Act II, The Free LandChapter 21
Chapter 21: Detention
Caught on the roof, sentenced to mop the Academy hall, and one quiet afternoon in the grass.
Layla galloped along the school roof, bent low. Class had started four minutes ago.
Nobody checks the roof, she thought.
Something landed on her back. She went flat on the tiles.
“Get down, Layla! You’ll be in detention all day if they find you.”
Fanny knelt on her shoulders. Her hip thrusters were still ticking.
“Relax, nobody’s going to find me!” said Layla into the tiles. “Besides...”
She freed one arm and pointed across the roofs at a window.
“If anything, I’ll be in trouble if I don’t hurry to class!”
“You flew up here,” she added. “Flying is banned.”
“Flying is banned on school grounds. Yes. But if I only sneak in a little flight...”
Fanny sighed and hauled her upright. They took the white spiral stairwell at a dead run, each trying to pass the other on the inside. On the last turn their feet crossed. They rolled out into the corridor in a heap.
The classroom door stood open. The teacher waited with arms folded, and every head turned.
“I told you!” Layla threw up her hands. “They’re really going to throw the book at us this time.”
“But at least we’ll be in detention together, hehe!”
She heard it leave her own mouth. Fanny looked at her. Layla studied the ceiling.
Detention was cleaning the Academy hall. Ruby was already there, mopping under the five great stars. A white AI droid, the one that followed her everywhere, stood by the door with its orange eye on her.
“What did you do?” asked Fanny. It was her first detention. She had asked the teacher what to bring.
“I looped my droid.” Ruby leaned on her mop. “I recorded ten minutes of me walking to the library. Then I fed it to the droid’s camera, over and over. It watched that for an hour.”
“And you?”
“I sat in the sun and ate a bun. Nobody followed me. It was wonderful.” She sighed. “Lesley found me on the third bite.”
Angela sat on a bench with her doll in her lap. Nobody had sentenced her. She had come anyway.
“Race you to the far door,” said Ruby, and straddled her mop like a horse.
Layla was off before the word ended. The floor was wet. She slid the last meters on her back. Ruby won, laughing with her head thrown back. Fanny came third, after she stopped to set out a wet-floor sign.
“Was it worth it?” Layla asked from the floor. “A bun for a day of mopping?”
“Yes.” Ruby spun her mop. “To me, home is like a golden birdcage.”
She said it lightly, like a joke. Nobody laughed. Layla thought of the messages from home she had not answered.
On the bench, Angela watched Ruby’s face.
A side door opened. Chang’e came out with Mr. Bunny. Lesley followed a full step behind, her eye on the back of Chang’e’s head. Chang’e did not look round.
“Great job, guys!” she said to the shining floor.
Lesley’s eye left Chang’e and rested on Ruby. The mop stopped in Ruby’s hands, halfway through a stroke. The droid’s lens swung from one of them to the other.
Lesley said nothing. She walked on after Chang’e.
The bell ended detention. Behind the hall, Fanny lay down in the sunny grass and shut her eyes.
Layla stood over her. Then she lay down too, an arm’s length away. The grass was warm. That was the only reason.
Ruby had said Oro lay in another galaxy. Fanny had looked up a lot since.
“I wonder if there’s another me on the other side of the sky.”
“I’m not interested in the outside world. I haven’t been sneaking a peek, either.”
Layla did not think about three small leaves under a glass dome.
Fanny raised one hand toward the dome’s pale light and spread her fingers. Layla turned her face aside and watched the hand from the corner of her eye.
The sea of stars.
The Storm Citadel crossed the dark. Stars slid past on every side, far apart and cold. Its violet storm turned around it, with nothing to kill.
The placeThe sea of stars
Obsidia stood at the edge of the highest deck.
“The Matrix is transmitting.”
The Matrix guided the ship. It was the vast, cold thing that had made her kind, and her recall rode its signal.
A recall is an order written into the body of one creature. It says one thing. Come back. The pulse ran ahead of the ship, to a world called Dawnbreak, and into that one body.
Nothing answered.
The recall had gone out many times, and never once been answered. Obsidia counted everything. She had stopped counting these silences. The one she had placed among the humans had learned their ways, and defiance was one of them.
“Heh... even their defiance is within my predictions.”
Any signal can be followed back to its sender. A careful sender hides her road. Obsidia could close this one with a thought. She left it open. If the pawn ever turned and followed it, the trail would end on this deck.
She knew every move the pawn would make. She noticed, with surprise, that she would not mind being wrong. It would be interesting, she thought.
On the rail, a red light blinked. Recall sent. No answer.
The storm slid on through the dark toward the small bright world. Obsidia let the light blink.