Trapped Read Online Free PDF Page B

weekend in the hope Impervia would start a fight and get my heart beating faster for a minute or two.
    As my willfully morose college roommate used to say, "So it's come to this. And hasn't it been a long way down?"
     
    The fastest way to the residence wing was a shortcut through the school itself—the building was shaped like a four-storied T, with classrooms forming the front crossbar and dormitories extending out the back. I used my pass key to unlock the doors at the center of the T... and the moment I passed inside, I heard the sound of weeping. Quiet little sniffles, welling up into tightly choked sobs. They echoed off the walls and terrazzo floors so I couldn't tell where the whimpers came from.
    Hmmm.
    A corridor of classrooms ran left and right; a short passageway lay directly ahead, leading into the dorm wing. But the whole area was pitch-black... no light except the spill of starshine coming through the glass doors behind me. Since I never carried a lantern on drinking nights (best not to be holding breakable glass filled with flammable oil when you expect to get into a brawl), there was no way to see who was crying in the darkness.
    Tentatively I moved forward, thinking the sounds must come from the residence wing; this wouldn't be the first time some student crept out of bed and huddled forlornly in the hall, shedding tears over bad grades or love gone wrong. But as I advanced down the passageway, the sniffling grew fainter, fading to inaudibility. I backtracked, picked up the noise again, and was soon feeling my way past darkened classrooms—keeping one hand on the wall to maintain my bearings.
    It's odd how the academy's smell changes at night. During the day, the aroma is young, young, young—dozens of different perfumes, lavishly applied by students who get their families to send the latest scents from Bangkok, Damascus, or São Paulo. After dark, though, the jasmine and ginger die away, to be replaced by fragrances much, much older: the dark varnished oak of the wainscoting; the mausoleum dryness of chalk dust; two centuries worth of oil paints from the art room, sweat from the gym, and book leather from the library.
    At night, the school showed its age. Feliss didn't have the prestige of institutions that traced their lineage a full four hundred years back to OldTech times, but it was still venerable by conventional standards. There was good reason why we attracted students from important families all over the world—never the best, of course, never the talented eldest son or the brilliant youngest daughter, but the "tries-very-hard" middle children who needed decent schooling too. Feliss Academy provided such schooling, in an appropriately time-honored venue... and it was only at night that you could smell the decades of glum mediocrity accumulated within these walls: the psychic residue of generation after generation who subconsciously recognized they weren't destined for greatness.
    No. I wasn't projecting my own thoughts at all.
     
    The sounds of sorrow drew me on. The snuffles weren't loud—they seemed to recede as I moved forward—but they continued in quiet anguish, leading me to the Instrumental Music room at the end of the corridor. I stopped outside, peering through the small pane of glass in the room's wooden door. No sign of anyone within, even though an adequate amount of starlight trickled its way through windows on the far wall. Then again, my view of the room was restricted, showing the middle but not the shadowy edges.
    When I tried the door, it was locked. That was mildly unusual; most rooms in the school are left open day and night. I got out my pass key again and slid it into the lock, making just enough noise that the weeper would know I was coming. No point in startling some heartbroken teenager who'd come all this way to keep others from hearing the sobs. Opening the door, I said, "Hello," in what I hoped was a comforting voice. "Is there some way I can help?"
    No answer. The