Silence.
Then the air pressure below suddenly changed. A cold sweat broke out down my back; because the Chi wave rising from below resembled not a person but almost a living wall. Just as my mind was about to give the command "run," that muffled and dangerous voice echoed from right below the stairs.
"Stop hiding behind the shadow, Kai. I know your footsteps from a hundred meters away."
I swallowed. With the strange weight that being caught brings, instead of pulling back up the stairs I slowly took a step toward that gap where the light was leaking out.
When I went down the steps holding onto the railings, two figures were standing at the mouth of that dark corridor. The woman was among the shadows; she was wrapped in a dark-colored cloak and it was impossible to make out her face or her silhouette. Right in front of her stood Master Ren, in that old and shabby jacket of his.
The hardness and dangerous expression that had been on his face a moment ago gave way, the instant he saw me, to his usual weary, tired-man manner. But that momentary sharpness in his eyes... I had never seen him like that before.
The woman quickly turned around, burying her face in the darkness, and disappeared behind a door.
"Master?" I said, taking care that my voice wouldn't shake. "What... what are you doing here? It's one in the morning. Elisa's at home in a panic, she's been waiting to hear from you since yesterday." Master Ren let out a deep breath. He took his old rusty lighter from his pocket and clicked its lid open and shut. "Elisa exaggerates, as always," he said in a flat voice. "I had business with a couple of old friends, it dragged on."
I turned my eyes to the dark corridor behind him. That woman's shadow was no longer there; it was as if she had never existed and had vanished into the darkness.
I went down another step and saw inside the dim room. The room was larger than I'd thought — most of the walls were lost in a darkness my eyes hadn't yet adjusted to. In the air was the heavy, sweetish smell of old paper, dust, and a place that hadn't been ventilated for years; after the disinfectant smell that filled the rest of the academy, it felt almost foreign to the nose. The floor was nothing like the polished composite of the corridors above: rough, bare concrete. As if, when this floor was built, it was known from the start that nobody would ever look at it.
On the table stood a holoprojection device similar to the one on Master Ren's desk at home, but looking far older; the data flowing across it was full of symbols and graphs of a kind the System had never shown me. The figures were familiar, but the way they were lined up beside one another was not; it was as if I were reading a language I didn't know, written in an alphabet I did. In one corner, dozens of books were stacked on dusty shelves; all of them bore that same three-line symbol — three lines interlocking inside a circle. The same as the symbol on the cover of that old book on Master Ren's desk.
And on the wall, right above the shelves, was a large diagram drawn in pencil and ink. From a distance it resembled a family tree, but instead of names, dates were written; the date at the very top belonged to five hundred years ago, and most of the lines descending from there had been cut off at some point. At the end of each cut line a small cross mark had been placed. I tried to count them, then gave up; the number of crosses was greater than the number of lines.
"What is this place?" I asked, my voice still coming out a bit shaky.
Master Ren looked at me for a long while, as if trying to decide how much to say. Then he spoke in his usual tired voice, but this time carrying something else inside it as well:
"We call this place 'the Archive,'" he said finally. "A place that doesn't appear in the academy's official records. A location known to very few people, where information from the period before the System was established is kept."
"And you... how can you get in here? You're not even a student at this school. The barriers outside, the Kryonium coatings, the turnstiles... The System detects anyone who enters here without permission instantly."
Master Ren laughed slightly, but there was no joy at all in that laugh. "I was once one of this academy's teachers, Kai. A very long time ago. Then some things happened, and I left — or, more accurately, I was forced to leave. I know the underside of this building better than its architects."
This information surprised me completely. All those years, I had known Master Ren only as a former guard; I had never thought that part of his past was this intertwined with Academy. "What class did you teach?" I asked, aware that I was asking the most meaningless question that came to mind. Maybe it was because I sensed that if I asked a meaningful question he wouldn't answer.
He paused a moment, then smiled genuinely for the first time. "Chi Theory," he said. "The version, in my time, of the class Ms. Laura teaches now. Back then the curriculum was shorter, and it had two sections in it that don't exist today." He gestured with his head toward the diagram on the wall. "Then those two sections were removed from the curriculum. And a year later, I was removed as well."
"Why?"
"Because I kept teaching my students the removed sections," he said. There was neither pride nor regret in his voice; only the flatness of a man recounting a very old event. "I paid the price for that and I'm still paying it. But two of the three students who read those sections are still alive. I've learned that in this world that counts as a good ratio."
"I heard just now," I said, trying to gather my voice. "Were you talking about me? Were you saying that I... wasn't normal? Who was that woman?"
And at exactly that moment, the door that had been opening closed again.
That brief thaw on Master Ren's face vanished. In his gaze there was neither panic nor any desire to give an explanation. Only that deep, unsolvable mystery of his remained.
"I came to check on you at school," he said simply. "I was curious about your development, how it's going. Is that so strange?"
I frowned. "You came to check on me? At midnight? Beneath a laboratory like a bunker, on a floor that doesn't appear on any plan, behind locked doors? Master, what you said just now—"
"Go home," he cut me off. His voice this time carried a fatherly authority closed to discussion. "Tell Elisa I'll be back tomorrow, tell her not to worry. And don't use anything you saw tonight, or a single word you heard, as an excuse to rack your brain and fall behind in your classes."
Master Ren came right up to me. He tapped my shoulder lightly with his hand. That familiar, data-less touch... The Chi in my body wavered slightly again for an instant, but this time I pulled myself together quickly.
"I have very close friends from the school, Kai," he said, with a faint smile appearing on his lips. "I know more people than you think. Now stop asking more questions and tiring that mind of yours."
He turned around. Without making any extra movement, he took a few steps toward that pitch-black corridor. No light came on, and no sound of a door was heard. The darkness of the corridor simply swallowed him slowly like an ink stain. Within a few seconds, not even a single trace of Chi remained to suggest that someone had really been there. I was left alone on the stairs. I checked the System in my mind, looked at the blue screen.
[Class Ranking: 4 / 1200]
[Control Stat: 49]
After Master Ren mingled into the darkness, I stayed alone on the stairs for a long while, my hand resting on the cold railing, waiting for my breathing to return to normal. The blue light on my panel went on blinking silently, as if nothing had happened.
I looked at these figures, then looked at the darkness, then at the figures again. A minute ago I had perhaps lived through some of the most important minutes of my life, but the night's tiredness weighed more heavily; I set it all aside and, with the growing weariness inside me, decided to go to my room.
As I walked I was watching the moon. I looked at the open Olympic pool; it was as if the moon had gently let its hair down into the water — it was shining, it was very beautiful. Then I looked at the moon again, and our eyes met. It seemed unaware of the stars around it; the city lights had hidden them all away in the depths of the darkness, but in reality all of them were thousands, millions of times larger than the moon. Only the moon seemed unaware of them. I smiled toward the moon. "It's as if we're alike."
When I got back to the dormitory the corridors were completely empty, only the dim night lamps on the ceiling were on; even the echo of my footsteps felt foreign to me. I sent Elisa only a short message: "The Master's on his way, don't worry, he'll come tomorrow." It wasn't exactly a lie, but it was far from the truth as well. I lay down on the bed, looked at the ceiling, put my arms under my head, but sleep wouldn't come at all. There was that woman's voice turning over in my head: "No one has been found in five hundred years, Ren." And Master Ren's answer, that strange seriousness in his voice: "It isn't coincidence. That control ability of his is like something out of the legends; he can even perceive anti-Chi."
That night I understood that the time had come to get a bit serious for the events that would happen from now on. Maybe I was curious about the whole mystery, but at the same time these thoughts both frightened me and — strange as it is to admit — oddly enlivened me. It was as if I had sat in the same room for eighteen years, looking at the same walls, and had finally found a window, and I couldn't help wondering what was behind it. It was as if a light had come into my life.