The Outage

Chapter Four

That night I could manage nothing other than holding the headset a little ways above my eyes and examining the cracks. You may assume I was depressingly wondering if I could somehow repair them into working condition again. But honestly, my eyes were unfocused and staring off past the broken headphones thinking of something else entirely.

A few hours before, I had sat down at a grimy grey cafeteria table and eaten a bowl of brown mush I'm not quite sure the identity of with the three boys I had seen earlier. I picked up the slang of the school fairly quickly and my new companions' names as well. The Indian boy was named Dylan, the African American with the white eyes was Ethan and the mute one who refused to look at me for the entire meal was Nico. Miss Howard had never shown up, it was a young girl who had come to get me from my room and taken me to the mess hall-more of a mess room if you ask me- to eat.

Her hair was long and a deep auburn, she was small and had sloped shoulders. She was very stern when she spoke to me, almost like she imagined herself my superior, although she looked maybe two years younger than me. She had barged right into my room without even knocking. The boys called her Kat. Ethan explained to me in a heavy foreign accent that she had always been there, and that she was Miss Howard's daughter. They described her in many ways. Ethan called her responsible and kind-hearted, Dylan spun a tale that she was self-conceited and cruel, and Ethan translated Nico's signs into a profile of bravery and confidence.

But I couldn't imagine Kat being Miss Howard's daughter.

So here I was spinning the headset through my fingers and thinking. I had some of my questions answered at least. It took long measures of pestering and repeating inquiries over and over again. But I had prevailed enough to be satisfied.

This was a boarding school for children like me, with high expectations for learning, but the boys that showed up here had all either caught the sickness or their parents had mysteriously died weeks after their arrival, leaving the once thriving school a place of dust and shadows. Miss Howard had been the first headmaster's favorite student and when he had disappeared one night she had taken the post. As the house fell into poverty, the furniture and school supplies had been sold and the boys had been sold off to mechanics and engineers as apprentices and servants for wealthy families. Personally, I thought this was a rumor, Miss Howard wasn't that cruel.

The Lost Boys, as I liked to call them, were the most recent recruits of the school and their parents had all died only a fortnight after their departure from home. Of course this worried me horribly about my own parents but I pushed it away as paranoia; it was almost certainly a coincidence or the area they lived in holding a hazardous amount of the sickness.

I had my eyes closed while pondering this last part and they flew open when there was a loud yell from down the hallway. I pinpointed it well, Kat had shown me the way to the mess room and it had come from that direction. I slipped out of bed, chest tight with suspicions, and slunk down the hallway in the dark letting my hand slide down the walls to feel my way.

As I turned a corner a faint glow of cold light grew against the walls until the blinking fluorescent lights of the room I was entering almost blinded me. The Lost Boys were huddled together at a table horrified expressions glued to their differentiating features, their eyes glued to the wallscreen across from the eating area. Miss Howard wrapped in a ragged robe was snapping at them quietly, shifting her weight from foot to foot anxiously. And there was Kat, sitting alone a few tables down, hands forming a pyramid around her lips and ending, pointed between her eyes, which were locked onto the news broadcast flickering on the wall. Her green orbs slid to him, then back to the hologram seriously. Wearing only sleeping clothes I sat down with the Lost Boys and watched the screen filled with eerie curiosity.

The image on the screen was an asteroid breaking the atmosphere and tumbling towards the VALO space station. Nico squirmed next to me in concern and signed to Ethan.
"He say he doesn't want die."
Dylan elbowed Ethan in the ribs.
"Shut up! I cannot hear with your jabbering!"
A clamor of shouting and screaming and gesturing broke out in the stress.
Nico made a sign of jabbing his fist at the screen and images of people standing and watching the asteroid slowly advance on the gigantic satellite all over the world blinked past. Times Square. Tokyo. Washington D.C. Mobs of people frozen and staring in wonder as the biggest piece of space rock anyone has ever discovered floated towards our cyborg station like a demented ballerina.

The Lost Boys fell silent and Kat stood up all signs of pensive expressions vanished and eyes glowing green with panic.

Closer.

Miss Howard screeched quietly into her hand the other at her chest, fluttering.

Closer.

Nico opened his mouth in a silent scream as the asteroid moved right alongside it.

I remember standing up and my mouth dry and a dreaded feeling of scruples swept over me.

The asteroid struck and everything went black.