Columbine

Fortunately, my room hadn’t suffered as much damage as I’d expected. The television had come out of the wall, leaving an empty hole. I hadn’t bothered picking up all the books that had come off the shelf. I’d gone right back to bed and tried to imagine that it was all a dream. When I woke up, it was confirmed that the earthquake had been real. With that realization came the nauseating knowledge that the Demataxt was steadily succeeding.

My hand instinctively grasped the flash drive, grabbing onto one of the last pieces of reassurance that I had. I forced myself to think only constructive thoughts, steadily suppressing the knowledge that the Demataxt was definitely going to destroy me. If denial was ever a good thing, it was definitely now.

I cleaned myself up, maneuvering my way around the rather small bathroom. I found that the shower nozzle had been replaced by a huge water cooler. I unscrewed the little lid that was on the spout and systematically cleaned various body parts beneath the inch-wide flow of water.

My guess was that the plumbing down in the underground lab hadn’t been hooked up to a network. It had probably been hydroelectrically powered, meaning that when electricity died, so had the plumbing. I spared as much water as I could, scrubbing the stench of the past few days off of myself.

Living in Egypt had certain prices, one of which was eternal sweat. I was lucky to have been born with skin that didn’t burn and barely tanned. It was somewhat of a wonder that I hadn’t died of skin cancer.

I dug up some clean clothes from the pile that had fallen from the sofa. I dragged on some beat-up jeans and a shirt so ratty that it would have put the homeless to shame. I’d worn all my clothes at least fifty times before. They had long since lost their original form and color. Only the jeans had held on to a shade of faded blue. Everything else had been sun-bleached so many times that I couldn’t remember what designs had been there to start with.

I walked upstairs, where Scarlett had treated us to dinner the night before. After the earthquake, we’d spent hours cleaning everything up. Most of the debris had also been swept up hidden in the basement, where it wouldn't bother anyone.

When I got upstairs, I found Sarah sitting by herself at a table laden with breakfast items. An unexpected assortment of bacon, scrambled eggs, toast, marmalade, sausages, coffee, tea, orange juice, and pancakes was smack-dab in the middle of the room. My mouth swam with saliva in that instant. I swallowed heavily and raced to the table.

“Hey.” I greeted Sarah, who had piled her plate high with some of everything. She looked up from her food and attempted to smile through a mouthful of pancakes. She managed to make an excited grimace.

“Good morning.” She grunted happily after having swallowed. “I see you’ve finally cleaned yourself up.”

She took a moment to chug some coffee.

“You really have to do that more often. You look almost human!” She added, before she forced huge portions of bacon and egg into her mouth.

I wanted to defend my unkempt habits, but the breakfast buffet was calling my name. I didn’t bother getting a plate. I grabbed a fork and bowed over the table, harpooning food from everywhere that I could reach.

A myriad of flavors came together on my tongue, bringing with them a feeling I thought I would never feel again – normality. The last time I’d had a breakfast like this, the world had still been a good place. The way I figured it, a world with food as good as this hadn’t totally lost its marbles.

“Good morning!” Scarlett called from the doorway, having entered with a miraculous fresh stack of steaming pancakes. I swallowed as much food as I could before I greeted her with a heartfelt grunt.

“Columbine, did anyone even bother to teach you manners?” Scarlett asked. “Get a plate like the rest of us and stop lording over everything.”

“Did you make this?” I managed to ask, chugging coffee and collapsing into a chair and piling as much food as would possibly fit on my designated plate.

“Yes.” Scarlett confirmed.

“Thank you. You’re a real life saver.” Sarah told her.

“You’re very welcome, dearest.” Scarlett positively beamed.

All of my previous suspicions that Scarlett and Sarah would hate each other dissipated in that instant. I didn’t know how Scarlett had managed to make so much food in such short a time, but if she kept it up, she’d have total control over everyone.

It took fifteen minutes or so of relentlessly stuffing my face to realize that someone was missing from the table.

“Hey, where’s Valentin?” I asked.

“In the kitchen. He’s making second servings.” Scarlett informed me, daintily cutting her sausage into small, bite-sized portions. I swallowed before I spoke again.

“I thought you said you’d made all this.” I said.

“I did.” Scarlett said. “I meant that I'd made the coffee.”

For a moment I became very confused. The idea of Valentin relentlessly slaving at a kitchen stove just didn’t register in my head. In all the time he’d lived in the Morgan Mansion, he had been in the kitchen no more than three times. Over time I became convinced that he didn’t need food to survive.

“You’re saying Valentin made all this?” I asked, shocked that the crispy deliciousness of bacon in my mouth was his handiwork.

“Yes.” Scarlett confirmed.

“Wow.” Sarah groaned through her pancakes. “Now that really warrants a kiss.”

I almost choked on my eggs, but found them to be too valuable, so I made them go down smoothly. I put my fork down, but before I could push my plate away, Sarah stopped me.

“Don’t even think about it!” She warned. “You’re way too skinny to refuse food.”

I looked down at myself. My abdomen had practically caved in, thanks to my slouch. I sat up straighter, but it hardly made a difference. I sucked in air and forced it to go down to my stomach. Even that didn’t help.

“See?” Sarah gloated. I glared at her, and wordlessly started to shovel food into my mouth again.

The truth was, I could have cared less who had supplied the food. Even if the Demataxt had shipped it over, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was just too good to boycott.

So Sarah and I ate like pigs for the next few minutes while Scarlett ate small portions of food with all the etiquette of a princess. The more I ate, the hungrier I seemed to get. I realized that I’d been living an ascetic life for too long. The time had come to balance the books.

“So, Columbine,” Sarah said, setting down her fork with a clatter, “Your blood plays music.”

This was a statement, not a question.

“Yeah.” I said, chugging orange juice.

“That’s certainly…different.” Sarah said.

“This coming from the super-witch?” I asked.

Sarah looked down at her empty plate for a moment. I took that to mean that she was letting the facts sink in. It had taken me a while, too. Somehow, amid a world full of strange and unusual powers, musical blood took weirdness to whole new level.

“The thing is…” Sarah started, “Being a witch isn’t supernatural. It’s natural. But this…it’s crazy. Your blood plays actual records made by actual people and instruments. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

I shrugged. I’d tried to find an explanation for the phenomenon that was my blood, but had come up dry. Sarah had a point. She’d never seen anything like it because there had never been anything like it.

“Does that mean you play music when you menstruate?” Scarlett suddenly asked, startling me from my coffee. I accidentally sputtered onto the pristine white cloth.

“Um…” I said, not having expected a question of this magnitude. I threw a napkin over the coffee stains I’d made.

“Come on, you can tell us.” Sarah urged. “We are all girls here, after all.”

“No, I do not play music when I menstruate!” I said through gritted teeth.

There was silence at the table for a long, stretching moment. My face went from neutral to red, and then to neutral again. I distracted myself with a sausage, savoring the crispy exterior and the juicy, tasty meat.

“What are you planning to do with your blood, exactly?” Scarlett asked, setting down her cup of tea.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, research is one thing.” Scarlett elaborated. “But development is something else.”

“Are you saying I should go public?” I asked, suddenly not feeling so good.

“Make no mistake, I don’t want to pressure you!” Scarlett quickly added. “But with something of this magnitude, you have to start thinking long-term.”

It was then that I realized that I had no idea what in hell I was doing. Everyone had thought that I had a plan, but the truth was that I had utterly nothing. I had no long-term plan. Hell, I didn’t even have a short-term plan. I’d gone in way over my head before I’d even known what I was doing. Now I was, quite simply, fucked.

“Um,” I scratched my head, “I’ll think about it.”

“You’d better. I have a feeling that even if we were planning to keep it a secret, it would get out.” Sarah advised.

I gave her a lopsided smile, not knowing what else to do. I hadn’t planned very many things, and I definitely hadn’t planned to let the world in on the secret. Not with Demtaxt agents crawling all over the place, anyway.

The last thing I needed was to draw attention to myself. From all that I’d heard about the incarcerations that the Demataxt doled out, it was no picnic. It had even been likened to medeival-age torture methods. I, for one, did not want to subject myself to that.

The coffee suddenly didn’t taste as good. I set my cup down and wiped my mouth, standing up and preparing to leave.

“Where are you going?” Scarlett asked.

“My room.” I told her. I didn’t want to run into Valentin, anyway, but I didn’t say that out loud.

“I think you’ll find the library more interesting!” Scarlett called. I turned around.

“Library?” I asked her.

“Yes -- the purple tiles lead to the library. You can go pick out something you like.” She said.

I nodded and began following the purple tiles, perplexed that there’d be more books in the lab than were already in my room. If I was going to be living here, I was going to need a map.

Something told me that there were more hallways and hidden passageways in this place than met the eye. Maybe knowing how many different colored tiles there were would help. I looked down at the floor and counted the colors I saw. Among them were pink, purple, green, white, and blue.

I continued to follow the purple tiles, looking into all the rooms that I passed. There were quite a few and all of them were marked. Small, engraved bronze plates were screwed in just under the little window on the door that let you see into the room. They had numbers and letters engraved on them. I guessed that the markings were a way to discern what the rooms were used for.

I peeked into one of the rooms. It was almost empty, except for a few brown boxes stacked in the corner and a lone desk where there must have been a computer before it was thrown out. Most of the rooms had that same basic layout. Some of them had leftover shelves full of miscellaneous objects -- vials, beakers, microscopes, paper, and maybe some trash that hadn’t been thrown away. It almost had the look of a lot of abandoned cubicles.

From the looks of things, the entire lab had once been like one big office. A medical station came to mind, but medical stations were typically on the ground, rather than below it.

I made my way to the library. Finding it was easy enough. It was the only room in the entire lab that was even mildly inviting. The sight of soft furniture was a nice change compared to all the plaster and metal I’d grown accustomed to over the last two days.

The living quarters had been the only rooms that gave the impression of being built to accommodate actual human life. I hadn’t seen Sarah or Valentin’s rooms, but I’d assumed that they were more-or-less like mine.

The library seemed to be the largest room in the entire lab. Shelves lined all the walls, practically exploding with books. I’d expected color-coded encyclopedias and thick tomes. What I found was a trove of colorful paperbacks and novels that had been mindlessly crammed onto the shelves. Sofas and armchairs were dispersed around the room almost as randomly as the books.

An enormous rug had been tossed into the middle of the library like a big puddle of colors. A barely discernable pattern was depicted on it, giving the room a vaguely freakish quality. I was instantly overcome with an urge to redecorate everything. I stepped up to the shelf that I was closest to and began to organize books.

I occasionally stumbled upon a familiar title or a familiar author as I sorted the books in the lab’s library, but I hadn’t read a book in years. One would think that without a television, I might have read more than ever, but it seemed that I’d lost the stomach for it. I'd lost the stomach for a lot of things after I'd realized that electricity wasn't coming back.

As the day wore on, I worked through all the shelves, sorting through piles and clutter. It turned out that books weren’t the only things on the shelves. Sometimes I came across piles of paper. The papers seemed to be old, needless copies of recorded experiments. Being the science flunk that I was, I didn’t understand I word. I put the papers on a table in the corner.

I also found battered notebooks filled with hastily scribbled notes that I couldn’t read. I put them next to the papers. If I was particularly lucky, I found a dusty stuffed animal or a broken pencil that had been shoved into a corner of a shelf. I threw those into the nearest drawer that I’d unconsciously set aside for junk.

One thing that came to my attention was a cheaply framed paper -- a list of names and the rooms that were assigned to them. Scarlett’s name was on the list. Scarlett M. Collins, Ph. D. had been assigned bedroom number five. There were twelve names on the list. I didn’t recognize any others.

The roster of room assignments was proof enough that, at one point, twelve people had stayed in this underground station. Furthermore, there was a curvy logo on the bottom right-hand corner of the paper. As I looked closer at my surroundings, it popped up from all sorts of objects that I hadn’t suspected earlier.It had been stamped onto the front pages of all the books in the library. It was on a discreet corner of every piece of furniture. It was sewed into the tags of the pillows and towels.

I didn’t want to ask Scarlett what it meant. I knew she’d probably have answered all my questions without a second thought, but I didn’t know her well enough to be sure that she’d tell me the truth. I knew I was being slighly more paranoid than was strictly necessary, but I couldn’t stop myself. It had become natural over the last couple of years. With all my run-ins with Demataxt agents since my grandmother’s death, I preferred to handle matters of mystery with caution.

I could still remember the boat ride from Washington. The ship had been standard Demataxt issue, almost like it had been sprung out of the nineteenth century. Because I knew that it was powered by a mage’s spell, I was queasy for the whole three weeks that I was on the ocean. Knowing that I was on a ship that sailed regardless of waves and wind was something I didn’t like. I’d rather have been blissfully ignorant of the source of fuel for the ship. But even that hadn’t been the worst of it.

The unbearable part of that voyage had been my strict prohibition on music. I’d been trapped in a silent room, almost praying for a splinter or a nosebleed. I’d tried to entertain myself, humming the tunes that I remembered.

Then one day there was a storm. I’d been caught on deck through the ordeal and hadn’t gotten to my room in time. I’d slipped on the wet deck and cracked my knee open on a nail that had been sticking out of the floor.

As soon as people heard the music, they came rushing up. I’d managed to hide my bleeding knee in time, so no one could trace the music to my blood -- not that they'd have. The idea of music being played by blood was strange even to me.

The crowd had swayed to the music that I was emitting. I was shocked to see a good part of the people start to cry. I wondered why for a moment, and then realized that they hadn’t heard electric guitars and an invisible voice years. So I did them a courtesy and stayed on the deck, anxiously waiting for my blood to start clotting.

It had been too much for me, and the sight of people crying as a crowd, mourning something that they hadn’t realized they’d missed was something I hoped never to see again. Most people would probably have been glad to provide some fleeting joy to the world, but I wasn't one of them.

Suddenly an ominous growl filled my ears. It took a moment for me to realize that it was coming from my stomach. I stopped working on the books and blinked. My head was ever-so-slightly spinning.

Considering the enormous breakfast that I’d had in the morning, I wondered if maybe there was something wrong with me. I consulted the rusty pocket watch to find that I’d been relentlessly slaving away in the library for over seven hours since. I winced at the thought that I’d missed lunch.

I made my way back to the dining room, hoping to find the remnants of breakfast. Instead I found an index card stating that ‘lunch is in the kitchen’. I followed the trusty clue to the alotted location.

The kitchen itself turned out to be frighteningly high-class, with its marble countertops and a crystal chandelier. Of course, the chandelier itself wasn’t working, but it still sparkled beneath the light of the glow sticks that had been hammered into the ceiling.

The food was all on plates, protected by sheets of napkins. I recognized the remnants of pancakes, bacon, and eggs. The sandwiches were a new addition to the menu -- probably from the lunch that I’d missed. I realized that I obviously hadn’t won anyone’s heart over if no one had bothered to call me to lunch.

I shrugged it off and ripped off the napkin from the sandwich platter. I bit into it, not even bothering to notice what it contained. I moved on to the food from the morning. It had grown somewhat limp and soggy, but the taste was still there. I shoved morsels into my mouth, hardly bothering to chew before swallowing.

It might have been a full half hour of relentless munching before I noticed that Valentin was standing in the doorway, grinning. I almost choked on my pancake, but miraculously swallowed it with as much grade as I could manage.

“V- Valentin!” I choked. “What are you doing here?”

He shrugged and pretended to examine a ceiling tile before answering.

“I need a favor.” He finally said.

My eyes widened before I could stop them. He saw this and put up his hands in defense.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing important.” He assured me. “I just need you to keep track of how long I’m gone.”

I blinked. Gears began to turn in my head, concocting theories and hypotheses by the dozens. I mentally slapped myself, hoping that I could get a grip on my imagination long enough to take in the entire story.

“Why?” I asked.

“If I’m gone for more than three hours, you need to tell Scarlett.” He said.

I noticed that he’d put a coat on. It was getting chillier now that the Demataxt had broken into the mummies’ curse. They’d managed to get a grip on the weather, from the looks of it. The glow sticks built into the ceiling had been dim all day, implying that there wasn’t as much sunlight as usual.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.

“Just taking a walk.” He said lightly.

If I didn’t mistrust him on general principle, I’d have believed him without a second thought.

But as it was, I was practically looking for an excuse to hate him. I nodded innocently.
I pretended not to look as he walked back into the hall. As soon as he was out of earshot, I began to creep after him.

I followed as quietly as I knew how. I kept my breathing shallow, made sure to tread lightly, and kept the distance between us nice and rounded. He was hasty, and I had that to my advantage. If he was in a hurry, it meant that he was going somewhere important.

I expected him to go to the exit through the underground tunnel, but he didn’t. He stopped at one of the hallway closets. I’d checked the closets earlier when I’d been exploring the halls. They had all one stored sponges, towels, and other cleaning supplies -- nothing spectacular. What possible business he may have had with a broom was beyond me.

He opened the door and several towels fell out. He didn’t bother picking them up. He reached into the closet. I didn’t see the exact movements of his hand, but I heard something creak open. Before I could discern what it was, he walked into the closet and disappeared into it completely.

The closet couldn’t have been more than four square feet of space -- not enough to comfortably accommodate all of his body mass. There had to have been a secret passageway that I hadn’t noticed when I’d examined the closet for all of two seconds.
I bit my lip, suddenly afraid to continue following him.

I waited for a moment before carefully peeking into the closet. It was as small as I’d expected, and with Valentin nowhere to be found. I put my hand forward on the closet wall, trying to mimic what I’d seen him do. I pushed and prodded. I poked various random spots on the plaster. Nothing happened.

I stepped away, disappointed.

Either he’d pulled the greatest disappearing act I’d even seen, or I hadn’t found the secret passageway yet. Being the skeptic that I am, I opted for the latter. I pushed brooms and mops out of the way, clearing the wall. I examined the surface as thoroughly as I could, but found no cracks or buttons.

Then I had an idea -- maybe I was looking at the wrong wall. There were two other walls in the closet. I looked at the one to my right, and sure enough there was a door that no one had even bothered to obscure. I pushed the door open.

I was instantly met by a staircase. Cold, dry, concrete stairs invited me to climb them. I carefully closed both doors behind myself and began to ascend. It was pitch black, but I could still hear the echoes of Valentin’s footsteps. Unlike me, he wasn’t trying to be quiet.

He was stomping as loudly as he wanted, and I had that to my advantage.

As I began to walk, I was grateful to have a glow stick strapped to my side, even if I was afraid to use it. Fortunately for me, the stairs were a fairly predictable terrain.