The walls on either side of me were basically built-in shelves lined with books of all kinds. Some were leather-bound, others shimmered like my journal.
The back wall was even stranger. Hundreds of squares.
They kind of looked like the cubby holes at the Faoiltiarn village school, but bigger.
And most of them were stuffed with black bags that reminded me of…
I furrowed my brow. It almost looked like… but it couldn’t be.
I climbed off the chair and crossed to the back wall to pull one of the bags out of the cubby hole.
My heart stopped. It was a Cordura duffel. Just like mine.
And I meanexactlylike mine. It even had the same tag knotted through its zipper, with ALBAN SCOTSWOLF stamped into its leather.
Had they taken my bag out of my room and put it in here?
My brain grabbed on to that reasoning, and I so badly wanted to hold on to it. But then my eyes lifted to all the other cubbyholes. Hundreds and hundreds of them.
Most of which were filled with black bags.
I pulled out the next one. My chest lurched. It was a black Cordura duffel with an Alban Scotswolf leather name tag attached.
I went to a higher shelf. A black Cordura duffel with an Alban Scotswolf leather name tag attached.
A lower one: black Cordura duffel with an Alban Scotswolf leather name tag attached.
At random, I pulled out ten more bags.
They were all black Cordura duffels with an Alban Scotswolf name tag attached to their zippers.
My knees buckled. I sat down hard on the stone floor, a bag in each hand, surrounded by twelve versions of my own luggage.
Twelve…
I was a holoscribe. And I didn’t have the words.
The stone was hard beneath me, and the room’s utter silence felt like an animal closing in to attack.
“Don’t freak out!”Kiwi reminded me.
Right, right.
I made myself think… tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for…
I started counting the number of cubbies with black bags stuffed inside of them.
And nearly threw up when the number passed one hundred within the first couple of rows.
Several short, quick breaths, like an idiot psyching herself up to touch a burning flame. Then I started unzipping the bags.
The first one had a bunch of clothes and a waterlogged notebook I recognized as the same kind of teacher binder my mom kept.
Another one had colorful clothes that were technically a match for my skin tone but the kind of flimsy summer dresses I would never wear.
There was a t-shirt that said LAYLA RUSTANOV for President. That didn’t track with anything I knew about the former first daughter who, when last I checked for my fating gate story, was living a life of happy anonymity with President Rafes Nightwolf’s fiercely private brother, Knud.
The contents of the other bags were just as baffling. A waterlogged physics textbook.
