Dawn of Fog and Glass

Chapter Seven: Dawn of Fog And Glass

Adams grabs my shoulders, steering me carefully away from the group of kids. My feet stumble over the ground. I watch them with wide eyes. They return my stare, all collectively holding their breaths.

"Aw, come on, Adams, let us see her!" The ginger boy calls, his voice booming through the halls.

"That's Head Officer Adams to you, Barrett!" She yells back, her tone sharp and furious. Nothing like how she has been treating me.

Sparse hoots, catcalls, and jeers bounce through the small crowd. They're sharp, louder than they'd usually be, making my stomach turn. Something crawls up my spine and settles in the crook of my neck.

The boy's loud voice fades as the officers take me through two heavy wood doors to a stairwell. Each step is lined with glass engrained with small, rubber-lined grooves to prevent tripping. I hate that I feel the glass buzzing beneath my feet, even through my boots.

The steps, despite the unusual architecture, are surprisingly effective. We move down them with ease. I don't miss the nervous glances split between Stumpy and Ratface. One of them mouths something I don't catch to the other. I get the gist of it, anyway. All of a sudden, with a new glass-manipulating, out-of-control Morph, glass steps maybe weren't the best idea. I snort. As if I could ever do something bad. As if I would ever do something bad.

Orion's eyes flutter, brown eyes rolling upwards. His body jolts once before he stumbles and falls down the stairs.

I scream, the sound echoing through my ears and reverberating through my body. The glass window breaks, shards swarming like wasps around him. They help Orion to his feet.

The glass helped. Right?

With a constricted throat, I suddenly realize how alike this stairwell is to the one at Marksberg. The one where...all of that happened. I mean, apart from the odd glass-lined steps and blinking red lights of cameras.

Before I can dwell on it much longer, a new set of doors washes away the stairwell and brings forth a new floor, one with the same white walls and a sheer white floor, somewhat like the citrus room. This floor is livelier, more attended to. The floors sparkle with a lively sheen, Healthy potted plants stretch up from beside each door. None of the ceiling lights flicker, although they hum. Or maybe that's just the glass protecting them. Honestly, they're equally possible.

Adams glances at her watch. "We'll be late."

Asshat's nails dig into my arm, and I flinch.

"Maybe if we had skipped all the waterworks back at Marksberg, we wouldn't be having this issue."

"Our timing is Rhymie's fault, and you know it, Parks," she growls. Asshat flushes red but remains silent. I smirk.

Still, they move faster, and I have to speed walk to keep up with them. They rush past steel sliding doors on either side, and one made entirely of glass. Thick, strong glass that makes my head spin. I breathe a sigh of relief once we're past it.

At the end of the long corridor is a beautiful wooden door adorned with a window of frosted glass that I feel shiver through my arms with a cold tingling sensation. This looks more like the doors to the "classrooms" on the strange floor above, except that the black-and-gold letters read "Alfred Crawley" with some fine print below that I don't care to read.

The door swings open before Adams can knock. I swallow quickly, not expecting the room before me.

The first thing I notice is the sheer space of the office. It's more than twice the size of Darcy's office in a pentagonal shape with a crackling woodfire attached to the back wall. The two to the left are taken up with neat, colour-coordinated bookshelves, and the walls on the right boast immaculately cleaned floor-to-ceiling windows.