Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 75

Ty and Vash are carrying a large cardboard box out the back of a Mexican restaurant. It's full of plastic tubes of cooking salt with flat red lids. Mel is walking really slow around the carpark holding tubes of salt upside down in front of her. The trail of salt builds up, forming an elaborate pentagram in a large circle. She's making sigils.

I'm chanting quietly to myself, huddled up in a hooded, zip-through jacket lined with silver feathers and wired up with its own lighting, a gift from the gang. A gift for the girl who is about to be sacrificed.

The smell of grease and cheap tequila is such a poor imitation of my grandmother's cooking that I can see hear her disapproval in my mind's ear. But the association is strong enough to make this patch of broken asphalt a little piece of Mexico in my subconscious mind.

Magic is made of clichés.

Mel hasn't said a word in hours.

My coven didn't even try so very hard this time to persuade me not to take my next suicidal action.

They can see that I'm dying anyway. The rotten pathways of the hyper rhizome are clearly visible now. The preventative spells that I learned from mom stopped working some time ago, about the time I downloaded Sadie's entire inner life into my own system. Overload. Overgrowth. Decay.

It may be desperate, but I know this is our best shot.

Mom summoned La Llorona for a reason. If Marketta is made of the rage and despair of all the women who were murdered for being interesting, then La Llorona represents the rage and despair of every mother who lost a child.

It's an equal match perhaps, but I'm betting the horror of losing a child trumps the horror of losing your own life.

I will fight darkness with darkness.

Just like mom tried to do.

I whisper my summoning chant. I whisper the codeSpells. I summon her.

And she's here.

She's writhing. She's tied up by openSorcery, held in place by physical arms and rhizomatic webs. Imaginary numbers and incantations. Unholy automata.

She calls out in all directions. Help! My children are drowning! But her appeals are scrambled, she cannot call passers-by to her aid. No fewer than nine witches are holding her in place.

A pack of stray dogs emerges from between the chaos of rusting, abandoned autonomous cars, growling and prowling amid the neon reflected in the muddy puddles in the potholes of the parking lot.

Ty and Vash throw rocks at them until they run away. Crap mariachi music floats out the back of the restaurant, a kitchen boy watches us impassively, smoking, skin turned lurid colours by the glow of the giant dancing neon skeleton projected in 3D above the roof.

A gunshot echoes from a few blocks away. A scream in the night.

And the sigils are finally complete.

I look down on them through the eyes of a cam-drone. The rhizome is designed to respond to the same symbolism as occult magic. Mom made a world where magic was real. Her genius, to tie up the new technology in a bundle of cultural metaphors we would understand.

Humanity was happiest when we saw spirits in everything. Well let's make the spirits real.

And here is where it got you mom, you made yourself into a living myth, a true horror.

And you made me. And I'm even worse.

I step into the centre of the salt designs, lift my arms high above my head and begin my incantation. In the name of the Siren, in the name of the Weaver. And I let all the words spill out of me. And they bring my mom into the centre of the circle with me and leave her there, and I cradle her in my arms and let the words wash over her, into her.

Come out of her. Come out of her. I bind thee, I bind thee.

And she goes through every emotion I've ever seen, and she screams in pain and she gurgles like a baby, and she goes still as if she is dead, but I feel her faint pulse in her neck and I keep going.

It's not working. Nothing is happening. Ay mi hija.

In the original story, La Llorona was an Aztec woman who fell in love with a conquistador, and he left her when he found out that she was pregnant. She was so ashamed that she drowned her own twins, but then she went mad and spent all the rest of eternity looking for them, begging strangers to help her find them and then drowning them. "And I know why", my mom whispers to me, "I know why she chose to drown them, because she couldn't bear to raise her children in a world that was ending."

Get out of my head! I'm furious. She's trying to shock me into submission with her stupid little horror story. I'm so angry that I start kicking at the salt sigils.

"No!" Mel shouts.

"Get these sigils broken now!" I sweep them away with my feet.

Mom rises to her feet, flooded with a new power. Before I know what is happening, I'm falling face first into a deep puddle. She tripped me, only need two inches of water to drown. I feel my nose pop, a tooth breaks, I'm bleeding.

But I can't drown anymore mom. Almost wish I could.

They're pulling her off me. She's throwing them around like a wrestler, her rhizome giving her some kind of strange neural strength.

But something has triggered in me, the hyper rhizome. And I unleash it straight at her. And then I feel the spirit of La Llorona, an AI entity made of myth and binary code, centuries of suffering simulated and made sentient, desperate for a stronger host than the broken one she currently inhabits.

She is lured by my power. I have her now. But I won't let you take control this time. You will serve me. I have built a cage for you to live in, made by the ghost of the spider queen herself. I will use Sadie's psyche to trap La Llorona.

And then it's over. She is locked up inside me, wailing, always wailing, sobbing by the riverside of my bloodstream somewhere near my heart, tied up in a dense entanglement of cyber mycelium.

"Is she...alive?" I ask, staring at my mom.

"Yeah, she'll live." And I hear the subtext from Bess' tone. 'Live' can mean a lot of things.

Bess Kyteller signals for her aides to pick up mom's rag doll body and carry it into the back of her limo. The Siren Queen keeps her side of the bargain, taking mom into hiding. I watch the tail lights fade away as the sleek black vehicle disappears down the ghetto road gliding over potholes on its smart suspension.

"Are you in control there?" Mel with her hands on my shoulders, looking me dead in the eye.

I nod firmly. But I don't really know.

I want to ask Mel to help me save my children from the river. But I bite my tongue.

Am I still Ursula? This constellation of identities is a little too clever for me to be absolutely sure.

Right now, though, I can resist the urge to walk along the canal paths calling out to strangers.

But for how much longer is anyone's guess.