's the most lavish, gothic boneyard I've ever seen, and each grave has some kind of statue or stone house with creepy iron gate.

The place is giving me the terror, but I can't freak out, this is my last chance maybe to speak to the Weaver Queen.

And the royal entourages are here, facing off either side of the priestesses. Queen Sadie and her court on one side and Queen Bess of House Siren with her court on the other. Between both groups there are three celebrants, priests of the new religion. The cult of the three women.

One for the Siren, one for the Weaver and another who seems to wear a hideous mask of some kind. They all chant at the same time, their words inaudible, blending and twisting together, chains of data in the virtual air.

These people are so different to anything I knew before, I'm still a foreigner in a new land. Trying to not put my foot in it. But Mel agreed with me last night, the only way forward now is to get a message to Queen Sadie herself, too many enemies in the school looking at us to fail now and I've already done enough for them to get their way.

Alice is here with her crew and a beautiful Indian boy in a white suit with subtle gold trim, who she is carrying around on her arm like another accessory, and I know she is crying but I can't believe she's not also running game. I still suspect she set me up when the security breach happened. Maybe even trying to frame me.

And there will be a chance, surely, for me to contact Sadie here. I'm seeing other women approaching her, after they toss their offerings into the wet digital earth, and say a few words. If I time it right, I can talk to her for a moment.

And then we're at the graves and I hear the words that the three priests are whispering in rounds over and over the graves and I see with horror that the ghosts of the three dead witches are standing inside the holes receiving the gifts we give to them, and then I look around and see throngs of spirits, wandering all through the cemetery.

Vash notices my faltering step and whispers in my ear.

"They're impressions of the people who are interred here, just animated echoes of their digital footprints, bits and pieces of their lives reconstructed from data. They're a form of memorial, not intelligent, just shades."

And I wonder why the witches decided to do this, maybe to aggravate their feelings of loss, to maximise their sadness in a world so far removed from the actual physical death that perhaps their grief slides into abstraction.

I didn't know these women, but I grieve because they are us really, another group of desperate fugitives, cursed with a dangerous implant, trying to navigate their way through a world that hates them. And just also being kids really, just wanting to do all the dumb stuff that kids used to do, before this world got so hard to survive in. Before I left the gated community of upper Manhattan.

And then I'm dropping a sprig of Applethorn into the holes and the not-ghost looks up at me with a quizzical look on her face. As if to say, what is this for? And I can't remember really when I decided to bring Applethorn, or even knowing why I know what the strange white flower was. Datura stramonium. Thorn apple. Jimson Weed. Devil's snare.

But now is my chance, if I can speak to Sadie maybe she can tell me how to find mom, and mom can get us all out of London, mom can do anything, she's a goddam genius. Bona fide. So, I swallow my fear and strike out towards Sadie, who is surrounded by Weaver Spiders, the bodyguards of the gap, like a group of FBI agents in black drag.

All the weavers wear the most practical and understated clothes, their anti-fashion becoming a kind of fashion in itself. Sadie is, as always, underdressed so artfully it makes her look less like a Queen than a librarian who got lost on the way to work.

And I'm almost there, Sadie begins to looks up at me when someone grabs me by the arm and leads me away. And that subtle hint of the Caribbean in her south London accent hits me from behind.

"Ursula, we need to talk." Says Alice.

I follow, as if we were old friends going to have a heart to heart. And she leads me away from the main funeral party, further into a maze of mausoleums. And the witch ghosts stare at us and whisper to one another, seeming to gossip.

And then we're alone in what feels like a town square almost, surround by grand crypts, charnel houses, the family resting places of rich witches, executed in some prior hunt from centuries past.

And she stands in front of me holding my hands in hers, looking into my eyes, not with naked hostility, but something new, a kind of curiosity I hadn't seen before.

"Ursula, I think I maybe got you wrong."

And I'm trying to think what exactly to call the colour of her eyes, like a little firework of shades of red amber exploded in a cup of chocolate.

And I respond, "Um, I'm... yeah"

And I try to remember what it was I was trying to do.

Something about mom?

Would mom like Alice?

And she says to me in a tone I've never heard from her.

"So maybe you are a little glitchy, but I've seen you do things that nobody with your level of experience has done. I think maybe you are not the weak link I thought you were."

I take a deep breath and try to respond like an adult.

"Look, I understand Alice, this is your family and you think I'm a threat to them."

Then I notice her boyfriend is with us standing a little way off just watching, a weird look on his face, and I stiffen up.

Suddenly she reaches her arm out towards me, I flinch a little, then I realise she's playing with my hair. That's the first time I've seen her smile this way, relaxed, unforced, and somehow it doesn't feel weird that she has my hair in her fingers for a second. And I can't breathe.

"Look, I want to see in you in meatSpace. I have things to talk about that we cannot say here."

There is an alarm bell ringing far, far away, like an alarm clock on a Sunday morning. I want to trust Alice, this could be a turning point for us, if she's changed her mind about me, maybe we have more time to find out where mom is, maybe the heat is off on us getting expelled, then the Siren Queen appears with her entourage.

"Alice, come away child, we have work to do."

Alice says "coming mother" in a precise imitation of an upper-class English girl. Then she leans into close to me and I feel a shiver rise up from the base of my spine to the crown of my head.

"Your mother kept a secret room in the library for her research. You'll find answers there."

And Alice lets my fingers drop as she walks away, strutting like she always does, serving the walk that says: I'm shark in a gold fish pond.

And I realise just a little too late that I'm staring with my mouth open.

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