Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 59

"You got what you wanted." I half whisper.

"I didn't come here to gloat."

Alice reaches out her hand.

I wish I was strong enough not to go with her.

We walk through the streets of London together for hours, hardly talking at all. I can't remember exactly when we started holding hands. I can't remember when I stopped crying.

Alice has the codes to walk us through a checkpoint into the City of London. She's dressed me up like a Corp Intern, and she's every inch the exec. Wrapped up in a little Siren magic, we pass as regular white-collar folks. She tells me she wants to show me something.

I try to say something, but all that comes out is a deep sigh. The sky is clear for once, and up above the layer of drone traffic, through the gap in the skyscrapers I can even see a couple of stars. Or I guess they could be satellites. A corporate couple pass us by, jumping into a taxi cab and heading from some late-night crisis meeting to the next cocktail bar. This bit of London reminds me of home.

Alice takes me down an alley around the back of a big ass tower of glass and steel. Past dozens of giant trash cans. No street people here. Corpo mercs would beat them senseless, drop them outside of the zone's armoured walls.

Now we're walking up the fire escape stairwell of this corporate colossus, deep in the City, the old financial district. Most of the buildings around here are still in use, but this one is empty. Miles of office space, floor after floor. We go up flight after flight. The clanking of our steps on the metal become hypnotic.

We're still holding hands. I wonder if she might be taking me to die. I wonder if I care. Maybe I'm already dead. Maybe I died when mom left.

I didn't notice the cloud rolling in off the river, but sometime on the journey upwards it must have started raining, because I feel the warm water on my face as we step out of the doors onto the roof and into the forest. I stop dead in my tracks, drinking in the scene, overwhelmed.

"Ursula, be careful. You're almost smiling."

Words can't describe. Up here on this tower block, they built a rainforest, this place is so lush, so green and throbbing with life. I can hear insects, sounds like a million of them and the greenery banks up and away above us into an impossible canopy. And I hear birds, lots of birds.

Somehow this megacorp built a biome up here and we're walking on mosses and grasses and there is running water in little streams and all goes over the edge of the building, and looking out across the gulf of the street to the Corpo towers opposite, where you see they are the same way, the whole facade of the building all the way down to street level is a hanging garden, abundant with life.

The street itself has a microclimate, creatures fly from roof top to roof top, and the street down below, has had the road converted to a manmade river, and the pedestrian walkways are a kind of landscaped paradise. There are little boats on the river.

And from this distance you can't see the security measures that keep this little slice of paradise from being ripped apart by scavenger gangs. And I notice that opposite us, there is some kind of elegant party going on, it's a rare sighting of London's remaining elites, the corporate upper echelons and the politicos of the Republic, generals of the Republican Army, people serving cocktails like it's 1999.

The apocalypse is not evenly distributed.

And I look around at Alice, stunned and she's just smiling, not even working any of that over-the-top Siren charm, just being Alice, the one I caught glimpses of now and then. And she invites me to come up into the bushes with her and find a spot amid the Azealia bushes, cushioned on lush springy mosses and we just kick back together, like an old couple on a day off, looking around, and she picks a few flowers and starts to chain them together.