Cyberwitch Academy: Learn or Burn

Chapter 85

I look at my hands. They're shaking violently. I realise I'm not breathing again.

Somewhere deep inside me a voice is screaming at me to get up, to run. And when my body finally starts to move, I feel like I'm moving through treacle.

I fumble the door lock. Never has it seemed so hard to open a latch. Each scrape of the blade feels like it's playing a tune and my spine is the violin. He's taking his sweet ass time with every gesture, like a cat playing with a dying bird. I know he's letting me get out of the bathroom. Giving me a head start. But I run anyway. In my broken, wounded way, What else does a hunted animal know how to do?

I hobble-run out into the cavernous soulSpace. The pain in my leg is breath taking.

Where the hell is everybody?

Then all the lights go out.

And the only light comes from the wall of plasma screens high above the space. It's Marketta's face, rendered as a technicolour glitch. She's here, she's taken over the building. I hear the sounds of heavy bolts firing. The school's emergency lock-down routine firing. Wherever I run to now, I'm trapped inside the building.

Something rips open the top of my left shoulder. Then the pain comes. It thuds into the wall up ahead. It's an arrow. I don't turn to look back at him, sprinting in spite of the agony, ducking, weaving between dining tables. Zig zagging. Can't think. Too much panic. Thick. An arrow vibrates in the tabletop above my head. The pain fades as the adrenaline floods my brain.

He's singing something.

Sounds like the nursery rhymes my mom used to sing.

I'm trying to buy time, need to hack the school, bust open the locks, but Marketta is there in the system. Thick. Another close one. Feel it graze my leg. My shoulder is hot and wet, going numb. I'm wheezing, lungs still ruined. And now the glitch is coming back, scrambling my thoughts.

Run for the stairs, up to the mezzanine, the middle way up through the offices.

I catch a glimpse of the angel archer. He's not running, sauntering towards me.

Marketta calls to me.

We could have been a new god together. We could have been the witch queen of England. We could have remade the world in the ashes of their ignorance.

But I am her and she is me.

The connection refires, the rhizomatic links surge with activity. By finding a new host, a body which is really a building, Marketta has reawakened our link. And I know that she is masking how much it hurts her, feeling the pain in my lungs. Hurting her enough to weaken her grasp on the door locks.

And my shivers are with me. She cannot keep them away. My legion of Gap cursed sprites.

So, I sing the words that bind the door shivers to open the way, and the electronic door bolts slide back for me and I dive into the office area of the upper mezzanine just as another arrow hits the back of the door.

But it's not over, Marketta fights back, seeing my thoughts and hearing my spells in her own mind, she can counter them so fast. I cannot relock the door behind me.

So, I dive into the school library, and using a shiver to maximise the signal from my brain to my nervous system to my muscles, I overclock my own strength, just enough to pull down a heavy book case in front of the door. It's buys me a minute.

Golden boy tries to shove the library door open. He almost makes it, then changes direction.

Marketta sees everything through the school CCTV, and I wonder if she passes it to him. I try to remember how Mel played her game. How many moves ahead she always was. How can I get a message to her? Where are my coven sisters? Will they get here too late, find me disembowelled?