Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 70

"I want to take a walk."

Mel, Ty and Vash exchange glances. I think I only just noticed how busted they look. Browning bruises and dark scabs. Bloodshot eyes. It's been a week. Still not healed.

How much of that damage was me going psycho on them?

Still, it feels so good to be with them again. My real coven.

"Yeah, we can do that." Mel takes me by the arm. I'm still shaky on my feet. My mind is stuck in some kind of low level perma-glitch.

I'm not OK but it's OK.

"How long has it been since they got Sadie?"

"Ten days."

I'm surprised to find I can talk about it. Then again, it's like I've totally divorced myself from the memory. Sadie just wanders around inside my internal landscape like a lost tourist. I ignore her. It works. For now.

"How have you guys been surviving?"

"Look around you."

And I do, we're walking through a warren of rooms in a Victorian sanatorium. Mel tells me this is one of London's famous abandoned mental institutions. The toot doc has set up shop inside what was once a surgery for ripping the wombs out of women with 'hysteria.' Hysterical. We call 'em toot docs 'cause they get all their skills from watching online tutorials.

I'm sure I've seen this place before. Every horror game I ever played had a level set in a building like this. Maybe this actual building, sucked up into digital space by a swarm of 3D camera drones.

And there are people everywhere, mostly males. I can tell this is gang stuff. They have a symbol that they're all wearing. Upside down pentagram. Neon pink on dirty white. Pigeon feather charms hanging from their belt loops. Shaved heads. Lots of highly visible implants. Cyberpagans.

Most of them are sitting around killing time. Some are picking through piles of stolen junk tech looking for pieces to clean up and sell. Some are cutting up powders and pouring them into multicoloured capsules. Every room has a different purpose. Some of them salute us as we pass through. Most of them ignore us.

"So, you joined a gang?"

"That's about the size of it. We do runs for the Dead Foxes, they pay us. We pay the toot doc and he keeps you alive."

"I'm sorry Mel. For everything."

"Shut up kid. You were too young for all this. It was too much, too fast."

"Let me own it, Mel. You guys suffered because of me. I can't get better if you don't let me own that."

We sit down together on the front steps of the asylum. Some street people are standing around a fire warming their hands and drinking some kind of evil smelling homebrew liquor. The Dead Foxes sell moonshine. The building is full of homeless people up front, a useful cover for the gang hiding deeper inside.

"What happened in there, when you spoke to Sadie?"

"It was like we joined together, like our minds were two networks that linked up at many different points, we kind of experienced each other."

"Did you feel her die?"

I say nothing. Nothing I can say.

"For a moment there, I knew everything she ever knew. She was so intelligent. Her inner world was so big. I was awestruck."

"Anything in there we could use?"

"Use?"

"Ursula, I know you basically just came back from the dead, but there's a war on out there." Mel gestures to the wider city.

"There's a new craze, they call it a Witch Night. They make a bonfire and get drunk and they find witches and hurt them. Some say they're even burning them."

"I'm so broken, Mel, what can I do about that?"

"Ah, you're right. I'm just going crazy. I feel so powerless. All these girls out there, just anyone with an implant, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Witch Hunt is just getting worse and worse."

"Wait, there is something."

Vash and Ty appear and sit down beside us. I'm remembering one of Sadie's memories.

"They built a failsafe, when they created Marketta, when they installed her with the souls of all the women ever murdered for witchcraft. They built a back door."

"How do we find it?"

"It's in the lab, in the Gap, inside the secret room in the library at the Secret School."

Mel sucks her teeth. Go back in there? We're banned from entering the Gap now. The whole system will be armed against us. Could fry us in our own juices if we go in.

"Maybe there is a way to disguise our signatures."

"Yeah, the glitch could work to my advantage, I'm not even sure I am me, so maybe the Gap won't recognise me either."

Vash grins. "She's been awake five minutes and already she's selling us some mission into the jaws of death scenario."

"You're too weak for a run."

"That door won't open to anyone but me, you know that."

A long silence as we look out across the dark grounds to the lights of the city beyond.

"There's nothing there for us anymore." Says Ty. And he means the city itself. He means the world.

"I won't ask any of you to come with me. You've all sacrificed enough. I don't want anyone else's blood on my hands.

I let my gaze drift out across the city lights to the point where London meets the starless sky and I breathe out long and slow.

"I'm never going home."

I let go of New York. Let it fall into the void like throwing a coin down a well.

"I'll be dead in weeks anyway. The Rhizome is killing me, and you know it is. I want to end Marketta. If don't I survive that, then please free my sisters if you can, find a life for them somewhere."

"Shut up dick head." Says Vash.

I guess that's that famous British sense of humour.

"Well, that settles it. One last run." Says Mel, as she wanders over to the guy selling BBQ squirrels and orders four.