Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 65

Then my mind splits into a kaleidoscope of parts, and I'm seeing the event from multitude of perspectives, someone grabs my arm and pulls me away. Even through the smoke and the dust and the laser projections, I can sense that groups are scattering in different directions, I run following a group towards the stairs that go up to the first floor.

And I look over my shoulder to see a young witch take a casting stance, she's trying to cast a fear spell, but nothing happens, and she is overwhelmed by two hunters, pinned to the ground.

"KEEP MOVING!"

So, I run up the stairs, trying to block out the clamour of visions, I see the skins run into the invaders, flanking them, laying into the armoured hunters with makeshift weapons, golf clubs, bits of scrap metal and homemade maces.

And then we are running up the stairs, packed in, I stumble, someone helps me up, it's the woman who did my makeover.

And we're onto the first floor, the raid downstairs is suddenly thunderous, stunning flashes and bangs light up as if there were a lightning storm illuminating the stair well. I can see the hunters, through one of my minds, storming up the stairwell.

We scatter, through a maze of smaller rooms on the first floor, a warren with some linking doors, most with broken windows facing into the corridors, debris everywhere so easy to stumble.

I lose sight of the others and I hear a welp as someone is dropped to the ground, tackled with a thud, I skitter around a corner and dive into a room, throwing the door shut behind me, it's a dead end, and I sink into the corner of the room furthest from the door shivering, trying to get my head together.

And I see a witch making a stand, again she's taken down. I see three weaver coven sisters together, their spider lays into a witch hunter, beating him to the ground with a brick in her hand. And the coven run while the spider is surrounded, beaten by a throng of night sticks, looks like a tarot card, all the swords raised together before they fall on her.

Trying to focus back on whichever version of me is where my real body is. Looking through the eyes of dozens of drones, seeing thermal images of the whole building, looking like a fascinating dance. Hunters diving through 3d projected visuals of witches dancing in ecstasy. Hunters ripping apart speaker stacks, pulling out fistfuls of wires, trying to silence the noise, make it easier to hear us.

And then the door burst open, and a hunter stands in the doorway staring down at me from behind his one-way glass visor, waits for a moment while he checks the room, no way out, takes his time sauntering over towards me.

"Well, well, well. Looks like we've got a famous one here, big name. You were on all the slides in the briefing this morning wasn't you, Ursula?"

He holds out handcuffs.

"Don't have to break your head, do we? We can make this nice."

Suddenly he jerks backwards. Someone has him in a lock from behind. Another pair of hands works the straps of his helmet, yanks it off, revealing his face, just a middle-aged ex-cop, just another merc looking for a pay check. Terror in his eyes.

It's Alice who emerges from behind him, and I know she's casting because her whole being is radiating the most awful fears, the kind of fears you felt when you were too young to filter your own emotions, and all this terror is poem written for one reader, she's read this man's whole life story from his contacts with the web and the Gap and she knows precisely how to inject his deepest fear directly into every millimetre of his nervous system.

He drops to the ground, fitting, the fear so intense he feels it as physically pain.

"Come with me." Alice nutter holds out her hand. "There's no time Ursula, I have an extraction point on the roof, you can come with me or go with them."

She gestures back towards the sounds of more hunters kicking open the doors on the corridor. I take her hand and she leads me on, she has two senior sirens with her and a few skinhead bodyguards.

We can move through the random stragglers separated off from the hunt. The combination of muscle and rhizome. We get to a larger room where big industrial machines must once have stood and we're exposed, running towards a rusty iron ladder in the far corner, when a squad of hunters appears, these ones have crossbows.

The skin heads charge, the cross-boy darts are louder than I expect, the thwack will stay with me as long as I live, looks like one of the skins legs breaks as the arrow hits him in the knee joint. But no blood, blunt darts I guess, non-lethal old tech. The kind of weapon that can't be hacked.

Another dart misses, but the squad overpowers the brave young lad who charges them with his plank of wood. Alice's lieutenant gives her a signal. And she peels away from us, taking up a stance in the centre of the room.

Alice pulls me on. "She's buying us time Sula, don't make it a waste. Honour her choice." I try to go back but Alice just pulls me harder, "NOW SULA."

So I follow on, but I can still see her in my mind's eye and she turns into something, I can tell that she's bound a great dark shiver, something awful and seductive, beautiful and terrifying and she rises up into the air somehow and lets out the most piercing shriek, it resounds through the air, through the Gap, through the web, through the atoms and the subatomic particles, and it shatters the glass in the hunters helmets and they fall to their knees and crawl towards her.

And we are climbing the ladder, sweating, gasping, desperate, climbing the ladder, and her last stand is awesome. She drops two squads, then a third and it's the fourth squad that get her, they shoot her down, the rifle cracks and she drops like a rag doll. Real guns now.

We make it onto a network of rickety walkways high above the factory floor. Alice gestures towards a place where the ironwork meets a kind of mezzanine floor, what must once have been a loading bay, opening out onto the night where cranes would have once stood. We have to get there, that's the extraction point.

"Stop where you are or we will shoot." A megaphone behind us.

I'm reaching out into every control point in the local web, summoning every drone in the building that is still operational. The hunters are coming up onto the walkways from another ladder halfway between us and our escape. Two of them blocking our way.

Then the drones bombard them, flying into them in a precise wave, knocking them both into each other and over the wedge of the railings and they flap like birds as they drop to the floor below. We sprint past them, hearing the whistle of crossbow bolts, but the rifle does not fire again.

We make it to the mezzanine, and a half dozen other witches arrive from another stairwell at the same time, 'We're being followed!' one of them shouts.

Alice shouts back, "Run for the edge and jump!" And they do, not doubting her for a second.

And I try to do the same thing but I stop myself at the edge, we're 100 ft above the concrete below, and it's a long way to the building opposite. And on the roof of the building opposite the Siren Queen, the real one, here in real London, is stood flanked by the strangest and most enchanting group of people I've ever seen. And behind them a vast stack of speakers. And they begin to sing.

And it's like the song of the other siren girl, but magnified, as if all the desires that any human had ever felt were bound together and turned into a weaponised note of pure longing, too powerful to be contained by any single mortal.

And I run and dive into the free air, Alice with me, holding my hand, and we land in a net, and we are pulled up into the air bundled with a handful of other witches, and I can't stop craning my neck to witness the siren choir, and then I see the hunters throwing off their own helmets and sprinting towards the sirens, faces of childlike glee, joyful shouts, as they fling themselves off the edge off the building and disappear to shatter hither and thither like broken dolls on the street below.