by Ryan Tang
Her students surged out of the room.
"Ms. Alex! Ms. Alex!"
"Teach us! Teach us how you did that!"
The librarian shook her head.
"Get back to your class!"
Mrs. T winced.
"That was the end of the story."
Other students walked out of the reading room, the thin ghostly figures of the lost children intermingling with the students Alex and Mrs. T had taught since they were babies. The adults walked out after them, frowning and crying. Alex wiped away the rest of her tears and sadly shook her head.
Most of the stories tried ending on a positive note. After all, they'd all joined together to defeat Stock, shouting out their stories at the top of their lungs. The force of the truth revealed his deceits, broke his power, and withered his goddess to nothing.
But how positive could you be if your whole family had dissolved right in front of you?
Alex stared at the Eternium shelves and tried turning her grief into resolve. It was a slippery and uncomforting thing. She swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to heat her heart and stomach.
A blue flicker winked back at her, twisting and turning through the void black. Her Paragon was waiting. After the battle, they'd gathered up the broken pieces of her machine and returned them to the Spire.
This was why she had to be an ace.
She couldn't let anyone hurt her friends and neighbors again.
As the adults hurried back to work, Alex noticed that she wasn't the only person who'd needed a long night's sleep. Almost everyone looked tired and haggard. They had guilty and awkward looks on their faces, looks that said they thought they should be working harder. A reading session was only about 30 minutes. It was usually a workers' only break, and often the only time they saw their children outside of the home. But considering the colossal damage Stock had done, even a tiny break led to a downpour of guilt.
Guilt for resting, and even more insidious, guilt for surviving. Alex felt that as keenly as anyone. Alex had been lucky. The librarians had only been captured near the very end of Stock's scheme. Her parents didn't live on Plenty. Compared to the others, she'd gotten off easily.
Matthew waved apologetically as he stepped out, briefly yanking her back from the poisonous thoughts.
"I'll come back tomorrow. We'll practice then. It's time for my shift."
He turned to his son and winked.
"Don't give them too much trouble!"
A long row of Peacetime models was parked outside. The strange and gangly machines had no armor. Jared designed them to use as little metal as possible, so they'd be cheap and easy to produce. The Paragons were hunched up on all fours and relied on their enormous hands and feet to balance themselves. Only Eternium was light enough to support a humanoid structure. Jared's machines looked like apes or trolls. Due to the bizarre proportions, almost everyone called them Hands Paragons.
But despite their strange shape, the machines were perfect for colony reconstruction. If the Paragons of Old Earth had the strength of a thousand people when it came to warfare, the Hands Paragons had the strength of a thousand people when it came to making repairs.
After the devastating quake that occurred after Stock first harvested the core's Eternium, Jared had used his machine to rebuild homes. The brave decision had spawned Stock's enmity. The tyrannical oligarch tried coercing people into working for his company by leveraging their homelessness. He'd even sent an assassin in a Paragon gilded with Eternium armor to try and kill Jared.
But Plenty had won. Stock was defeated, and now they were using the mass-produced machine to rebuild the whole colony.
Mrs. T shot a look at Alex and twirled her fingers together.
Alex smiled and nodded.
"Alright everyone! Gather around! We're going to try and command Eternium again."
A demonstration would be just the thing to try and cheer up her students after such a difficult story.
It might cheer Alex up too.
She set her hand on the cold black metal, then paused to gather her words. Not even Alex herself fully understood why Eternium responded to her the way it did. Mrs. T said it was because the tower loved her, but not even the other librarians could summon the metal. She'd been trying to teach her friends for weeks but had seen very little progress. She only knew of two others who could command Eternium.
The first was the mysterious golden boy from Block 12, the one who'd died in the tunnels. The children from Block 12 had called him Fred, but he'd called himself a different name, one she'd never heard of before. Falo. Alex thought he might have been a Mad Noble, one of the ancestral tyrants who'd inadvertently rendered Old Earth uninhabitable. He'd died after Stock betrayed him.
The second person who could command Eternium was the big man who killed him, Stock's associate who'd escaped in the orange pod.
Alex clenched her fist. She thought about that man whenever she stepped inside a pilot's chair. If he returned, she'd have to be ready for him.
She made herself smile, then gathered her students around her. She didn't feel happy right now, but it was part of being a teacher and part of being an ace. She had to make her students feel comfortable, and that included her attitude and demeanor.
In the far corner, she noticed a few of her kids shifting awkwardly from side to side. Nico and Alice whispered urgently with one of the pale students from Block 12. The librarian made a mental note to check on what was bothering them after everyone left.
"Alright. So what I do is, I concentrate as hard as I can. I like to think of it as a mental spear. There are different ways to do it. I like to close my eyes. But that's not the important part. Do what makes you the most comfortable. All that matters is concentrating on a single thought. Then I press against the metal and let my thought enter the void."
She closed her eyes and concentrated.
When she needed to, she could summon Eternium almost instantaneously, but now she made her movements slow and deliberate so everyone could see.
She placed her palm against the floor.
Her thought-spear pierced the Eternium. She could feel the mental image travel from her brain to her heart and then to her fingers.
Vibrant blues erupted into the air. The metal twisted around her hands, waiting eagerly for her to dictate its shape.
"Then I let my thought diffuse. I release it into the metal. I let it spread out and push against the black until it turns into the shape I'm looking for."
It was hard to find the words. To Alex, commanding the Spire's Eternium was instinctive. The first time the metal bent to her will had been entirely by accident. It was only through her later experiments that she discovered the properties and rules of the legendary metal.
The Eternium dissolved into a pool of swirling blues.
Then her fingers danced, and The Spire danced with them.
A tiny head formed, closely followed by a miniature arm. The torso emerged from a crescent moon shape. A hand reached down and pulled a pair of weapons from the ground – a pirate's cutlass and a long rifle, the same arms she'd wielded against Stock during the climactic battle.
She snapped her fingers, and the tiny model of her Paragon soared gracefully through the air.
"Wow!"
"Awesome!"
Alex grinned.
"Now, here's something interesting."
The Paragon flew over and landed in Mrs. T's palm. Alex twirled her fingers, and the machine started dancing. Her students giggled.
"So even though Mrs. T is holding it, the machine's still mine. So I can make it do what I want. But let's say I choose to give it to her."
The librarian took a deep breath.
"The Paragon is yours now."
At once, the machine stopped its cute dance. The proud head bowed, and it fell into a dormant state.
"Mrs. T can't command Eternium, so she can't make the model dance. But if I gave her my Paragon, she'd be able to pilot it."
"Wow! That's cool
!"
"Give me a model!"
"No! Me!"
"Here's the problem."
She put her hand to the ground again, but this time, nothing happened. The metal remained stubbornly cold. A strange chiding pressure deflected her will. The feeling reminded the librarian of the fables her mom read to her when she was a girl. Stories like the farmer who killed the golden goose or the greedy woodcutter who threw his ax into the river. Eternium had already granted her an incomparable wonder. It wasn't her place to give it to somebody else.
It was only when Mrs. T handed the model back that the metal responded again. Alex gestured and the Eternium model dove back into the ground. There was another flash. Then the floor was the same void black as before. Raw Eternium was the darkest substance humanity had ever seen.
"Eternium can't be cheated. That's why we need to find other people who can forge it!"
Her students cheered excitedly, each imagining that they'd be ones who could access the legendary metal.
Alex took a careful look around the room.
Some of her students glared daggers into the black metal. Others squeezed their eyes shut so tightly their faces crinkled. A few slammed their hands into the ground. Most of them murmured beneath their breath as they gently pushed their palms forward.
Thin white hands that looked like ghosts' intermingled with those of her students. Some of the hands were cut and broken. They were missing fingers. Flesh had been out of their palms.
Alex's heart blackened with hatred, and she cursed Stock for the billionth time.
There were a few sparks, a few signs of Eternium reacting to their deliberate probes. A handful of colors danced through the air, but it was nowhere near enough to command the metal.
Nico, a small boy with glasses who was one of her most eager students, gnashed his teeth with frustration. He grunted angrily and started pulling at the nearest shelf, as if he could yank a shape out of the Eternium.
"Come on! Come on! Damn it!"
Alex blushed a little at his angry curse.
It was her fault.
A lot of parents had pointed out she should stop cursing in front of their kids.
The rest of the class cried out in frustration.
"Come on!"
"Why the fuck isn't this working?"
"Holy shit! Come out! Come out!"
Alex turned even redder. She was just about to tell them to watch their language when a sad voice echoed through the room.
"I got it."
The class turned and gasped.
Alex turned and gasped with them.
A thin boy from The Wastes held a very familiar shield in his hands. The rounded dome was teal and silver when it should have been purple and gold, but Alex would have recognized the massive kraken anywhere.
"Wow! Nice!"
"Amazing, Jon!"
Alice beamed from ear to ear as she put a hand on her friend's back. Alice and Jon had become very fast friends. They'd lost so much during the crisis. Alice's parents had died brainwashed, and the strange golden boy from the tunnels had been Jon's foster brother. The prisoners of Block 12 had left their longstanding prison to find the lost boy only to arrive moments after the big man killed him.
"Fred! That's Fred's shield!"
A very tall and gangly boy gaped in wonder. Jon held the shape for a moment longer, and then it dissolved into a puddle. The colors vanished as the metal returned to the Spire floor.
The pale boy began to cry.
Mrs. T ushered the other children out of the room as Alex walked over to Jon. Alice was awkwardly hugging him, but he didn't seem to notice. Nico hovered clumsily in the background. He would hesitantly step forward like he wanted to hug Jon too, but then he'd wince and backtrack. Alex couldn't blame him.
The thin little boy sobbed and sobbed.
"Fred. I can't stop thinking about him. What if I'd been faster? Why did we wait?"
Alex smiled sadly at the dark Eternium floor.
The boy had forged his mental spear from grief.
Jon turned and stared into Alex's eyes. He stared through his tears with an intensity she remembered well. His brother had stared at her like that in book-corridors. There was a manic look to him. Nobody, especially not a young boy his age, should ever look like that.
"I hear him. I hear him calling out from the metal."
Alex repressed a shudder.
Could it be?
The legends said that Eternium was influenced by everything that touched it. It only slightly assimilated with baser materials like paint. As far as Alex could tell, the books on the walls had little effect on the Spire. But blood stained it bright red, and a powerful spirit could transform the metal entirely.
Jon's brother had dissolved into a puddle deep in the Spire's basement.
She anxiously licked her lips, but before she could speak, he said something even more horrifying.
"I saw him too. I saw him walking around the courtyard."
"What?"
Her surprise made the question come out much sharper than she'd wanted it to, but her students didn't seem to notice.
Nico nodded.
"I saw ghosts too! I saw my mom! Two nights ago. And the night before that! She was just walking around the courtyard. But when I ran down to see her, she disappeared."
Each word sent a little spike of fear scurrying up her spine. The jolts quickly stacked on top of each other. Her dread mounted higher and higher with every word.
Ghosts?
How could it be?
Alice quickly agreed.
"I saw ghosts too, but not my parents. Do you think that means they are still alive?"
That couldn't be it. Alex had seen Alice's father die with her own eyes. Stock had splattered him against the Spire during their final battle. Alice's mom was one of the many people still unaccounted for, but that meant little. After all, the people who'd been sacrificed had disappeared completely. Alice's mom hadn't seemed like the true believer, but you could never really tell what was inside someone's heart.
"What do you mean? What are you guys talking about?"
All three of her students looked right at her.
"Ms. Alex. There are ghosts in the courtyard. Lots of them."
____
Alex whirled and gazed at the Spire's black walls. She looked past them and into the book-corridors, thinking of the wailing that'd once haunted the tunnels. She and Emile had dismissed the bizarre noise as nothing more than some trick of the wind.
Instead, it'd been the goddess lurking in the basement.
The librarian shuddered and had to sit down.
Her students rushed toward her.
"Ms. Alex, are you alright?"
"Ms. Alex! We didn't mean to scare you."
She scowled inwardly.
She shouldn't be receiving comfort from her kids, especially not after Jon had pulled the shield out and cried. She was their teacher. She was Plenty's ace.
She took a deep breath and imagined herself inside the cockpit of a Paragon. Inside a Paragon, Alex's doubts and fears always melted away as her battle-mind surged forward.
The librarian took a better look at her students. They needed to sleep. They looked even more tired than their parents. Their eyes were bloodshot, and they could barely keep their feet.
For a brief moment, Alex felt a small spurt of a strange feeling she couldn't quite describe as relief. Maybe her students were so tired they just thought they saw ghosts.
Then she shook her head and pushed the thought aside.
There were three of them seeing the same thing, and so many strange things had happened on Plenty already. She didn't want to believe what her students were saying, but she innately felt it had to be true.
"Have you guys been staying up to watch the ghosts?"
They nodded.
"Alright, well, that ends tonight. I'm going to send you guys off to Jared's house."
Stock had destroyed most of the homes, but Jared's massive
house on Block 1 had been located far from the quakes. There'd be good rooms for her kids there.
She swiftly cut off their protests.
"I will investigate very carefully, but the three of you need some sleep."
She had to take care of them, and that meant letting them rest. She was their teacher and Plenty's ace. After sleeping last night, Alex's brain felt alive in a way it hadn't been before. It'd been a slow deterioration she hadn't consciously realized. In hindsight, she wouldn't have been able to deal with this problem last night, not even with her battle-mind. She had Matthew to thank for that, and now she would help her students the same way.
"But..."
"Come on, Ms. Alex!"
She smiled and then pulled the same card Matthew did.
"No. I'm not going to look for these ghosts unless you sleep."
They groaned.
"Come on!"
"But Ms. Alex!"
She immediately cut off their protests then pulled out her tablet to send Jared a message. Her friend quickly agreed to take them with him.
"Alright. Before you guys head out, I'm going to need as many details as possible."
They looked at her blankly for a moment until she clarified. Alex shook her head. They really were too tired to think.
"What do the ghosts look like? How many are there? What did you guys see?"
The other two naturally deferred to Jon, allowing him to answer. He seemed like a natural leader. She'd seen students like that before. Apparently, he was also the person who'd convinced the citizens of Block 12 to leave their prison.
"Nico saw the ghosts first. He couldn't sleep and thought he'd get some reading done by the window. Then he saw his mom walking around in the courtyard. He ran down to look at her, but then she was gone. He thought he was just seeing things, so he kept to himself. The next day, there were a lot of ghosts. He woke me up, and I told Alice. On the third day, we decided to go down and try to talk to them. That was when I saw Fred. But when we got down there, they vanished as soon as we walked up to them.
"Did you guys take a picture?"
Jon scowled.
"No. I thought of it, but it was the same thing. They disappeared whenever I pointed my tablet at them. We're not lying though. We're not lying!"