The timing of the sunrise placed Skolala Refujeyo pretty close to the Greenwich meridian, but to be more specific was going to involve some complicated maths. Not for the first time, I missed the internet. Finding out where we were would be so damn easy with google. I could google the sunrise times around the world. I could google the plants in the valley, if I were clever with their descriptions. Hell, if I were really clever and did some research I could probably identify the type of stone the mountain was made from and narrow down possible areas from that.
But I couldn’t do any of that. And by the time I had google again, my time at the Haven would be over, and it wouldn’t matter any more.
For the moment, I grabbed some breakfast, then headed to English class. There was only one Initiate English as a First Language class and it was taught by Instruktanto Ahuja, a very small, very dark, very skinny man who put me in mind of an extremely animated spider. He leapt randomly about the room as he spoke, illustrating his sentences with rolling movements of his long fingers like he was playing an invisible piano, which made the mage mark in the web of his right thumb seem to dance and shift about.
He started the lesson with a ten-minute rant about the inconsistency of English, how its complex history created a language that it was a wonder that anyone could use, and how this may in many respects be a problem but it also meant that the language had a depth of character and broadness of expression that was simply impossible in constructed languages like Ido. He stopped himself about two sentences into a tirade on the limitations of Ido to drag himself back on track, constructing a new sentence in the symphony of his invisible piano.
“The complexity of English does, of course, go beyond the mere spelling and pronunciation of words, creating all sorts of exceptions in verb conjugation, sentence structure and even basic punctuation,” he said. “However, the preliminary test results of everyone in this class put you at at least the expected level of competence for your age, so I won’t waste your time with any of that, at least not yet. Instead, we will begin with something a little more practical and complicated than mere mechanics.
“Each of you have been sent three short science fiction stories. All are in English, and all are written in extremely different styles. Read them ad think about them. By the end of next week I expect you to send me your thoughts on the styles and techniques used by each one – there are no right or wrong answers, but I expect you to think about them all seriously. You may give me your answers in whatever format and however many words you feel expresses your point the most clearly. So long as your answers are, of course, in English.”
What I needed to do was get a better look at the world outside. The little valley was too sheltered, but if I could get out into the snow outside the medical wing… maybe something would be there. Some kind of clue. I needed an excuse to go to the medical wing, then, but I couldn’t just fake a stomach ache; not when the doctor could magically look inside me and see what was (or wasn’t) wrong. Would it be crazy to hurt myself so I could go? Yeah. Yeah, that was probably crazy.
Everyone was on their tablets by then, so I pulled mine out and found the stories. The first one, Scanners Live In Vain, looked pretty normal even if the subject matter was weird. I made a mental note about all the boring things that nobody except English teachers cared about – third person limited, past tense – skimmed to the end, and moved on. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas had a lot more I could write an essay about, being written more like a plot summary than an actual story – I could probably make up a few hundred words of utter nonsense about that. But the only one I really liked was They’re Made Out Of Meat, a dialogue between two aliens weirded out about humans being meat. I wasn’t really into science fiction. At least They’re Made Out Of Meat was funny.
The stories didn’t take long to skim read, but most people were still reading, so I kept my eyes on my own tablet. Could I play Minesweeper without anyone noticing, if I held my tablet so people couldn’t see through the back? Probably not. I’d have to poke at the screen a lot more than if I were reading.
Maybe I could just walk into the medical centre and ask Malas about the snow outside. He’d probably want students to go out there, right? Sunlight was healthy, right? So was fresh air. Surely we were supposed to go out there? Why else would there be a door in the medical centre?
Wait a minute. There was a way, way easier way to do this.
After class, I caught up with Max. He didn’t take English so it took a bit of thought to track him down. Eventually I thought to type ‘library’ into the tablet’s map program and found him in a dusty corner behind an actual wall of books.
I stuck my hand over the book he was reading by way of announcing my presence. “Hey, how do I make this terrible school GPS thing show me all the different ways outside? Just typing ‘outside’ doesn’t do anything.”
“You will need a more specific address,” he said, moving my hand aside without looking up. “There is a list of some of the general access locations on page four of the general guide on the intranet. Which you should definitely have read by now.”
“Yeah, I looked at that. It’s two hundred and six pages without a table of contents. Why would I read that when I’m rooming with a walking encyclopaedia?”
“It is nice to know that my skills are appreciated,” Max replied, sacrificing a few seconds of reading time to roll his eyes. “What if the document is hiding some vital clue about the school’s location? Then you should definitely read it.”
“But they’re trying to keep that location a secret, remember? I’m sure if they’d slipped up so drastically, you would have told me.” I found the list he’d mentioned. “Ooh, there are a lot of places here.”
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“Of course there are. Sunlight is vital for physical and psychological health. Was there anything else, or…?”
“Not unless you want to come and check out whatever ‘Agreabla Insulo’ is.”
“I do not.”
“Suit yourself.”
I dropped by the dorm to pick up my good sneakers – wherever I was going, it was best to be prepared with good shoes – but as I opened the door, I heard a couple of hurriedly choked sobs, followed by a quick blowing of a nose.
I glanced in the direction of the sound, at Kylie’s bed. The curtains were drawn, and it was dead silent.
For a few seconds, I contemplated pretending I hadn’t heard anything. It would be so easy to pretend I hadn’t heard anything.
Instead, I said, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Right. Look, I know you’re doing a ‘lone wolf’ thing right now, but if you ever do want to talk – ”
“Go away, Kayden.”
Whelp, I tried. I changed my sneakers and left.
Agreabla Insulo was a beach, as it turned out. A tunnel of the school opened out of a low, scruffy, weed-choked cliffside right onto idyllic, sunbaked yellow sand. The tide was out, for the moment.
Trying not to think of the rising waters of the monster pit, I stepped out. The sun was high in the sky, and the tumbling waves looked gentle.
Something was weird.
I inspected the plants – they looked normal. I could hear some seagulls, somewhere. It all seemed fine. The presence of a warm, sunny beach at one school entrance and a snowfield at another seemed weird, except that the Haven was built into a mountain; the medical centre was probably just really high up. Which meant –
Wait. The mountain.
Where was the fucking mountain?
I looked back at the cliff I’d emerged from; it was barely higher than a house. I peeked into the tunnel I’d emerged from; yep, there was still a natural stone hall there, lit by blue crystals. Strambling up the tiny excuse for a cliff, which was easy with all the vegetation, I looked over the forest beyond and beheld the complete absence of mountains.
Weird.
Okay.
To be fair, I’d just kind of assumed that the Haven was in a mountain. All I really knew was that it was in a network of stone tunnels; maybe it was just underground. I hadn’t actually seen any mountainsides or anything, just cliffs and open plains. But in that case, how could there be snow outside the medical centre? I didn’t know much about weather, but I was pretty damn sure that that didn’t make sense. Not with this beach, and the sun…
Overhead…
I glanced down at my own feet, and my shadow covering them. The sun was almost directly overhead. But I’d timed the sunrise right before English class – that couldn’t have been more than an hour ago, right? I checked the time on my tablet; it was just past seven thirty. But according to the sun, it should be around midday.
So the valley was near the Greenwich meridian, but the beach was… what, about a quarter of a planet away?
Okay. Clearly I’d put a lot more faith in a detail like ‘all the stone walls look the same’ than was warranted. This project was going to be a lot harder than I’d thought. Maybe impossible. Who knew how spread out the halls of Skolala Refujeyo were? To meet my self-appointed challenge, did I only need to pinpoint one location (since with that, you could access the rest of the school), or all of them?
I started to stroll down the beach, looking for anything interesting. Within the hour, I found it – the place I’d started. I’d walked in a giant circle; the area was a small island. Made sense, I supposed; they didn’t want to put Skolala refujeyo somewhere that random commonfolk could accidentally stumble on it, or people with evil intent.
Or make it easy for students to leave, a far more paranoid part of my brain said. I hushed it. The next six months were going to be a self-imposed nightmare if I kept letting myself follow thoughts like that.
Instead, I turned to the task of trying to figure out where in the world I actually was. If I was lucky, I might run across a really distinctive animal or something. I turned towards the middle of the island.
Beyond the sand and a small stretch of scrub was a forest of pine. Or something like pine. I wasn’t a tree expert. I took a couple of photos in case there was some way to image-search the trees on the intranet or something, and headed in.
Right, what did I know about forests? Other than ‘don’t wander blindly into them, or you will get lost and look like an idiot’? Eh, that probably didn’t apply on such a small island.
Biodiversity. Natural forests should have lots of different plants and animals and fungi, right? Whereas man-made ones should have a lot less, which was unhealthy. That’s what the environmentalists outside shopping centres said, anyway. But did that apply on a tiny island? The populations of everything would have to be low, which meant that even if they were natural they’d go extinct easily, right? Did evolution… make more, at a decent speed? Because otherwise, wouldn’t all little islands just be barren by now?
Okay, so apparently I knew nothing useful at all about forests.
But I did know what woodsmoke smelled like, and I could just smell it under another, less pleasing smell. I wasn’t sure what it was, but the only word that came to mind was ‘pungeant’. The woodsmoke caused about three seconds of panic while my brain screamed ‘bushfire!’, only to be replaced by the more reasonable conclusion that if I was currently in a small forest that was on fire I probably would have noticed more than a faint smell.
I stood very still, listening, until I was able to follow the sound of crackling flames.
I followed the sound to a clearing about five metres wide. It was very clearly artificial; not only was the flat, rock-free ground covered in soft moss, but the clearing itself was perfectly circular, and lined with evenly-spaced tall, perfectly white trees I didn’t recognise. In the very centre of the clearing, aboard a broad flat stone etched with arcane symbols, sat a fire, and on that fire sat a huge metal couldron. Whatever was bubbling inside had me reflexively gag and pinch my nose.
“Well, well, well,” A sinister voice said right by my ear. “This is a surprise.”