Soar, Part 12 - Spirit

"There's nothing here," Skye said and shut the book. The others looked at her wearily over their own books.

"Same here", Alex said, but didn't lift her hand to close the book.

The girls had spent the Saturday afternoon in the library, trying to dig out something, anything, about what could possibly be wrong with the streetful of people. They were continuously coming up empty-handed. Of course they had found a lot of things that could turn a person into a statue, but either it was something so obvious and simple the authorities on the case would've tried it by now, or there was something that didn't fit to the case. Like one spell that turned people to actual statues, meaning stone. And the people on the street were still quite people, jsut not moving.

"Maybe we should call it a day?" Roxie said, yawning. I had been a beautiful day, with the sun shining, the temperature climbing higher than for a few weeks, and there was hardly any wind at all. The perfect day for being outside. Unless you had a friend who was frozen and you needed to spend the entire day in the library trying to find any explanation as to why.

The girls had also spent a long while in the morning trying to figure out what the text on the street was all about. They had dug out all possible meanings or "soar", first from a dictionary and then from everywhere else to see if it was an abbreviation for something. It wasn't. At least not an abbreviation for anything that would make much sense to be written on a road where a bunch of people were petrified. Finally they had agreed they should give up on that, at least for now, because it didn't seem to have much to do with how to get all the people better. Even so, Skye had a nagging feeling that if they figured out what the text meant and why it was there, they would find a way to help the people. But when you find nothing, you find nothing.

"Yeah," Alex said. "The library's closing anyway in.... a half an hour."

"I'm starving," Olivia said.

"Ok, let's go," Skye said. They gathered their things, got up and returned the books to the shelves they had taken them from. Probably. They'd looked through so many books today it was almost impossible to remember where all of them were taken.

"What should we do tomorrow?" Roxie asked as they walked out of the library into the cold.

"What what should we do tomorrow?" Skye asked.

"Well, the library's closed on Sundays, so we can't come back here," Roxie said. "Not that I'd want to. It was a loooooong day today. But we could go search somewhere else, though  I'm not sure where. Or we could go train. We are falling behind with all this mess. And I could use some exercise after a day of sitting."

"But we don't have Annalise. We can't train a new choreography without her," Olivia said.

"We can always train something," Roxie said. "Or..." she paused, not knowing if she wanted to say the next thing out loud. "We could take a day off."

The other girls' faces fell.

"I know, I know, there's so much we need to do and we can't just leave Annalise but it's not like we are any help to anyone if we wear ourselves out working all day every day on one thing or another," Roxie tried to defend herself. The others looked at her in silence for a moment.

"I don't know," Skye said. "I'm hungry, and I'm tired. How about if I we just agree on something tomorrow morning?"

"Sounds good. We can sleep in and then decide what to do," Alex agreed.

And so the girls went home, tired and scared for their friend, not really knowing what to do.

~x~

Roxie was flying. Or floating was probably the better word, since there didn't seem to be any gravity. It was black everywhere. Not dark, because she could see herself when she look down, but there was nothing else anywhere to be seen. But she still knew she was moving, going somewhere through the darkness, flapping her wings.

Then she saw something in front of her. A figure. A figure, that looked like Annalise. She hurried towards her through the non-existing air. It was slow going, as if she wasn't moving as fast as she thought she was, or that Annalise was moving away from her. She didn't know which. All she knew was she had to get to her.

Finally, after an eternity, she reached Annalise. She was standing with her back to Roxie. Roxie was going to yelp in joy for having found her friend, but then the girl turned at it wasn't Annalise. She wasn't even her age. She was a little girl. The girl had huge and weird, orange eyes, and she was looking directly into Roxie, seeing everything she was.

"Hello," the girl said. Her voice was soft and wonderful.

"Hello," Roxie said, "I was looking for my friend. Do you know where she is?"

The girl thought for a moment.

"The friend who was cursed?" the girl finally asked. "No, I don't think I know where she is."

"But you know she was cursed?" Roxie asked her, "Do you know what happened to her?"

The girl laughed then, a delighted laugh, like a tiny stream in the spring.

"Of course I know what happened to her," she said and smiled wide.

"Can you tell me what happened to her?" Roxie asked, her heart lifting. The girl went still for a moment, like she was listening to some far away voice Roxie couldn't hear. Her face went serious.

"I have to go now," the girl said. "Come find me."

And then she grinned, and jumped, and was gone before Roxie could even begin to say anything, to ask her to stay. She was left alone in blackness deeper than the sky at night.

Roxie opened her eyes in the dark room. She reached with her hand, turned on the light next to her bed, sitting up. For a moment all she could do was stare at the wall across the room.

What had just happened?
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Your topic for Friday is Buttons.

~matu