A burst of steam and light from behind Amanda played with her hair and skirt, and a sudden red glow lit up her face.
The cappucino was ready!
With a smile that could disarm businessmen, she swept off to deliver a tray of coffee to a table of professors and students. I wiped my forehead with my wrist, keeping up the effort of restricting my cleaning efforts to the area around Alex's table.
"Listen to this," Alex said, disgusted. "The President's Welcome is nothing but patting herself on the back and denying bribery charges," she went on, referring to student body president Nobuko Wing. "I can't believe we voted her in after you guys covered the scandal."
"I'd love to chat, dollface, but I gotta run." I cut her off as gently as I could. "Boss is shooting death rays at me." Too late, though. The store owner and business manager for the university's campus shops started to stalk over. Julia Hibble was a good friend, but a fierce amazon of a young lady making her way into the marketing world.
"Jack," she began.
"I'm gonna get some orange juice, sweetie," Alex said, getting up. "Hi Julia."
"Hey you!" Julia returned comfortably, dodging around chairs. She allowed Alex to duck under the glare she put right back into position.
An uncomfortable couple of seconds passed as my company changed rounds. Stuck cleaning the underside of one of the dozens of tables in the coffee shop, I tried not to look as my boss came within conversational distance.
"You stole my lighter," she said, smiling.
Ah, crap. That's right, I forgot to give it back-
"Honey listen," she said quickly. "It's gonna be a busy day. Do your best to keep this organized, okay? Don't spend so much time cleaning your girlfriend's table."
"She's not my girlfriend," I said, relieved she wasn't actually mad.
"I'm not his girlfriend!" Alex piped up helpfully from the counter, getting her drink. Amanda stuck her tongue out at her and turned at the bar to take another customer's order.
I was left alone to collect my thoughts for a moment or two.
My fourth year at Windy City started today. I wasn't nervous- I've done this routine enough to know what all the important parts are. I wasn't in school for the school anymore.
Alex still studied hard. Her national biotechnology tests were coming up in the Spring, even though more than anything she wanted to be a tapdancer. We've talked about it a lot since I met her here three years ago today.
"Hey." A fresh wet towel slapped down on the table next to me.
"Hey," I said back. Amanda dropped off a bucket of clean water for me before she went back to the counter. I was flattered- she didn't have to spend her free moments here doing stuff like that. We get all the free coffee we want, after all.
"So, did you read it? The President's Welcome? It jumps all the way to page C8." Alex plopped back down, sipping.
"I'm not responsible, I tell you," I said, smiling. "I don't own the newspaper, I'm just a lowly reporter."
After a couple of hours of class, I punched in at what now felt like home- the mansion. Situated almost exactly in the center of campus, the paper's headquarters was always in the middle of the action. That was part of why we were such a good publication, and had so many legal complaints.
I don't know where the nickname came from- the building itself was an unflattering concrete block with black windows. If you didn't have a reason to be there, your eyes could go right past it.
My access card slid through the sensor, and the front door opened. I pulled hard- the front doors were heavy and airlocked. A stale, familiar breeze pushed on my face as I went in.
"Adams!" I was greeted immediately by my editor, holding a loudspeaker made of a rolled-up magazine. "Adams is back!" The greeting came in the form of a friendly club to the shoulder hard enough to make me do a half-spin.
"Hey, Eli."
Before I'd gotten two words in, he was off. I had two assignments for late tonight, and there were dozens of administrator quotes to get for our centerpiece. My head spun, but I was used to it. This was what I did.
I signed out the voice recorder, grabbed a camera, and dashed out to dig up the scoop on rumors of unidentified cultist clubs. It wasn't my first time doing something so "interest piece" but I wasn't too bothered. Cults on Campus will be my first story of the year!
"That kid," said sports editor Wendy Meza, laughing. She was a tiny, atypical sportsdesk type- she stuck to numbers and records to make her points, and was gaining steam as a statistician. "You're too hard on him, Eli. I didn't even get to say hi."
"You'll be fine," Eli said. He sat back at his desk and reminded her they had an entire year of news coverage to exchange pleasantries over.
I got a text message, ten minutes later.
SAW YOU COME IN, CUTEY. WELCOME BACK! -W
"How did it go?" Alex was on her couch with a book.
I was on the floor, exhausted and happy. We stared at the ceiling together. "Sucked. This is going to be a tough story, I can't get anyone who knows anything." This was one of many rituals. Before dinner, we'd vent and sympathize. I passed. "What about you?"
She had her in braids. The beads clicked when she moved her head. "Same old," she said, a little subdued. I wondered if something was troubling her. We tried to get some homework done, but we were both distracted. We shared a creative writing course, and neither one of us could seem to get our minds around the first assignment.
My name is Jack Adams. I live a simple life, and have never been in a fight. Everything I know is going to change.
I threw the paper down ineffectually, causing only spin and fluttering to the carpet. "Let's break into the library," Alex said.
Exploring this strange campus was one of our hobbies. A lot of it just didn't make any sense- stone columns that didn't support anything, towers that led to nowhere, glass greenhouses that didn't hold anything except weeds. There were places we'd seen that contractors and professors on campus couldn't find on any map, any many of them were underground. This library was one of them.
We'd spent a week trying to get in- it had never taken this long, before. Like all the other places, there were no alarms, just a lot of locks and obstacles. A janitorial or service tunnel broke slowly into unfinished dirt walls and got us as far as, we estimated, right under the campus clock tower. Suddenly, though, it broke into smooth concrete tiles and a stairwell with a gleaming chrome handrail. Over the week, Alex picked a lock (we simultaneously shouted, celebratory, when it happened- both of us scared each other) and I managed to break a door down when I brought my screwdriver the next day. We ventured further down each time we got it, and every floor held dungeons of warehouse-sized library sprawls. They all looked mostly the same: stone shelves bound by steps and arches that connected to eachother, and gloom that went further than our eyes and flashlights.
When Alex suggested that we break in tonight, I knew what she meant. She was in a mood to dive into this and get it done, which meant something was bothering her. Breaking down this next door wouldn't solve any of her problems, but it would help her feel like she was getting something done.
It was late by now, but we were excited. The further down we climbed, the louder the noises got. It was a humming at first, but by the time we were down as far as our next door, it was a dinosaur's rumbling. There was a churning in the earth, like a million goblins spinning in squeaky metal office chairs. Like a monster factory. And the noise intensified behind the door.
The door itself was plain, but strangely decorated. Corners met and receded, and the fluting effect caught four angles at the center of the doorway. There was no handle, no lock, and no doorknob. But last night, we'd caught sight of a hidden panel next to the door's frame. When I pulled it away, all that was behind it was an engraved circle, some electrical switches, and two spinning bars. It looked like a breaker box that hadn't grown up yet, and I put the thing back in place. We left, defeated.
But today, in between assignments, I'd done some digging in our paper's archives for anything about the clock tower. I only found one story about the clock stopping, and assumed at the time this meant it was such a frequent occurance, no one bothered to report it anymore. When I dug up an issue dated 1703, I laughed and put the thing aside with the other April Fools issues. Nothing in the edition was worth reading, except the clock story. It said the hands had stopped at 10:54.
That point in the evening had come and gone, but I wasn't convinced the seamless door would open magically at any hour.
Alex gave the heavy door a kick. The bang bounced up the metal and concrete steps, disappearing in a spiral above us. Agitated, she put her fingers into the ridges of the door, searching. I took the panel off. It came away big enough for my hands to grip shoulder-width apart. I set it down, and spun the brass bars inside the niche. They clicked at small, regular intervals. This was it- those markings were definitely minutes.
Alex looked over at me suddenly, as if she'd heard something I hadn't. The hands hit 10:54. The door opened.
A small boy wearing a white collared shirt stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting. There were lights in this room- plenty. The place was filled with light of all kinds. Against it, his hair was so pale it looked almost blue. He smiled to himself as the stone door slid open.
Quiet voices moused their way in- a young woman, dripping with nonviolent bloodlust, and a young man who sounded oblivious to just about everything. College students. The boy turned his back on them. They were all the same.
"Well, well!" said a sudden voice at a conversational level. I jumped. Alex shrieked. "Now, don't be scared. I've only just come in! I welcome you here."
We made our way into the room together, but slowly. There was too much to look at- my eyes couldn't stand still. An amphitheater seemed to have been haphazardly carved into the dirt and stone beneath the campus, here- unfinished tunnels and alcoves that ended in darkness. But the room itself bustled with the inside of a clock. A giant pendulum penetrated the floor near where we'd come in, and gearwheels the size of cows spun everywhere. A belt dropped from a wide slice in the makeshift ceiling, was caught by a handful of wheels, and spun back up into blackness.
"It's the heart of the clocktower," Alex said.
"Bravo, Alex! You figured it out." I couldn't tell if the boy's cheerful voice was mocking or not. I felt outraged, suddenly, but couldn't understand why. I wanted to question the kid and get the scoop on this place. But somehow, I didn't feel right taking charge for once. I looked at Alex.
"Do you.. need help?" she asked, at a little bit of a loss. Finding something as grandiose as this probably wasn't exactly what she was expecting. I wondered if that bothered her. She approached the boy slowly. "Are you lost?"
He shot a grimacing smile at her, and I then knew we were being mocked. I realized why the hair on the back of my neck was standing up- this kid spoke down to us exactly like a bully planning on getting your lunch money. I'd romp him if I had to, kid or not.
"You, Alexandra St.Cirh, are the one that is lost. You agree, don't you?"
I looked over at her. She swallowed, looking pissed.
"You see..." He gestured with one hand, still staring at us, to a polished wooden windowframe I hadn't noticed before. Impossibly, I saw the moon in the sky through it. Pale light even trickled in and pooled on the floor. "...the red star, don't you?"
She whirled on him. "Tell me what you know! This is about the dreams I've been having. Isn't it!"
The boy leaned forward, enticing and threatening. "You were meant to be here, Alexandra. Come here. I'll prove it to you."
I looked at her, and she looked at me. We both looked at the boy, who kept staring at us. The silence was awkward enough to prompt her to step towards him uncertainly. He kept staring, that awful grin stuck on his face, so Alex kept walking. The gears ground with rhythmic rage around us.
Suddenly, a flash of light flared at her hands. I sucked in a breath, startled- Now what? -and she reacted immediately, but strangely. I would become familiar with moves like it. In the face of the surprise, she held one arm out straight and the other bent slightly. The flare became a gleaming warhammer, head resting on the ground. With some effort, she spun it into attack mode- both arms bent like a jogger, hammer's pole set against her left hip.
I was mesmerized. A sound like whispers over glass filled the room as the light died, and droplets of something vanished before they hit the ground. The warhammer was as tall as she was, flawlessly sharp and angular, and gleaming so thoroughly I could hardly bear to look at it. I couldn't look away. The colors behind the shine shifted from black to white to shale blue to maroon and back again. Alex held the thing as if it weighed almost nothing.
"What..." she said, her face hidden from me. She sounded choked up or panicked, and I took a step forward to intervene with whatever was going on.
"These are elements, Alex," said the boy. She looked wonderingly at the thing in her hands, puzzled and shellshocked. "You stay there, shadow." He pointed at me, giving me one quick glance. "This is her fight."
That's when we both noticed new sounds. A rasping, clawing, breathing roar coming from the doorway to the stairwell. Something was coming down towards us. I started sweating. "Alex."
She whirled back towards the boy, having turned with me to face the sounds. When the pistol end of her hammer connected with the floor, it made a loud, low noise exactly like pieces of chalk hitting each other. "You said these."
I struggled to think what she was talking about. She couldn't possibly be stuck on semantics when there was a-
"Yes, Alex. Two Childs currently share the space beneath the clock tower. You hold the weapon bestowed to you by Verhartet, the blood Child of moonlight and darkness." He gestured again, this time to a man-sized alcove off behind a lot of the gearwork. Though the spot was bathed in darkness, we could see everything he pointed to. There was the silhouette of a face there- something black and snarling, with slits for eyes.
"I don't know him," Alex said, breathlessly. She and I kept glancing behind us.
"I know," the boy said back. He smiled. "Then let me show you the other, princess." Strangely, that word didn't sound mocking at all.
Hurried, we were led to the back of the room. The warhammer puffed out of Alex's hands quickly, almost resentfully. The boy stopped at a strange clockwork podium. A gigantic pendulum, bigger and louder than the one near the stairwell, swung behind it, hiding a door.
Alex was beckoned inside. The boy put something to work at the altar, and mechanisms started turning. A windvane, set above the door, started spinning in its niche. "This is a private affair, boy. You stay here."
Without looking back, Alex walked slowly up the shallow steps as the door slid open. Another burst of light lit her up, but I couldn't see what was in her hands. The pendulum swung by, and she was through. The door closed again.
Was it a trap?
"Alex!" I shouted. The sounds were coming closer. Minutes seemed to pass as the boy kept studying me. "What?" I snapped at him, getting angry and scared. He didn't say anything back.
I heard claws scraping against chrome, and grunts of breath from a big mouth. The floor shook with the impact of the thing bounding down the stairwell towards us. I was surprised the steps didn't collapse under the weight.
"Alex!"
I looked around, frantically, for a weapon. There were no free scraps or refuse- everything existed, down here, for a purpose.
The clockwork world under the campus was invaded by screams and dust. Light motes spun away dizzily, surprised at the intrusion. The beast hit the far side of the stairwell with a thud that sent concrete chips and dust flying, and crawled halfway through the doorway. I caught sight of dark mandibles and fangs. A bloodred tongue. I couldn't find the eyes. Claws gripped the doorframe, scratching against the wall. The monster slid all the way through.
"Alex!"
"Fascino!" Twin beams of light blazed by my shoulders, making sounds like the snap of metal-against-metal or a zipped groan. I whirled- Alex was there, holding two small crossbows. Something was coming to life at her feet.
"Is this what you've chosen, Alexandra HiME? Will you fight with Fascino?"
I screamed as the monster lunged towards me blindly. My shoulder hit the ground and I slid- had I been hit? I got up, unwounded, to the cacophony of gears hitting the floor or each other. I scrambled to the side, sliding under another podium-like structure.
"I will!" She shot the crossbows again, rapidfire, and the beams bounced against the brass teeth of the machines. Each of the pale, glowing shots somehow found the monster. It set its claws into the floor and gave a scream of rage loud enough to, probably, stop the clocktower again. My gut had fallen into an icy nihilistic sky, and I was sure I was dead.
But a creature rose from the machines at Alex's feet. A pale lion's mane around an Eastern dragon's head floated up, wispily, from the stone. Brass bars ticked by, gears glowed into place, and glasslike green eyes rolled wildly. A black bubble blasted up from her feet and sent the darker monster flying. I lost sight of the sudden shadows, confused.
"Will you put what's most important to you on the line, and dance with a loving heart?"
"I will!"
Fascino stood in place regally for one second, looking like nothing so much as a serpentine New Year's decoration bought in Chinatown. Like the warhammer I'd seen, the creature didn't seem to be made from anything I recogized. It was neither glass nor gear, or flesh and bone. It simply gleamed with that unearthly light.
It roared.