A Fortress of Pebbles

At first, Aissaba was amazed at how many times the stairwell twisted and switched back upon itself. The Johnsons had built all this? The amount of concrete and the sheer depth of the engineering were staggering – military grade, for sure. She kept expecting it to open out into a giant room full of people in uniforms, headsets, and computer terminals.

Soon though, her amazement turned to disbelief. She stopped in what felt like the hundredth concrete junction room lit with orange bulbs, the stairwell changing direction by 90 degrees once again. Her stomach growled. They’d been walking for at least an hour.

“This can’t be real,” Tassadu said.

It was chilling to hear Tassadu confirm it. No less chilling was the fact that, real or not, this endless stairwell’s existence confirmed that the Johnsons had access to magic. They’d either built the thing with map magic, which would have taken a whole sea of pebbles, or there was some subtle mind magic at work.

Aissaba took out her language pebble – instinctively planning to call her mom. It wasn’t glowing, though, and when she placed it to her forehead, nothing happened. It might as well have been a normal pebble, smooth from centuries of lying in a riverbed. Tassadu opened his pebble pouch and grimly revealed the darkness within.

“Well, this is not good,” he said, as if joking. But Aissaba could tell he was panicking beneath the surface.

She moved in close, even though his body was a furnace, and put her cheek on his hot scales. “Deep breaths,” she said. It was something he’d said to her a million times. Time to return the favor. “We’ll just go back up.”

He nodded, head practically touching the low ceiling, and his folded wingtips brushing the walls whenever he inhaled. Aissaba was feeling claustrophobic on his behalf. She could only imagine how he felt.

They began their ascent, passing junction after junction and thousands of orange lights. Aissaba’s stomach continued to complain – more so now that she was going uphill. When Tassadu’s stomachs joined in, like a gurgling acapella group, she finally admitted what she had begun to suspect several junctions ago: they’d been going up longer than they’d gone down.

Tassadu put his back to a wall and sank down. “This is not good,” he said – definitely not joking this time. The pebbles were still dark.

Aissaba sat on the steps beside him, cold concrete beneath her and warm air wafting from Tassadu’s direction. She considered moving away from the heat, but this seemed like the wrong time to aggravate Tassadu’s insecurities about his chosen physiology.

"Let’s think about it logically,” she said – hoping he didn’t think she was making fun of him. “It’s obviously some kind of trap, right? Something to catch people trying to go down.”

Tassadu nodded, eyes closed. He was probably trying to imagine he was in a wide open space, like the Fortress courtyard.

“So,” she said, “they’ve either managed to warp space into an endless stairwell, or it’s all in our heads. If it’s the latter, maybe we can think ourselves out of it.”

Tassadu, eyes closed, was either ignoring her or already trying this. As Aissaba considered blinking Cassandra, she heard her mother say: And this began before the Fortress was spatially docked – which indicates that the psychic link may be unaffected by distance. Sure hope so, she thought. Because the more she looked at the concrete prison around her, the more she felt it wasn't just in her head, that somehow they had exited normal space and ended up here, undocked from reality.

***

There was something wrong with the principal, that was for sure. After reminding them that morning that they would have detention for the rest of the month, he kept poking his head into their classrooms, nodding politely to the teachers, and pretending to survey the room. He never made eye contact with Cassandra, but come on: the guy was obviously monitoring them. After this had happened in both history and math, Orion started giving her looks.

The one good thing about it was that the Parrot King’s spitball equipment disappeared slowly but surely into his backpack when, for the second time, the triangular mustache made its appearance. Cassandra had been worried about algebra class – being, as it were, run by a Nazi and populated by eighth grade parrots who didn’t appear to love the idea of two sixth grade magpies in their midst. So although the recurring triangular mustache gave her the creeps, it was better than being on the receiving end of the old hepatitis in the ear trick.

During lunch break, Cassandra found her locker blocked by the principal himself. Orion cleared his throat several times more than necessary to alert her to this fact as they approached, books in hand.

“If it isn’t the Johnson twins!” he said, as if he had just happened to be standing here. As if this was his new office.

“Detention is after school, right?” said Orion. “Or is it during lunch too?”

“Ah, detention, yes,” said the principal, cheerfully. “I’ve actually come to extend an invitation to you both. I’ve had a recent epiphany that I was wrong to place you into advanced classes with older students. Bring your lunch to the library?” He said it like a question, but a flick of the triangle told Cassandra he meant business.

He watched them from the door to the cafeteria as they loaded their trays with sloppy joe meat. He then led the way as they ported their food down a seemingly endless hallway to the library.

(Blink: Assaba sat in a concrete room, a junction between two stairwells, one going up and the other down. The orange light was like that of a parking garage. “Hi, Cassandra,” said Aissaba. “Sorry to bug you, but you wouldn’t happen to know anything about an endless stairwell trap underneath your house, would you?”)