Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 84

A man's voice, posh London accent.

"Can you hear me?"

He holds one of my eyes open and shines alight directly into my eye.

"She's badly hurt. Her lungs are inflamed, she's hardly breathing. I don't understand how her pulse is still so strong. I'll try to check her blood oxygen."

I can feel him distantly, wrapping his watch strap around my wrist. Then a voice from below.

"I know that girl! I know her face!"

And there is a rush of murmuring through the crowd. I'm still surrounded by an audience it seems, I feel another set of hands, cradling me. One stroking my hair, my head is on someone's lap. But we still appear to be up on the smouldering wood of the bonfire.

"We must move her away from the smoke." I think maybe he is a doctor.

"Get away from her! She's dangerous!" Comes the voice from below again.

The posh man tuts, "she can't very well be dangerous, she's an injured child."

And the voices from the crowd get louder.

"That's the witch that murdered my daughter, right here in this very school! She's dangerous! She can hack people's implants! Anyone with an implant run now, get out of here, she's lethal."

And then I manage to open my eyes and catch sight of him, the man who is rallying the crowd against me. And I can see traces of her face in his. Sienna. It's her dad, grief stricken and red faced in fear and rage.

I can feel his hate boring into me. I accept it too. Try to imagine what it's like to lose a child. He's right. I am lethal. Always have been to everyone around me. But I can't speak. And I know the only reason I'm alive is because the rhizome is farming oxygen from the air and channelling it into my veins.

But I can speak through the computer attached to the PA. I make all the phones ring; I make all the smart watches beep. I speak, at the same time through text messages and through a computer-generated voice on all the phone speakers and the blue tooth speakers in the crowd so that my voice appears to come from many directions at one. But what should I say to them?

And I say, "He's right. I am a witch."

And then there is a cacophony of angry shouting, one voice in particular raises above the others, the man with the dirty fingernails who led the protests at the school gates.

"She's confessed! We need to take her to the witch hunters! Stand aside we're taking her now! This is for the protection of our community. Get your children away from here."

Families begin to flee the scene. There is a commotion as three people try to clamber up the bonfire towards us. Then I hear Ms. Fortune's voice, and I want to cry tears of joy, I'm so glad she's alive.

And she shouts, "Get back! this is not your business, you're on school property and I'm telling you to leave. You're breaking the law if you stay here!"

"This school belongs to the community who use it!" The man screeches. "And that is not a child, that is a machine! A killing machine!"

And I speak again in my multi-toned digital voice.

"He's right."

I can't bring myself to claim innocence. I know in some abstract way that none of this was my fault, I'm only thirteen, I was given an impossible burden for a child to carry, but I don't care anymore. I want to open my arms up to everything I have done and own it all.

Am I endangering my sisters in the cyberWitch underground by telling the truth? Surely no more than I have already endangered them. so, I almost sing out the confession.

"It was my fault. I knew something was wrong with me. but I didn't tell anyone. I didn't know I had augmentations when I joined this school, but I should have guessed. It was so obvious in retrospect. And I should have given myself up when the accident happened. But I did not kill your daughter deliberately. I swear that on my mother's life."

Silence. I have their attention.

"My sisters in the witch clans have never meant you any harm. They did not cause the yellow sickness and they do not trade illegal implants or recruit vulnerable girls. Do what you want with me but please leave them alone."

"She's lying!" A man cries, but he finds himself hushed by a those around him.

"The hunters were led by the most dangerous witch of them all, and she turned the hunt into a death cult. She was mentally ill. But she's gone now. Please end the witch hunt, pressure the republic to dissolve the organisation, before they come for your daughters too. You won't solve London's problems by locking up women."

Silence. Nobody knows how to respond.

"I'm sorry. I have nothing more to say."

Nothing I realise except that there is an AI god called the Crone living inside a gigantic biological computer buried underneath your school. But let's not complicate the issue.

"You heard her confession!"

"Leave her alone you creepy twat. You don't even have custody of the daughter you claim you're here to protect."

"Yeah, shut it, Simon."

"She's only a kid, mate."

And the tide turns. I'm so relieved I would cry if I wasn't so dehydrated.

The angry mob melts away. And the remaining members of the, now much smaller, crowd lead me into the school, hobbling with my arms around the necks of Ms. Fortune and the Doctor. And the head takes me into her office and wraps me in blanket and picks up a phone.

I whisper to her to stop. Tell her that normal hospitals won't know what to do with me. She accepts this. Then she goes down to the front of the school to shoo away a gathering cloud of TV reporters.

I get up and shuffle slowly down to the girls' toilets, stopping every few feet to cough up a lung.

And I sit on the toilet with my head in my hands, breathing as deeply as I can. Just trying to feel for a moment like I did a few months ago. Just a stressed-out school kid in a new school.

Then I hear the sound of two knives being drawn against each other coming from the cubicle next to mine, and my spine turns to ice as goldenBoy whispers, grey goose and gander...