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Lockdrest
Chapter 26

Chapter 26

Namu couldn’t believe he had pushed Molly to go to that place again if it was worse than when either of them had been trapped behind that door. He had just wanted her to do what he couldn’t do for himself. And he was so used to Lily and Mr. Vero. They would have kept pushing themselves no matter how hard it got. Molly was different, though. She had more reasonable limits. She had dealt with trauma her whole life. Way longer than Namu had ever dealt with his.

So why had Namu pushed her when she had said no?

He was an idiot. He had been wrong to do that to her, and he would never do it again. Everyone worked differently, and that was something he needed to respect.

But he had a pressing desire to figure Molly out. To understand why she was the only one who hadn’t been destroyed out of everyone who had gone beyond the door. It might be because she was an empty vessel, but what did that mean?

He had tried researching it on his phone but couldn’t find anything.

It was like the problem he had been having with the holes in his soul all over again. Any solution he tried or research he tried to look up didn’t work. There was always something pushing back at him. Something not willing to give in.

He didn’t blame Molly. Not anymore. Not after her outburst, which he had not expected from her, but he did blame the door.

And that brought him back to needing to find a way to destroy it.

If he couldn’t block it or eliminate it from the outside, he might have to slip inside and somehow destroy it from within.

Without dying.

But how?

It was his allotted time to work with Mr. Vero, but he had told his teacher that he needed a break instead. He was sticking to what he had decided the previous night. He would put his own problems aside and figure out what needed to be done. A whole class period and lunch were enough to give himself time to research.

He was going to scour the school’s library. He knew that the door was too hidden, too new, too secret to have anything written about it yet. But empty vessels… he thought those were worth a try. He figured the chances of them being ancient, even if they were rare, was high. Which meant that there might be at least one book kept about them at the magickal school.

Namu heard a commotion coming from the near-empty library: Mrs. Yitter was screaming at the books on one shelf and something was gushing and leaking and forming a puddle around her feet. A clear liquid was ballooning out of the pages and the bindings of the books that Mrs. Yitter was yanking off the shelves and dropping to the ground away from the puddle with multiple splats. Her striped pink and purple romper was swimming in the expanding puddle, and the light blue rose she wore near her heart looked as though it were weeping.

“What’s happening?” Namu asked, ducking when Mrs. Yitter threw a book his way on accident. At least, he hoped it was on accident.

“The computers! Trying to make a system for these books and input them. The technology messes with them sometimes!” She only had a few more books to clear off the continually soaking shelf. It was as if there was some fountain or water system traveling through it that had sprung a leak.

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“Can I help?”

“You can step back. I’ll be with you in a moment. Just be glad none of these caught on fire or became slugged like last time. Slug slime is impossible to clean!” She tugged the last two books down, held them in her soaked arms, then dropped them to a table as she ran to the one computer that was turned on. “I have the hardest time with the history books, especially if we get a new one I have to put into the system,” she explained as she typed, continually hitting the delete button.

“You don’t want to know the type of things the system causes for those,” someone said from behind him.

Namu jumped. It was the religious coordinator, wearing a light blue dress with long flowy sleeves.

“Oh dear, Daphen!” Mrs. Heard yelled, walking over to her while Mrs. Yitter continued to type. She pulled Mrs. Yitter into a hug, squeezing her tight while Mrs. Yitter looked over her shoulder at the bookshelf. Namu looked too. The waterworks had stopped. “If you wanted a bath, I could have drawn you up one! You didn’t have to go that far today and get all the books wet!”

Mrs. Yitter pursed her lips before letting them slide into an annoyed smile when Mrs. Heard let her go. She looked at the religious coordinator with adoration, then looked down at the wet books with disgust. “I hate techno magick.”

“And apparently, it hates you!”

Mrs. Yitter laughed.

Namu stood there awkwardly, hating wasting his time, but he understood the frustration. Since techno magick had become a thing, there had been many hiccups in the system that ended up requiring more magick, spells, and energy to clean up. It was because the magickal incentive that writers put into books was reacting to the techno magick and not blending the way it should. It would take Mrs. Yitter the rest of the day to dry out those books.

He admired the smile that Mrs. Heard was giving her wife, and couldn’t help smiling himself at her suggestive wink when she looked down at the librarian’s soaked clothes. Maybe it wouldn’t take too long with the two of them working on it together.

Mrs. Yitter realized she had forgotten about Namu. Her cheeks flushed, which made Mrs. Heard howl with laughter.

“What can I help you with?” Mrs. Yitter asked, avoiding Namu’s eyes while squeezing each of her fingers as if trying to regain her calm.

“I was just wondering if you had any books on empty vessels.”

The pulling and squeezing of her fingers stopped. Her cheeks returned to their normal color, and then her cutting brown eyes took him in. “I’ve never heard a student ask that before. Why?”

He could feel Mrs. Heard’s scrutinizing gaze on him. “Hey! Aren’t you that boy who works with Mr. Vero? The one who skipped a Spirit Magick class. The one who… oh, never mind. I think that’s why, Daphen.”

“Oh.” Some memory sprung in Mrs. Yitter’s eyes. “I’m afraid we don’t. I’ve only heard of empty vessels word-of-mouth. I have an older brother, though. He has his own personal library and has collected many highly sought-after books that he has only let me glimpse.” She let out an agitated sigh. “I could reach out to him and ask.”

“If he would even tell you,” Mrs. Heard said.

Namu felt annoyed. “Well, thank you,” he replied, turning to leave them with the mess so he could try to accomplish something by the end of the day hopefully. “Please let Mr. Vero know if you do happen to find one.”

He disappeared behind some shelves further away from the librarian and Mrs. Heard then put his hand on one of the shelves, waiting for one to light up down the line.

Nothing.

He did it again until he found a section that might help.

There were no guns anymore, no bombs, nothing like that in this world. But could magick make something similar? The world he despised held all the disintegrated metals from those weapons. This world ate them up right before everything disappeared behind that door. Could he produce something that could disrupt that process? That atmosphere? That world? Something that could maybe destroy those creatures and that entire place?

Almost like the mix of techno magick and the old magick in the library, there had to be something he could mix to cause a reaction in that world that would be a disaster. He then could close the door leaving no one to fix it.

He wished he had someone to talk over his ideas and ask for help. But he didn’t. He knew what Mr. Vero would say. Mr. Vero thought the door was essential and that he couldn’t see how much more important stopping the killings and the eating of students’ souls was.

He couldn’t let Mr. Vero know what he was trying to do.

And Molly… Molly didn’t have the anger that he did about it. She hadn’t been eaten alive. She hadn’t almost watched someone be killed.

He took a book about multiplying metals off a shelf.