Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 80

I am a dark stain on the floor.

I hear voices.

I can tell by the taste of the air, we're in the Gap.

I have no desires. I have no ideas.

The broken voice of the glitch has fallen silent within me.

I am the end of the stelliferous age. I am the heat death of the universe.

But the voices persist. A happy little family. Two girls and a woman.

I can't make out what they are saying.

I lie to the universe, lie to myself. My name is Ursula. I am Applethorn. I want to know who is here in the Gap with me. Act as if you believe. The habits that made me, the pattern that I was is more persistent than the feelings that I thought drove me.

And my pattern was always this: Go home.

So, I rise up like a phantom emerging from a grave. I'm in a landscape I do not recognise, vast and featureless. Dark as always. Always night in the Gap. But the moon is gone. And the building in front of me, it's my apartment block in Manhattan.

And I am also on the floor of the engine room, in the prison ship. Trying very hard to sit up. Not moving at all. Shuddering.

And I am also Marketta, and I am lying on the floor holding hands with the Loveless twins, and we are a coven, we are using each other to build a gate into the Gap.

And I am also Marketta and I am playing with the twins in their old apartment in Manhattan. And they are so happy to be home. And I have erased all their troubling memories.

And I am phantom Ursula, floating outside the apartment window looking in.

And I am screaming.

My heart returns just in time to be filled with horror. Progress I suppose.

They have forgotten me. And Marketta is filling their heads with sad lies about what I was. And then she wraps them in her arms and they giggle and shriek. Their laughter sounds so good. I want to be there for them so much, I feel the longing in every quark of my ghostly form.

And back in the ship, I manage to move my arm a little, shift it under my chest to begin to try and push myself away from the floor, but the muscles have nothing in them.

In the Gap I bang on the window, and I scream and I scream and wail. And I concentrate everything I have left into moving that window. And finally, it shatters, and I am a dark wind howling through the apartment.

The twins stare at me in horror and they scream and scream. I catch sight of myself in a mirror behind them. I am La Llorona. Marketta stands between me and them, and shouts out the words of banishment. And I am swarmed by shivers, they pull at me and drag me away.

I cave in, my surrender is total. I am a ghost of a ghost. I sit on Marketta's shoulder like a tamed bird. Invisible, speechless. I am beyond dead. A subroutine of Marketta's program.

But I can still hear her talking to the twins. Watch as they consider her words with their big dark eyes. Trying to weigh up what is right.

"If you promise to be there for me. I will give you things."

"What do you mean?"

"If you love me, you'll just make me the promise, won't you?"

"I can't make a promise if I don't know what it means."

"Oh, but you can, those are the best kind."

"Adri, everybody else is gone now. She is very kind to us."

"Didn't we have another sister?"

"I don't know. I'm so tired."

"Do you remember the weeping women."

The twins' eyes go wide with fear.

"Who protects you from them?"

"You do."

"And I always will."

"Let's just say it then."

"OK both at the same time..."

And when they start to count down from three to one, time seems to slow down.

"Three."

I feel every pain, every discomfort my body has ever known. Every urge, every impulse, every desire. All at once. And I hear a cacophony of buzzing. Then the torrent of, the river of words, the voice of the glitch like a thundering waterfall of intertwining codes.

And she is there. The woman with the disfigured face. The one who comes before all. La ANTESQUETODO. And I see the women who came before us, marching through the ice ages, and suddenly I realise that I can access this power, at the very source. A door in my genetic inheritance has opened. I am riding a tidal wave of power. The ancient drive to life, life at all costs. The Crone.

"Two."

Inside the Gap the shivers throng to me like I have become their living god. The Gap becomes my plaything. I am not making decisions. Somewhere my DNA is making decisions. And they are played out here in the virtual world. I build a prison made out of shivers and bind the ten thousand souls of Marketta La Fey.

She is powerless, stunned as the Manhattan block disintegrates and she is lifted into the air. The moon returns massive and blood red. And she is held in front of it by my throngs of dark angels. The twins are by my side, and my shivers burrow into the webs of deceit that cocoon their minds, desperately unravelling the lies before it is too late.

"One"

My physical body floods with energy, I can feel my rhizome surging outwards, burrowing into the physical matter of the ship itself. Somehow the crone is using me to take control of the ship. I pull myself to my feet and open my eyes. My full awareness returns to me. And I'm singing out glitch speak, code spells, like a happy labourer singing a work song.

Inside the Gap I send fireworks up to fill the sky above the Secret School. The signal. Somewhere teams of Weavers and Sirens will ascend into the air-on-air bikes and swoop down to board the ship. Other witches will come from the water. The rescue operation has begun.

I use the new crone power to sever the connection between Marketta and the Twins, their coven disrupted, they are all thrown out of the Gap. The Twins wake up in meatSpace, violently coughing. Marketta leaps to her feet and lashes at me, trying to grab my hair, but I override her control of her own nervous system and make her throw herself across the room.

I hear the alarm sound. I hear the sounds of fighting echoing through the old ship from above. My witches have arrived. But Marketta takes my moment of distraction and sprints to the door, it is opened from outside. Hunters pour in while she runs away.

The night sticks rise and fall, and I find myself on the floor surrounded by big black boots.