Parallel 667

Chapter 4

Her blood tinted the tap water pink, but the drain could not tell the difference.

"Stupid," she muttered to herself. She had scaled those walls a hundred times, and not once had she cut herself on the metallic ledge seated above her room.

She closed her eyes and let the warm water run over her hands for a minute, trying to wash away the memory of the sharp slice of pain. It had been early when the sun hooked the first of its sharp rays into her eyelids and dragged them open. It was her least favorite kind of early too, the kind that meant dawn had already painted over the last twinkling lights of stars, the moon a ghost hanging on to the last of its corporeal form.

She had been left to pack up her things in silence, under the supervision of what could have hardly been two hours of sleep. The star chart she fell asleep on was wet from where she had drooled on it in her sleep. Ugh, she had thought as she rolled it back up with ginger hands.

At least she had warded off any nightmares again though. It had been weeks since her last one. She had found that a steady dose of sleep deprivation, star gazing, and coffee was working quite nicely.

The mix was not as conducive to a lucid climb back down to her window. She had been thinking about the School of Astronomy still on her way down, lost in a sleepy haze, picturing the way its sails had rippled out like water and calling for her. That was when she had slipped.

The water stopped running red after a few minutes, and Sable grabbed a handful of paper towels, pressing them to her wound as she grabbed her bag, now stained crimson on one strap. She shot a quick glance at row of lavatories lined up on the wall opposite the porcelain sinks, thick wooden doors separated each of them. With a quick shake of her head, she slipped out the door that led to the hall.

The dormitory halls were still empty this time of morning. She supposed that was one of the only good things about haven woken up so early. There was no crowd of students to maneuver around, no throng of warm, constantly moving bodies to pretend to be polite to at this hour. In the peace she was free to daydream about the stars and the hallways of another school she could have been walking down.

In those hallways no one would think the night was for sleeping and dreaming. It was a dream, the dream, her dream. They would recognize it in the, the truth of the world that people chose to ignore. The sun was pompous, a star who thought himself so important he should outshine all the others, but the night was equalizing. At night each star was allowed a moment to shine. There were no shadows that cast the inferior in darkness and revered the strong with its eliminating rays. Nighttime was when everyone laid in their beds all the same, their heads no higher than their feet and their egos lost to the unconscious world.

She turned a corner and sighed. There was no one to see her as she stopped by a one of the windows and touch her damp fingertip to the clear glass, watching the sun lug its rotund body above the horizon.

Or so she thought.

As she rounded the stone corridor that led to her hall, she felt a tingle creep down her spine. Odd. She cast a casual glance behind her and found a boy who looked to be around her age trailing a few yards behind her. She supposed someone else could have woken up at this hour. The cafeteria offered some truly dreadful concoctions that had sent her careening down the corridors more than once. Another quick glance revealed an air of foreignness about him that Sable found unsettling though.

Stealing yet another quick peek at him, she saw he was wearing an odd uniform, definitely not from any of the schools she had visited. It was gray, with thick, dark padding that hugged his frame. His build was muscular, wide and tall. As her gaze streaked up his figure, she almost missed the swords strapped to his back. They caught her eye last, the way she had to do a second sweep of a classroom to realize she had a new classmate, not because it was not odd, but because she had in no way been expecting it.