Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 43

I'm sitting in an exam hall at the secret school rearranging my pens and pencils for the thirteenth time, waiting for the exam to start. It's been months since the locked room at the library, and there has been no way back inside. The door itself has disappeared. But nobody has accused us of anything.

We've been on the run. Going to school. Studying, training. Trying to learn how to control the magic. trying to stay alive. Trying to research Marketta's links to Silicon Valley. Nothing works. No sign of mom. No way to get close to Sadie. No way except this.

This is the exam hall from my anxiety dreams about exams, as in literally. It's made of every individual's fears. this is somehow part of the test. Something about resilience. They make us write in pen on paper, as if were not all already signed into a computer network, but it fits the whole witch school vibe they seem to like here so much.

On the way in, the moderators, buzzing drones that fly around, another ludicrous touch, they do not even need to be visible really let alone flying, but a room full of buzzing quadcopters is more in keeping with our cyber witch underground style. And it makes I even harder to concentrate.

They are confiscating software routines that might hack the papers, because the papers aren't really papers, they're alive.

A girl is swarmed by drones, and dragged right out of the hall, blushing so hard she turns purple, busted with a shiver, trying to use spirits to help her pass.

This exam is diamond hard, so Mel keeps telling us, if you fail you have to re-sit the whole semester, three more months of sitting around with flashcards instead of helping my sisters get out of jail.

But I have to push the twins out of my mind, cannot afford to mess this up, if I pass, if we all pass, I get a one-to-one tutorial session with Sadie, the Weaver Queen and I'll finally get a chance to pressure her on what happened to mom, find out where she is and maybe even go home.

I try to think myself back into that apartment where all my best toys were. Where everything I did was amazing. I'm using my vision of my happy place, my Manhattan apartment, to calm my nerves.

And then the exam starts and the clock starts counting down. And I turn over the paper, it looks back at me. it has a face, and it gives me a wink before changing the questions, all of them, to the one topic I did not study because Vash swore to me it probably wouldn't come up in the exam.

And my throat goes bone dry, and even when I sip my water, it stays bone dry.

I was expecting to write essays about witch organisations through history, about the rise of the cyberWitches, about the takeover of the Weaver clan by Sadie and the conflicts between Weavers and Sirens over the years, but no, the questions are about something I've never studied. House Crone.

There were like, two references to House Crone in a couple of history lessons we had. No idea how it related to learning how to use the Rhizome. But the story went, that there was another house but it got banned, repressed somehow, something to do with human sacrifices. But Vash said, nobody is going to put that in the exam, nobody talks about house Crone.

And I'm being asked to label a diagram of a statue, with massive saggy breasts and a disfigured face, and one of the labels points to the face and I'm not even sure what I'm looking at, is it a woolly hat pulled down over the eyes, or a swarm of bees?

And that's when the roof of the sports hall starts to roar out in pain, a creaking and cracking followed by the appearance of starlight in a rapidly growing fissure between the ceiling and the tops of the walls. It takes a few seconds for the screaming and the panic to start, and then we see it, a goddam hydra, a multi headed snake somehow ripping off the roof of the sports hall, wrapping its necks around girders and struts then just tearing away with its vast power.

It's hisses from a hundred heads at once, the sound enough to drive you mad, drive all thoughts out of your head, for a moment I catch a glimpse of the exam paper on my desk and the question has changed to 'How did Marketta La Fey infiltrate the Gap? Discuss methods and possibilities.'

And then the whole wall comes smashing down and the creature is in the room with us, and the clamour for help, and the snake heads striking, grabbing at random girls, throwing them at the walls where their bodies crumple and slide, somehow, we cannot jack out, we're trying to jack out but we're stuck in the Gap, and God knows what happens if you suffer enough pain in the Gap, what it does to your brain back in meatSpace.

So, I throw over my desk and try to place it as a shield between me and the creature. And I can hear the voices within me, see the glowing network of gold under my skin. And I sense the shivers coming to my call. And I call a violent thing to my aid, a spirit that grew up in defence computers, something trained on the data of war, a piece of an old adversarial network, trained to out-strategize a superior enemy.

And I let it take over my mind.

And then I somehow know that I can fight back along the vectors of code that are perverting the good operation of the Gap, I can manipulate the rules of the world, just like Marketta is doing with her virtual hydra, so I throw a little white fire at her Hydra, because I remember the story, and I am not going to cut off a head without cauterising it.

Hydra screams, and I can hear many voices under its screams, in so many different languages at once it's a cacophony. I know I'll hear that scream forever. If I survive this moment.

It strikes at me but I'm not there, I've reappeared out of reach and my arms have turned into scythes, and each scythe is white hot and when the next snake head comes for me, I lop it off and cauterise the neck in the same motion, the smell of cooking snake assails me so violently I can taste it.

And the snake heads coil around my legs, my arms, my neck, and one of the voices seems to be saying 'I'm sorry' over and over again, 'I can't stop it, we can't stop this, we're sorry'. And I try to turn myself into a ball of spikes like a rolled-up hedgehog made of spines of molten metal, but I'm glitching again, and I'm drained and for a second, it's quiet, like a wave going out about to crash back in, a tsunami of giant snake heads cresting above me, when I hear Sadie's voice.

I don't understand the words that Sadie is saying but the snake dissolves, slowly, writhing in agony as its data corrupts into meaningless noise, tiny Sadie, walking into the centre of the Hydra Void, chanting, unravelling the creature to leave only a hole. And then others arrive, sewing up the hole in the Gap, and I finally drop out of the gap to join my sisters in meatSpace.

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