Root: Part II, Chapter 6
Trapped alone now in the school and afraid to sleep, Hasta has two vexing conversations that leave her with more questions than answers.
For more on this project, please see “This Year a Serial Takes Root.”
6.0 Hasta
Alone in the high school at half past two in the morning, Hasta didn’t know what to do with herself.
Beat herself up, that was an obvious one. As she stalked through the deserted halls, she had plenty of time to replay the whole afternoon and night in her mind. It wasn’t hard to pick out every point where she might have made a different decision, taken a different step, turned a different corner. It wasn’t hard to envision a scenario that didn’t end in a choice between saving Ivan or saving Juan.
What was hard was shaking the memory of the recrimination in Juan’s eyes in that moment before Mr. Sunshine flipped him to God knows where. That moment when she’d chosen to give Ivan the first shot at escape, not him.
She should have kissed him again when she’d had the chance.
Not that Ivan’s chances were great either. How much of a favor had she really done him, flipping him into the unknown together with Bobby Kimball while his hands were cuffed and covered?
Hasta kept watch at the front doors for a while, scoping the situation outside through the dark rain. The taller of the two agents, as Mr. Sunshine had called them, still patrolled the grounds, slowly and methodically. Sometimes he would stop while his fingers tapped the air—motions nothing at all like the sign language he used with his partner. After that she made a couple circuits of the school, opening classrooms to access exterior windows, but she couldn’t spot the other agent, the one she’d spoken with outside. Had he left the scene to go after Ivan?
Hasta felt the absence of her cell phone keenly. She kept wanting to text Ivan and Juan, to apologize to them both and find out how they were faring. She wanted to call her parents and beg them to come help her, but she couldn’t imagine how they could possibly stand up to the monster or monsters outside.
When she felt reasonably sure she was safe for now, Hasta opened the school nurse’s office in search of aspirin or something stronger. After dry-swallowing four Bayer tablets, she sat on the nurse’s table to wait for the throbbing in her head to subside. She only realized she’d begun to nod off when her chin touched her breastbone and her head jerked up. She shuddered, blinking hard. For just a moment there, she’d caught a glimpse of that vast plain of gray and salmon tiles. Heart pounding, she jumped down from the table and forced herself to walk up and down the hallway outside. She slurped cold water from a drinking fountain and splashed her face with it.
Mr. Sunshine had slipped away using some kind of invisibility cloak, or so it had appeared to Hasta. Watching herself in a girls’ room mirror, she tried to duplicate the gesture he’d used. If she could manage it, maybe she’d be able to sneak away from the school undetected.
She attempted the swooping gesture several times, like pulling an invisible cloak over her head, but her image in the mirror never changed. Was it working or not? She couldn’t tell. She wasn’t sure if being invisible meant she’d still be visible to herself. Without proof one way or the other, she couldn’t risk leaving the school.
After looking out at the taller agent one more time, Hasta decided to hit the computer lab and check her email. As she was heading toward the stairs, though, she noticed the little table in the front hallway with the memorial to Adele MacLeod and Brand Banks. She had never paid it much attention before, but now she wandered over to see what two drift casualties looked like.
The yearbook on the table was open to a page of Chess Club photos. Adele and Brand each appeared in more than one picture. She was a pretty, petite half-Korean girl. He was Black and slightly chubby, with horn-rimmed glasses and a friendly smile. They appeared in one photo together, seated on opposite sides of a chess board. Brand was studying the board, but Adele was looking at the camera through the circle of her right hand. Beside the photo was a note handwritten in blue ink:
hey brand
just a gesture of my great esteem
your pal
adele
A chill swept through Hasta. How many people out there didn’t know about this gestural stuff? And was she paranoid to start wondering if they had really overdosed? Maybe the slimeballs outside had gotten to them, and it only looked like a drift accident.
Creeped out, she hurried upstairs to the eerily silent computer lab. Not wanting to advertise her location, Hasta closed the blinds, then took a seat at someone else’s workstation. The power switch didn’t work so she used Ivan’s dial-twisting gesture to turn it on. The monitor sprang to life. Squinting, Hasta logged in under a system account that Ivan had long ago hacked.
Each workstation had a little webcam mounted on top of the monitor. Hasta started the app. A small window appeared on the screen, filled with a dark and grainy version of her moon-shaped face.
“Rats,” she muttered. There was her proof that the cloaking gesture hadn’t worked.
Students couldn’t access external email accounts and many other sites from behind the school’s firewall, but sysadmins could tunnel out through a proxy server that gave them access to the entire Web. Hasta brought up her various email accounts in different browser windows, but none of her new messages looked very important. Several chat requests popped up, all of which looked like they came from gamers she knew online. She set her status to AWAY and dismissed them all.
In a fresh window, she set about hunting for information about drift. She varied her search terms and ended up poring over every site from Wikipedia to Urban Dictionary. She skimmed articles about automotive drift, clock drift, continental drift, genetic drift, ice drift, linguistic drift, drift mining and more. What she didn’t find was any reference to drift as a pharmaceutical or narcotic of any kind, not even in the news.
“I’m just not getting the drift of this,” she said out loud and giggled. Sometimes she cracked herself up—especially when sleep-deprived.
As she rubbed her eyes, a soft chime heralded the arrival of a new chat request. She sat up in her chair. Tabbing over to Gmail, she found a Google Chat box open from a user named v15hnu_pr3z. The message said:
i think i am dreaming
A deep chill ran through Hasta. She didn’t know anyone named v15hnu_pr3z, but that first part sure looked a lot like Vishnu. The last part could be short for present or president—but it could also be short for Preserver.
Her fingers were frozen on the keyboard. This couldn’t be a message from a god, could it? What a crazy night this was that such a thing did not seem immediately impossible. She didn’t know what to say in response.
The chime sounded again:
am i dreaming
Hasta tried to type, but her shaking fingers turned the words to mush. She backspaced furiously and tried again:
I dont know.
Then, because that seemed somehow insufficient, she typed:
Sometmies when I deram, I cn fly.
The typos made her wince, but a moment later a response came:
i always can fly
I wish I cd fly, Hasta typed. Id fly right out of here.
stay in school, chimed her mysterious chat partner. education gives u wings
She snorted. Big help, thx a lot.
The machine was silent for several long moments. Hasta was beginning to think their chat session had ended when a new message appeared:
help me i dont want 2 wake up
How??? Hasta typed. Im trapped. My friends r captured. I cant even help myself.
when u have a problem its ok 2 talk 2 an adult such as a parent teacher or other authority figure
Yah sure, Hasta typed. Or like a cop, right?
The answer took a few seconds to come:
police cant help u
Hasta sat back in her chair, staring at the blinking cursor. She chewed the inside of her cheek.
Who r u? she typed. What do u want from me?
help me, came the response. a few r trying most will fail
She let loose a shout of frustration. Cn u tell me anything remotely useful? Is the world really ending?
? ur principal
“What about my principal?” Hasta muttered. “Wait—question my principal. Or do you mean question my principles?”
She was starting to ask for clarification when the chat box popped up one last message and turned gray:
pls lets chat again
The mysterious v15hnu_pr3z had gone offline.
“No, wait!” said Hasta. As weird and creepy as that had been, the dark room suddenly seemed all the more oppressive now that this slender thread of communication had been cut.
Hasta logged out of Gmail, cleared her browser cache, and turned off the workstation. She hurried down the stairs and back to the main office, pausing only to check at the front windows that the tall agent was still maintaining his long, wet vigil. He was.
Time to question her principal.
No staff directory was available to students, but Hasta figured the principal had to have one on paper somewhere in her office. It turned out to be in her top desk drawer, right below the telephone. Until the chat with v15hnu_pr3z, it hadn’t occurred to her that there were landlines in the school she could use. What other obvious solutions to her problems was she overlooking out of sheer inexperience and exhaustion? She’d never had to fight for her life before, let alone for anything bigger than her own life.
Like her friends’ lives. Maybe everybody’s lives. The idea made her want to crawl under the desk and never come out again.
She found the listing she was looking for, Ada Armisted, on the first page of the directory. Hasta snorted a laugh. The stuffy, old-fashioned name couldn’t have been more perfect.
Hasta pressed the speakerphone button and selected an outside line. The loud buzz of a dial tone filled the office, startling her. She hesitated before dialing. She had to be crazy to think of bothering the principal at home at this hour, stuffy old name or not. She was already on the verge of suspension.
Screw it. Hasta dialed.
Armisted answered before the first ring had ended. “Miss Veeramachaneni,” she said. She sounded fully awake and alert. “I hoped I’d hear from you. You’re at the school, I take it? How are you?”
Hearing that voice, Hasta choked back a sudden rush of sobs. “They took Juan,” she said, covering her eyes with her hand. “I don’t know where Ivan is. I’m trapped here all by myself.”
“Which ‘they’ do you mean?” asked the principal urgently.
“Mr. Sunshine from middle school.”
Armisted let out a breath. “I must say, that’s a relief.”
“What?” said Hasta. “He’s some kind of drift kingpin. He’s not a very nice man.”
“I know that, and I didn’t say it’s not a situation for concern. But the boy is far better off with Kenneth Sunshine than he would be with the daemons. At least this way he stands a chance.”
“Daemons? Oh, God, I think one of them’s after Ivan. If he’s not captured already.” Hasta took a breath to calm herself. “My friends need help. I have to find a way out of here.”
“Miss Veeramachaneni, your job for now is to stay in the school. You need to sleep.”
“Sleep? Are you crazy? It’s not safe in here.”
“Not perfectly safe, no, but it’s the safest place you’re likely to find.”
Hasta pressed her hand against her eyes. She couldn’t get enough air. “Please. Is the world really ending?”
A fusillade of rain spattered the window. The principal sighed. “Almost certainly.”
It was bad enough to hear it from crazy Mr. Sunshine, but to hear it from the principal made the bottom drop out of Hasta’s stomach. “Well, what can we do about it?”
“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it. I certainly can’t. I can only hope we’ve trained you or one of the others well enough that it makes a difference.”
“Trained me?” Hasta said. “No one’s trained me for anything!”
Principal Armisted clucked. “Hasta, my child, we’ve done nothing but train you in your time at Amundsen.”
Hasta stared at the dark ceiling, clenching her fists. “To do what—keep my mouth shut?”
“To think for yourself, to ask questions. Hasta, we’ve provided you the best environment we could in which to learn to rebel.”
What? The principal wanted her to rebel? All the idiocy and angst of high school was deliberate? “Is that supposed to help me save the world or something?”
“Not really, no—but that may turn out to be a beneficial side effect.”
“Side effect of what?”
Principal Armisted cleared her throat. “I know this has been a difficult night for you, but I function under certain unbreachable constraints, as do your teachers.”
Hasta wanted to beat the telephone to fragments. “Mr. Sunshine doesn’t seem to function under any constraints.”
“Yes, well,” said the principal, clearing her throat again. “Mr. Sunshine is not an Amundsen teacher. In any event, how he manages to do the things he does is a vexing mystery.”
Whatever, thought Hasta. “What about the agents, the daemons—Tweedledum and Tweedledumber?”
“My child,” said Principal Armisted, and something in her steely tone made Hasta’s skin prickle, “do not underestimate those creatures. They’re as implacable as the phases of the moon. They’re enforcers of the natural order, their existence woven into the very fabric of the world. Think of them like sharks—superb predators surviving virtually unchanged through eons of time while the world remakes itself around them.”
The crushing weight of unimaginable millennia seemed to fill the darkened office. Hasta had never felt so inadequate and insignificant. “If they’re such superb predators,” she asked, “why can’t they come inside the school?”
“Enough questions,” said the principal. “You must sleep.”
Hasta ground her teeth. “And while I’m sleeping,” she said, probing desperately for something helpful, “what happens if Vishnu wakes up?”
The faint hiss of ambient noise was all that came from the speaker for several seconds. When Principal Armisted spoke again, her voice was somehow quieter yet more urgent. “Hasta, please. Find a comfortable, hidden place. Go.”
Hasta began to shake. She’d caught a glimpse of something while Erin was choking her, something strange. She couldn’t remember what it was, but she knew the mere thought of it frightened her. Would sleep bring that vision back? She began to suspect that this might be why kids like Gillian starting using drift.
In a small voice, she said, “I’m afraid.”
“You’d be a fool if you weren’t,” said the principal. “Now goodnight.”
The harsh buzz of the dial tone filled the room.
Hasta stabbed the phone off. Unwilling to leave the office just yet, she turned on the principal’s computer and logged in. She wanted to see if v15hnu_pr3z would talk to her again, but when she brought up Gmail he didn’t appear to be online.
She did have new email, though. From Ivan. √
To be continued…