CHAPTER 11: GHOSTS IN THE GEARBOX
The heavy oak door of Melissa Hall swung shut with a definitive, suffocating thud, severing them from the chaotic symphony of the main academy building. The air inside was different—older, heavier. It was a mausoleum of polished ambition, smelling of lemon-scented polish, aged parchment, and the faint, ghostly whisper of perfume from a century of elite young women who had called this place a gilded tomb.
Sloane shot a withering glance at the ornate moulding on the ceiling. "Well, this is cheery. It's like a museum, but for disappointments." She nudged Aurelia with a sharp elbow. "Your mother would feel right at home. I'm surprised there isn't a portrait of her glaring down at us, judging our life choices and calculating the net loss of our potential."
"My mother prefers active surveillance to passive portraiture," Aurelia deadpanned, her boots clicking a precise, dismissive rhythm on the polished parquet. "And your powers of observation continue to be staggeringly pedestrian, Sloane. It's a corridor. You walk on it. Its primary function is to separate points A and B. Try to keep up with the fundamental concepts."
Ahead of them, the one who currently piloted Iris's body was buzzing with a nervous energy that was entirely Ira. "Oh, look! The sconces are new! And the floor is so shiny. Do you think they have a dedicated polisher? A polishing prodigy, discovered young and given a full scholarship to wax?"
"Focus, Iris," Aurelia said, her voice a low, flat drone. "The objective is our dormitory. Not a socio-economic analysis of the janitorial staff's latent talents. Your capacity for trivial observation is both impressive and deeply concerning."
They rounded a corner just as a figure emerged from Mei's room. The woman was tall and poised, a sculpture in a tailored charcoal grey suit that screamed expensive minimalism. Her silver hair was swept back in a severe chignon, and a pair of elegant, thin-framed glasses perched on her nose. She looked, for all the world, like a slightly younger, marginally less frosty version of Lilith Brontë.
Iris stopped dead, her jaw audibly unhinging. "Whoa."
Sloane let out a low, appreciative whistle. "Damn. The gene pool in your family must be a very small, very exclusive puddle, Aurelia. Is there a cloning facility we should know about? Should we be checking for barcodes?"
Aurelia's eyes, cold and analytical, scanned the woman from head to toe. "Similar aesthetic. Different bone structure. The jawline is less severe, suggesting a lower tolerance for protracted confrontation. The choice of eyewear is less about vision correction and more about projecting a perceived, non-threatening authority. Conclusion: a hired caretaker, likely selected by Mei's family for her superficial resemblance to a known standard of corporate respectability." She delivered the assessment like a coroner listing cause of death.
The silver-haired woman offered them a polite, professional smile that didn't reach her eyes before gliding away down the hall, her heels making no sound on the plush runner.
Iris, now fully reverted to her fifteen-year-old self, hurried to catch up with Aurelia, her words tumbling out in a rushed, gossipy stream. "That's Mei's new nanny! Can you believe it? She looks like she could wither a rose with a glance. Anyway, Mei told me—and you can't tell anyone—that her parents are like, mega-influential in the bio-tech scene in Neo-Kobe, and they're never around, so she's had a string of nannies since she was like, six, and she thinks they picked this one because she looks strict enough to keep the 'family reputation' intact, which is so—"
Aurelia shouldered open the door to their dorm, cutting off the torrent of words. "Fascinating. A tale of parental neglect and corporate aesthetics. My heart, as you know, is a barren wasteland incapable of nurturing such sentimental weeds." She tossed her bag onto her meticulously made bed and placed two items on her desk with deliberate care: the worn, leather-bound journal of Gwendolyn Smythefield, and a new, starkly blank one she had just purchased. The black card slipped out from between the pages.
She stared at it, her internal monologue a silent scream. The pass was equivalent and it was effective, a necessary step in the algorithm even if the final variable remains elusive. The key is with Akira and he's MIA. A Ruby's Crystal cult. Violet, do something!
A burst of static, sharp and impatient, answered her. Child, I have a word to say. You have to attain level 3 to summon like that, Violet retorted, her digital voice laced with crystalline irritation. Stop trying to brute-force the code.
Iris hovered by the door, finally letting out a massive, jaw-cracking yawn. "Really? Today's been… a lot. After the whole… everything… my brain feels like overcooked noodles. And then we had that pop quiz in Thaumo-History, and I'm pretty sure I mixed up the dates for the Great Ethereal Schism with the founding of the first coffee shop in Aethelburg."
She plopped onto her bed, which was adjacent to Aurelia's. Aurelia was sitting rigidly at the reading table positioned between them.
"She deserved it, and besides, it's cliché," Aurelia muttered, not looking up from the desk where she was arranging her pens into a perfectly parallel formation. Her voice was a low thrum of pure irritation. Then, she shot Iris a glare so potent it could have curdled milk at twenty paces. "Now, shut your crap. I'm trying to think."
Iris flinched, the bubbly energy evaporating instantly. The shift in the room's atmosphere was palpable. "Whoa. Okay. What's… what's with the deep freeze? Is it because of Gwen? Did you find something in the journal?"
Aurelia went very still. Her back was to Iris, but her shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. "I miss her company," she said, the words unusually stark and simple, devoid of her typical venom. "It's very—very incredible." The admission hung in the air, a raw piece of data in their sterile environment. She turned, her face a mask of cold fury. "The journal, I need Akira's key to unlock it and Akira is missing, apparently between Japan and Aethelburg. There's also one thing I've come to realize, the higher-ups are not willing to help and the root cause of my problems is just standing below me. I fought a Void Grub in the lavatory recently, and my guide said there's a gate in this academy. Plus I overheard Athena talking over-excitedly about Severance and other alien stuff, she's up to no good. And Mei's nanny is on my list too."
"Well," Iris began, her voice softening, losing its Ira-like pitch and shifting into something more measured, more serene—the paramedic, Aurelia's own discarded kindness. "I've been having some nightmares lately. Bad ones. Visions of… of a city made of light, and something screaming in the static. And you're the only person I've actually told about it."
That did it.
Aurelia, who had been mentally cross-referencing the timelines of Akira's disappearance and Gwendolyn's final entries, pivoted on her heel. Her full, razor-sharp attention was now locked onto Iris. The frustration on her face melted away, replaced by an expression of intense, almost predatory focus. There was no grin, no outburst, but a profound, chilling sense of satisfaction radiated from her. A new puzzle piece had just been offered, and it was infinitely more interesting than pop quizzes and teenage angst.
"Elaborate," Aurelia commanded, her voice a whisper that demanded absolute compliance.
As Iris began to speak, Aurelia's mind, unbidden, clawed its way back through time, to a different kind of problem, one made of gasoline, metal, and lies.
---
Hours earlier.
The Apex Garage, Aethelburg Town, Washington.
The memory surfaced, saturated with the sensory overload of The Apex Garage: the sharp, clean scent of catalyzed hydrogen, the rich, organic smell of warm engine oil, and the underlying note of cold, damp concrete. This wasn't a graveyard for cars; it was an operating theater, and the man in the grey coveralls, a stethoscope around his neck, was the surgeon.
Elian Vance wiped his hands on a rag, his gaze as assessing as a scalpel. He wasn't a 'Stereotypical Anglo-Saxon Poster Boy'; he was a schematic of focused intensity, his dark hair flecked with grease, his eyes the color of a stormy sea. "Elian Vance," he'd said, his voice a low, steady hum, like a well-tuned engine at idle. He didn't offer a handshake; his were currently diagnosing a pressure leak in a fuel line.
"You're not from here," Aurelia had stated, her eyes cataloging the hyper-advanced chassis of the coupe he was working on—a vehicle she would later know as the 'Snapdragon.'
"Observant." A flicker of a smile touched his lips, there and gone. "Chicago. The wind there is less... haunted. More honest. It just tries to knock you over. Here, it feels like it's looking for something." He tapped a gauge. "You're the Brontë girl. The one looking for hydrogen."
"My name is Aurelia. And I require a solution, not a profile," she countered, her tone flat. "The Tubes are useless. I need to get to New York."
Elian straightened up, leaning against the Snapdragon's fender. "Hydrogen's the future. Clean, powerful. Also, as of this week, scarcer than common sense in a council meeting. Rationing's hit the public depots. What you need isn't for sale." He watched her, the logical engineer piecing her together. "Paris is a long way to run from a problem."
"Running implies a lack of a destination. I have a very specific one."
"Right. And the problem? The one that has an Aethelgard Elite slumming it in a garage instead of having daddy's chauffeur handle it?"
Aurelia's gaze didn't waver. "The problem is that the 'higher-ups' seem to believe grief is a closed case file. I disagree."
Elian was silent for a moment, the only sound the faint tink-tink of a cooling engine.
He' finally broke at himself, like he was expecting Aurelia to speak but she didn't.
The reason I scaped Chicago was because a rival sabotaged my car, framing me for a fatal crash that ended a promising career. I reminisced graphically, the nitromethane in my car didn't turn on and I suspect one person for that. The sponsor's car was electro-magnetized by a car I couldn't really put in my head. It fell over the mountainside and I witnessed the glowing measure of the explosion it caused. I understand systems that were rigged against me." He sighed, at first frustrated then it expressed indifference. Nothing ever gets a happy ending," he said finally, the words not cynical, but factual, like the law of thermodynamics. "Not without a fight. And not without the right tools." He gestured to the Snapdragon. "This isn't a car. It's a statement. Hydrogen-electric core with a nitromethane booster for when statements need to be shouted. I can get you the fuel. But it'll cost you."
"Money is a variable I can control."
"Not money," he said, a spark of his old racing fire in his eyes. "A test drive. I've seen you walk. I need to see you drive. Instinct tells me you're a latent dragster. A natural-born getaway driver."
Aurelia allowed a smirk, so faint it was almost a trick of the light. "So you'll pass me your digits? How quaint. I assume the training involves more than just admiring your machinery."
"Let's just say I like helping kids with potential. And you," he said, that ghost of a grin returning, "have a terrifying amount of potential."
They had laughed then, a short, sharp sound in the clinical quiet of the garage, a recognition of two master craftsmen finding a kindred, sharp-edged spirit.
Aurelia's neck turned, her gaze met a hooded figure at the edge of the garage.
---
The memory of hydrogen and potential blurred into the older, fouler memory of the hit-and-run. The scent of the garage was replaced by the coppery tang of blood and the pungent sweetness of rotting oranges on rain-slicked asphalt. The pregnant woman's body, a broken doll under the sterile glare of emergency lights. Aurelia's mind, a relentless processor, had catalogued it all: the parabolic spray of glass, the specific, desperate angle of the skid marks.
Then Chief Ryker had arrived. Their eyes met across the yellow tape—his, flat and bureaucratic, seeing a complication; hers, reflecting back a cold, deductive analysis. She memorized the hard lines of his face, a man who built walls of paperwork to contain messy problems.
Aurelia had slipped away from his gaze, the weight of it a physical pressure between her shoulder blades. She'd ducked into the first open door she found—'The Daily Grind,' a coffee shop that smelled of burnt beans and quiet desperation.
"One extra-caffeinated coffee. Black," she'd ordered, her voice cutting through the low hum of a talk-radio host discussing the town's "vanishing youth."
The woman behind the counter, Maeve, was a study in eroded resilience. In her late fifties, her body was a map of her struggles: shoulders permanently slightly stooped from long hours, her hands a landscape of chapped skin and faded scars from old burns, one knuckle swollen with the ghost of arthritis. Her hair, a defiant auburn, was losing its battle against grey at the roots. She moved with the weary economy of someone for whom every motion was a calculated expense of energy. Her eyes, the color of faded denim, held a deep, settled sorrow. She frowned, wiping the counter with a cloth that had seen better decades. "Wired, that. An Aethelgard Elite, in my shop. Asking for jet fuel." Her tone was a complex alloy of awe and profound distrust.
Aurelia paid with a crisp bill. As she took the scalding cup, a sly, fleeting grin—there and gone in a nanosecond—touched her lips. It was not a friendly expression, but one of grim satisfaction at acquiring a necessary resource.
Maeve, emboldened by some private grief, leaned slightly forward, her voice dropping. "My friend's cousin… she was the one who died out there. Just now. Sarah." She looked at Aurelia, searching for something—recognition, sympathy, a shared outrage. "Left behind two girls. Sweet things. My age... they used to come in here for hot chocolate. Then they vanished, just like the others. Poof." She snapped her fingers, the sound dry and final. "I wanted to look for them myself, you know? But after Ryker got promoted... the searches just stopped. The case went cold. It's like he built a wall of paperwork around this whole town. You can't fight a ghost, and you can't reason with a wall."
Aurelia took a sip of the bitter coffee, her gaze fixed on some point in the middle distance, already running probabilities, cross-referencing this new data point with Gwen's case, with the student poisonings. She offered no condolence, no sympathetic nod. The woman's tragedy was a variable, a piece of the pattern.
"Was she," Aurelia had replied, the words not a question, but a simple, cold confirmation of a data point.
She turned to leave, but the door chimed, and a girl bounded in, a burst of chaotic energy in the stagnant air. She had deep green hair cut into close-cropped pigtails and eyes that were far too bright and knowing for her apparent age.
"Hey, Miss! I'm Michelle, and you are?" the girl chirped, planting herself directly in Aurelia's path.
"Aurelia. What's the deal?" Aurelia's reply was a flatline, her expression unchanging.
Michelle's grin was all teeth. "Honestly, in over three years I haven't really met an Aethelgard Elite... Perhaps 'cause I'm a normie. Let's not let the world become Elite supporters only, yeah?"
Aurelia's eyes narrowed a fraction. "How old are you?"
"Thirteen?"
"Thirteen-year-olds lately," Aurelia muttered, casting a cursory glance at her wristwatch and then her phone, a performance of checking a schedule that didn't exist. "I've got some time to spare, missy. A finite amount. Use it wisely."
Michelle's smile didn't falter, but it tightened at the edges. "Just saying. It's nice to see the ivory tower has a drawbridge sometimes. Even if it's only for a minute." She then skipped over to the counter, ordering a "hot chocolate, extra whip!" from a visibly tense Maeve.
Aurelia didn't wait. She walked out, leaving Maeve with her grief and Michelle with her cryptic cheer, the twin specters of mechanical failure and stolen futures clinging to Aurelia like a shroud.
---
Back in the dormitory, the past receded. The scent of ozone and old paper banished the ghosts of gasoline and despair. Aurelia's focus snapped back to the present, to Iris, and to the promise of a new, more immediate mystery blooming in the fractured psyche of her roommate.
"Now," she said, her voice cutting through the memory's haze like a scalpel. "About these nightmares. Start from the beginning. Omit no detail. What, precisely, is screaming in the static?"
... TO BE CONTINUED...