Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144277 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 721(@200wpm)___ 577(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
My steps are quick, urging Finn to keep pace, my curiosity and wonder subsiding with each step. Anxiety and dread resurfacing, replacing those feelings.
Once out the door, I nod to the left. “The Matron Tower is this way.”
“Lead on,” Finn replies, as we follow the serene hallway for several minutes, veering left each time we come to a junction, before finally reaching the glass bridge connecting to the Maiden Tower.
“Wow,” Finn says, looking down at the small, tertiary canal underneath as we cross. “I never knew this was here. I thought I knew every nook and cranny about Tau City, none of this looks familiar.”
“Huh. I thought the same thing when I crossed. Not that I knew every nook and cranny, it’s just… the glass bridge, right?”
Finn nods. “Yeah. It’s…”
“Out of place?” I ask.
“That.”
“Well, just wait until you see what’s in that room.”
“Isn’t it crazy that all this shit was going on behind the scenes and no one ever knew about it?”
“Mind boggling,” I agree.
We walk in silence for the next few minutes as I try to remember how to get to the Looking Glass room. We have to backtrack a couple of times, but finally, I recognize the door. “This is it.” I pan my hand to it, inviting him to go first.
He steps up, tries the handle, then looks at me with wide eyes. “It’s open.” Then pushes a little, and it opens with a creak.
He steps in first, blocking my view, but quickly moves aside to let me in.
I close the door behind me, but my eyes are glued on what’s in front of me.
“This… doesn’t look broken,” Finn says.
No. Indeed it doesn’t. Everything is the same as it was in our city, but all of it is working. And I’m so confused at what I’m looking at, I can’t even explain it.
The glass… plates?—that’s the only word I have for them—are lit up with… people. They are moving. Like the way his father’s message was moving in the glass tiles up in Finn’s Extraction Tower dome, but… nothing like that at all, actually.
The moving pictures aren’t in color. There’s a lot of spark interfering with the images, so they’re not crisp and clear, but fuzzy and hard to see. Plus, Aldo Scott’s face up in his Looking Glass was the size of a giant. It took up the whole front of the dome.
These people are tiny.
“Are they workers?” I ask. “Or are they like us?”
Finn walks over to the closest plate and flicks it with his finger. It makes a dull plink sound. He leans in, trying to see them better. “I think… they’re matrons.”
“What?” I lean in too.
“Look, they’re old like Matrons. And they’re definitely not workers. They’re wearing clothes.”
They are wearing clothes, I had noticed that immediately. I just didn’t assume they were Matrons because they’re definitely not wearing blue tunics and cream scapular aprons. They’re wearing… pants. My nose crinkles up. “What kind of Matron wears pants?”
I look to Finn and find him shrugging. “The ones who run Xi Factory?”
Thoroughly confused, but also intrigued, we turn back to the plates. “Look,” I say, pointing at another one. This one is different than the others, which all show the same scene. Pant-wearing Matrons doing… something or other, I don’t know.
But this plate is all black with a bunch of bright green letters and symbols that fill the entire screen from top to bottom, though not left to right.
At the very bottom is a single upright line. Maybe an L? Capital I? Not sure, but it’s flashing.
“What the hell language is this?” Finn asks.
“Is it a language? Because it doesn’t look like a language to me. It looks like… random.”
“I don’t think it’s random, Jasina. It has to mean something. I mean, look around. Something is happening here, right?”
I do have to admit that something is most definitely happening here.
“Look,” he says. “What’s this?”
“Ohh!” I brighten. Because he’s pointing to… well, I don’t have a name for it, but long, and black, and sitting right underneath the black plate with the weird symbols on it. But the cool thing is that it’s got letters on it. Letters I recognize. They’re even all lit up in the color of spark. Little… tabs or something. “Switches!” I say. Then I point at them. “They’re switches. Like the ones on the glass desk back home.”
Finn ponders this. “I think you’re right. So they do something. What do you think they do?”
I shrug. “Should I push one?”
Finn laughs. “What if we blow the place up?”
“What if it reveals a secret door? That opens up to a secret passageway? Or,” I say, ready to make more guesses because he’s smiling at me and his eyes are shining. “What if your father’s face appears? Hmm? And he’s got another message for us.”