Jago 2
Good things.
Heart pounding, she pushed the door closed,
It was quiet and smooth, easy to push for something so heavy, and it gave a sigh and locked with a reassuringly solid click behind her. She leaned against it for a moment catching her breath, then she exhaled slow, letting the tension ease just a little, shrugged off her backpack as granules of safety glass from the burst window fell from her hair and clothing to the ground around her feet, and prayed silently to her god that the door couldn’t be opened from the outside, hoping it wouldn’t even be found, so deep below the ground, two, three floors down, hurtling down so many dark stairwells she’d lost count. She shook her hair and more glass fell onto the floor, combed her fingers through the heavy cords, delicately picking out the final grains of glass one by one with her fingernails. Only when she was done cleaning out the glass, did she straighten up and look around.
The room was three paces wide and two deep, the door at one end and a small table and chair in the corner opposite. The walls of the room were white and crystalline and smooth to the touch, the air was cold and a little stale; a dull light came from a single pane of opaque glass in the ceiling. On the table top was a notepad and pencil and a small grey box, maybe twelve inches by eight and about a half inch thick. The room wasn’t dusty or dirty like the room outside - it was clean. She had the feeling that any dirt in the room was what she’d brought in.
She went back to the door and tugged on it again, testing it, somehow understanding, knowing, that it had locked securely behind her, but not sure how she knew, and needing to check anyway, just to make sure. After a while she heard faint tapping sounds outside and she knew also, without knowing how, that those were the sounds of the prowlers, testing the door to see if they could unlock it, to see if she were inside. She knew they could not unlock it though she didn’t know how she knew, the door just reassured her somehow, and she accepted the truth of that, and after a while the sounds stopped. If they were going to try and wait her out they’d have to be patient. Dakota would run when she could, but she could out-wait the seasons when she had to. She pulled out the chair, sat down and closed her eyes, focused on her breathing just like Jester had taught her way back when all she knew was how to be scared.
‘Pick a number,’ he’d say and she’d reply ‘four thousand and eleven,’ or some such random figure and he’d say ‘breathe in slowly, and see that number in your mind’s eye, as you breathe out, focus on seeing it, then when you breathe in again, nice and slow, see the number four thousand and ten, counting down one number with each breath...’
‘That will take forever.’
‘It’s not a race, ‘Kotes. You aint going nowhere but here.’
And he was right; there was nowhere else. Only here.
Here and now.
This was where she was.
After a while of breathing slow and counting down, she brought happy thoughts to her mind and smiled, eyes still closed, relaxed now, in a good place. Sometime later, she felt rather than saw a light flickering on the edge of the flat box, and she opened her eyes. The box, she knew, was a computer, though she’d never seen one that worked, she’d learned about them in her classes, and her grandmother had shown one to her a few years ago, explained how it all worked, sort of anyway, using the words her own mother had used before her, way back when the world had not been long changed and memories were still sharp. Jester had brought it back after one particular trip and they’d stripped it down trying to figure out how to make it work. Her grandmother explained that it would not; the power source was long worn down to nothing.
But she could see a faint glow from inside.
This one worked.
Slowly she reached out and, carefully lifted the lid. There was a blank screen and she stared at it until, suddenly, it flickered to life:
IF YOU’RE READING THIS, CONGRATULATIONS.
She sat back, studying it, thinking.
The screen flickered again and then said, PRESS ME.
She pressed a button. The biggest one, on the right of the keypad.
WHAT IS YOUR NAME? The screen asked her.
She typed in her name.
WHEN WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO? The screen asked her.
A dial appeared on the screen that showed her a number 2101. She stroked the dial on the screen and the numbers spun backwards to 2044. She stroked it again in the other direction and it rolled forward to 2217 and stopped. She stroked it again and it spun back to 2022.
She touched an icon in the corner that said Now.
Nothing happened.
There might have been the faintest of humming sounds, so low it was virtually inaudible, but nothing else, and she felt her stomach give a tiny lurch, but then it was still. The computer screen flickered briefly but nothing else changed. Then the screen changed again and a single word appeared:
DONE.
She stared at the screen, sat quietly, thinking to herself, weighing her choices. She closed the lid, satisfied, nodding to herself, trusting her instinct for truth, a smile sliding across her lips. ‘This is good,’ she said quietly to herself, which were the first words she’d spoken out loud in two days. Something had changed for the better, but she didn’t know what or how, or even how she knew. She just knew. It was the room; she trusted it though she couldn’t have explained why. She picked up her backpack and strapped it on, and on a whim, she scribbled her name on the writing pad by the computer, then she went to the door, which clicked and pushed open easily, allowing her to step back out into the darkness of the basement. She stood for a moment listening, then reached into a pocket and took out a small, powerful flashlight and clicked it on. The room was cavernous in the focused beam, filled with chairs and boxes and pieces of junk, the same room she’d escaped from an hour earlier. But it was different somehow. Less dust. In fact, she realised, there was virtually no dust. And the junk was piled neater than it had been when she stumbled through the sub-basement toward the door from which she now peered. There was a small pinpoint of red light coming from something fastened to the wall at the far end of the room. A faint orange light seeped from a gap between the bottom of the door and the top of the steps. ‘This is very good,’ she said, almost laughing, twisting the flashlight in her hand so that the beam widened out, so she could see the room better, and then she began to thread her way between the junk toward the light gap in the door, where the light slid in, smiling now, because, as Jester always said, she was always open to good things.
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Fun!