Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 49

Hands all over my arms, my shoulders - dragging me out of the water. Mom is gone. I feel like my nervous system is inside out. Everything hurts. I'm coughing, I'm vomiting, no not vomit, its water, I'm retching water out of my lungs. My brain starts to make sense of the babble around me.

"Got to get her warm boys, she's gonna freeze."

"Give her a queenie seat."

I'm lifted off the ground by a throne of arms. And I drift in and out of consciousness while the Canalside world drifts by. I'm dragged and carried and cajoled along. Then I feel the black clouds push into my vision, so this is what fainting feels like...

Awake again for a moment, we're under a bridge and I'm warm, so grateful for the warmth, under a pile of bodies, the sniffles and coughs and farts of a pile of boys warming me to my core, bringing me back to life. I let sleep take me.

Just at the border between awake and asleep I could swear that the Rhizome is still growing out of me in all directions, gently shimmering golden microscopic tendrils, taking root in the human soil around me, and I'm having memories that don't belong to me, or is this just a hallucination?

Now I'm at the Secret School. Alone.

And it's the damnedest thing because I'm sure Mel said you could not enter the Gap without a coven. Yet here I am. Doesn't feel like a dream. Too precise.

And the school seems to be closed. And I guess that makes sense. It can't always be open. The avatars here represent real people, they can't always be at work.

I'm on the bridge over the Black Lake when I see mom. And now it's my mom. Not some reincarnation of a Mexican folk horror, my actual mom. But of course, she is a ghost. Like she's made of glitching image-files strung together as a low-frame animation.

And she beckons me to her.

I run to her, and she looks me dead in the eye as she jumps off the bridge.

I hear nothing.

I'm at the edge of the bridge, staring down into the awful blackness of the lake.

And something inside me tugs at me to just follow her in. But it's so awful. The void staring into me. The ancient sense that something inhuman down there is waiting to swallow me up, snatch me out of ever having existed. Put out all the lights. World before us. World after us. Humanity a blink, a minute aberration in unending absence.

Mom went there. And if she had that courage, then it is in me too.

So, I stand on the edge of the bridge, trying to ignore the panic, the screaming voices in my head telling me not to do it. And then I'm falling. It is done.

I turn face down and swim, this time I let myself drown, and when I do - I know I can't die that way, never again. My Rhizome has mutated, both in meatSpace and the Gap. I've changed in a way that no other cyberWitch has, at least as far as anyone can tell me.

So far down, the glimmer, so faint, it takes hours before it starts to grow. Or whatever. Time is funny here. Then the phosphorescence on the carapace of a lobster the size of a Manhattan city block. And I'm swimming along above its head, towards the gate.

If you could imagine the cave in which the monster lives in every fairy tale ever told, made ornate by the craftspeople of pharaohs, you'd be close. I see the ghost of mom walking in through the gate ahead of me, glancing over her shoulder, snaring my heart.

And I follow.

And I realise that this is a submerged school building. A sunken wing of the Secret School, with its own coat of arms. And everywhere is the symbol of the woman with the disfigured face.

When I go through the gate everything changes.

I'm in a clearing in the woods.

I can hear the thunderous river of a freeway just beyond the tree line. It's not your pretty storybook forest. This is a scrap of trees planted to soak up the noise of the major road. And it's pretty gross. Trash everywhere. A place where people come to commit sins. Smashed beer bottles. Debris from fires encrusted with blackened melted plastics. Discarded condoms.

In the middle of the clearing, a square of concrete with a neat hole in the middle. Some part of the local infrastructure. Its cover tossed aside. A deep hole. And next to it, sitting in a cheap folding chair is the woman with the disfigured face.

She's wearing a black tracksuit with gold stripes, and over her head right down over the eyes some kind of chunky knitted hat, or is it a swarm of bees?

Standing next to her is my mom, except now she's not my mom, she's like some kind of secretary, with a clipboard. And I know this. It's so familiar. I've known these women since before I was born. She comes before all. La Antesquetodo. The Crone.

And in spite of myself, I feel this deep reverence. Like I'm so blessed just to be in her presence.

And I know that the Crone cannot speak to me in human ways, so she has the Weaver with her for that. And the Weaver offers me a contract to sign. And I sign it really without even thinking, wondering if I'm even still in control of myself right now.

Then the Crone gets out of her chair and climbs down the hole, and in a moment, she climbs back out holding a golden drone. It's Tinker Bell. The first drone I ever got, and I made it into a fairy. And I wrote a control program for her, and I loved her so much, and then I lost her. I lost her right about the same time I lost mom.

Then something else climbs out of the hole. And it's terrifying.

A giant spider with a woman's body. It's my body.

And she whispers into my ear in an ancient language I somehow understand...

'Be there for me.'

And I feel the pressure of her fangs on my neck, then the spreading paralysis, and she is moving so fast, a blur of limbs and thorax, and I feel the silk wrapping me up, holding me tighter and tighter till I feel like my chest will cave in and my ribs will snap.

And it's over, Mel's face over me, flooded with unconcealed relief.

Murky daylight behind her.

I look around and the boys are gone.

Mel picks me up, slings me over her shoulder and carries me away.

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