Ask Why

Chapter I: Rorke

'What makes me want to help you? I'm one of the biggest assets to the school. You can't afford to lose me.' I said a bit too arrogantly, to hide my nervousness. The large man before me was not impressed. He sort of looked like a penguin, and it didn't help that he was always in a suit.

'Where is your decorum boy? Your school pride, wouldn't you want to help build up this fine establishment, rather than destroy it?' the Penguin barked at me.

'With all due respect Mr Edey, I do believe that Mrs Frayne and yourself are causing more damage to our reputation than when we lost K-Day in two-thousand-and-eleven. The only difference is that this time the outside world can't see it. You've hidden us behind these walls so you can do what you want. It's been almost a year and a half now, when are you going to let us out?'

'The walls are for the good of everyone inside of them. You're lucky to be in here, anarchy is rife beyond those barriers. The crash of the stock market destroyed our economy and took our cosy little world with it. The walls are the only things that are keeping you safe boy, and now you're questioning them.'

'We believed that at first, but it's been sixteen months, the world moves on. We recovered from the Great Depression, surely we'll recover from this. You can't lead me to believe that everything just ground to a halt.'

'You don't seem to grasp the seriousness of this situation. The world outside has completely collapsed. There is no longer a government, society has crumbled.'

'Listen sir, this is all great and fine, but even if I wanted to help you I couldn't.'

'Don't lie, boy.' He said with increasing hostility, 'I know about your little "Secret Club" that you and your little friends have made, I just need a few names and we'll leave you alone for a while. You don't pose any threat to us, but a message needs to be sent.'

'Alex Gess, Michelle de Kock, Simon Harvey. Now if that's all I'll be on my way, I've got Leadership Skills in ten minutes, it's not much of a replacement for debating but I'll make do with what I've got.' I got up and headed for the door. I turned down the hallway and stepped into the cold, steel elevator. I avoided the eyes of all the staff in the lobby as I made my way out. I stepped outside and glanced back at the building behind me. Just like the interior it was cold and steel. Erected where Lower used to be. They deemed all sport unnecessary a while after the walls went up and decided to use it as their own base of operations. I walked up the (now useless) rugby stands and headed into Norton, as I entered I eased up a little, just being in the sight of that horrendous building gave me the heebie-jeebies. I trotted down the stairs and went straight towards the broom cupboard underneath them, I tapped an impatient rhythm into the door and it gave way with a sharp 'click'.

I walked down a few flights of stairs and turned left and walked urgently towards Caity's office.

'Caity, I need you to call a meeting for the Information Intelligence Unit. Tell them to drop everything and head straight to the Board Room.' I said urgently, turning around and left briskly, not giving her a chance to reply. The base was empty, we liked to keep it that way, it would draw too much suspicion if we were always missing. We only used it if we had meetings or if we had enough time to work on our responsibilities. I turned into my own office and sat down, I booted up my laptop and looked around while I waited for it to start. There wasn't really anything special about my office, except for a few posters with sarcastic quotes on them and some miniature rowing oars from a fundraising which took place in my first season. All of that feels like it was so long ago...

I entered my password and ran a program James wrote, it checked for any bugs or irregularities which would be left behind by someone who'd hacked into our system. Nothing, this made me more uneasy, how else would they know about us then? I ran the code again, but this time for our whole system, again it came up with nothing. If someone hadn't broken into our system, that means we have a Snitch among us. A Snitch is hard to find. There were sixty of us in the whole Resistance, the Resistance was run by "The Board", ten boys and girls from College and DSG, each of us ran a different part of the resistance: I was the head, James was in charge of hacking, Annie did all of our Strategy, Kelly was our top spy and ran our espionage unit, Luke recruited for us, Chris created the propaganda, Myfanwy monitored the authority and the school, Caity ran all of our communications, Dillan made our weapons and worked with Annie to plan the assault, and Jess tried to communicate with the world outside and gave us the news on what was going on.