For the second time in thirty years, the entire world has fallen asleep...
Thirty years after the Greymen caused the decimation of her people, high school drop out Rain Collins spends her days learning to pickpocket and hold her booze. Yet she long...
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Armed with the names that Dr. Farrah and Kayle had provided me, I took to the city streets in search of allies. The first name was Diana Farber, who I had known as Miss Diana or, on formal occasions, headmistress, for the three years of high school that I did attend.
Though I had never really liked Miss Diana, as she was an irritating woman and dull teacher, I understood Kayle's assessment: the woman was obsessed with questions and exploration, always reminding her students to challenge what they are told until they have enough proof to accept the facts. If any of the elder members of the town would even consider joining our cause, Miss Diana would likely be among them.
Dedicated as she was to the school, Miss Diana had set up residence inside. Unless some unexpected and unlikely emergency pulled her suddenly away, the headmistress could always be found roaming the halls or teaching a class. It felt like years since I had last stepped foot in the building after dropping out, but I expected that at least that hadn't changed.
The school was the same as it had always been, though the paint was perhaps a bit more chipped than I remembered. Unlike virtually every other building in the city, the school actually served the purpose it had been built for; one of the local high schools had been in fine repair after the First Big Sleep (once all the corpses were removed and the bodily waste scrubbed from the walls), so the founders had simply opened its doors and put it back into commission.
As I had expected, I found the headmistress standing at the head of a classroom, lecturing the students while the class's actual teacher sat patiently behind his desk. As I approached the door, her head whipped toward me and her eyes widened with surprise.
"Miss Rain," she said, pulling me into the room and pushing me into an empty seat. "So glad you've finally returned. Join us, join us."
When she thrust a sheaf of paper and a pencil into my hands, I finally got the chance to speak. "I'm not here for class, Miss Diana," I said.
The headmistress ignored my protestation and returned to her spot at the front of the room and her place in her lecture. She rambled on about a man named John who lived over a thousand years ago and wrote lots of boring books and did lots of boring things. After a few minutes of this, the familiar fatigue of the classroom began to take hold of me. Instead of hunkering down for a day devoid of experience or interest, I stood, eliciting gasps from a few of the students with the thickest notebooks.
"Miss Diana," I said. "Sorry to interrupt, but I'm not here for a lecture. I actually only came to speak with you."
"Well, I am teaching a class right now, Miss Rain, as you can well see." Miss Diana gestured to the students in front of her, ignoring the teacher behind.
"I know, but it's important. Please. I want--I need to talk to you about the Masters."
Miss Diana's thin lips curled downward in a brief frown before suddenly springing up. "Well, that is an opportunity. The topic isn't in the curriculum, but we always try to keep our minds fresh with current events," she said, turning to the class. "Shall we have a discussion, class?"
The cherubic students grinned, plumping up their apple cheeks, and in unison said, "Yes, Miss Diana."
I frowned, trying not to think about every embarrassing misstep that I'd ever made in nearly every group discussion that I'd ever been forced into throughout my years of schooling--not to mention camps and community programs and sports and all the other extracurricular activities. Memories of my fourth grade class spelling bee buzzed in my head, but I pushed the thought away. "I was hoping we could speak alone."
Miss Diana shook her head, gesturing at the room. "When we have all these bright minds eager to learn? All these whom would happily help you on your brave endeavor to learn? No, Miss Rain. This topic calls for a group discussion. Now. What do you have to say?"
"I--" I was taken aback. Miss Diana's curt and direct style of discussion had never sat well with me when I was a student, and apparently absence had leant me neither feelings of security nor authority: she still made my hands clammy and my thoughts cloudy. Somehow, with a simple question or a plain look, she sent my adrenaline pumping. "We're trying to get the community ready for the Masters and we need your help. Um. Your influence, you know, as a leader?"
Several of the roundest cheeked students in class gasped. "You mean to fight them?" asked a brighteyed boy.
"No, not really." Somehow I gained a bit of my composure as the fearful students stared back at me. "Not fight, but resist. The Masters are powerful, we know. We may not be able to face such a strong enemy in open battle, but we may be able to survive their invasion. That's what Dr. Farrah says. She believes that if we can survive their first attacks and gather enough intel, we might have a chance to go undetected."
"How?" Miss Diana asked.
"Um. Well," I said. "That's why I'm here. We've talked about hiding, but we need people like you to help figure that out: how. There are over three thousand people in the community, at our best guess, so it will take some doing to hide us all."
"What about the mountains?" one student piped up.
"Or some caves? Like, a big old bomb shelter, maybe?" chimed in another.
As the students spoke up, I flipped through the notepad with my very short list of names and landed on a fresh page. There, I noted a brief description of these students; they may be good allies in the future.
"But how would we even get there? They probably have crazy tracking powers."
"We could just round up all the Dreamcallers and kill them and their Greymen," said a blond girl in the back. "Problem solved, right?"
On my notepad, I wrote: Blonde, pointy nose AVOID.
"Enough," Miss Diana said, cutting a student off in the middle of a particularly poor suggestion. "Miss Rain, I don't know how I could think for a moment that any topic you would bring into the classroom would be anything but entirely too disruptive to warrant a civil conversation." She ushered me out the door as she spoke. "I can only apologize to my students for having allowed you into their classroom. You will not waste anymore of our time. If Dr. Farrah wishes to speak with me, she may talk to Miss Penelope at the front office to arrange a meeting. Goodbye."
With that, Miss Diana the headmistress closed the door.
"That went better than I expected," I muttered to myself as I began to walk the unfamiliar route from the school to the Dr. Farrah's office. Tomorrow, I would try the next name, but tonight, I would sleep.
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