Eden

6

CHAPTER SIX

"And the Lord said, 'Don't believe everything you see in the light, for it will surely bring darkness.'"

- Trials, 11:10-11, The Bible of the New World

There's a black slip of paper lying in the centre of the floor when I enter my room the following afternoon. For a minute I just stand statue-still in the doorway, my eyes zeroing in on the ink-black note which looks so innocent – so insignificant – sitting there on the floorboards. But there's nothing innocent about it, and this may very well be the most significant moment of my day, if not my year.

Apprehensively, I kneel down and unfold the paper, my hand making the note quiver as I read its contents.

Avalon Reece Kandor,

You're failure to be present during Lunch on Tuesday 9th of June has resulted in the following punishment: Mop Duty.

The duration of this task is as follows: 19:00 - 21:00, Wednesday 10th of June – Tuesday 16th of June (inclusive).

Please report to Mr Cunningham at the start and conclusion of each session.

I place the note on my desk as the meaning behind the message sinks in, my pulse increasing just that little bit more. They want me to mop the empty school halls for two hours every night in the darkness. The same darkness I've been avoiding ever since the night my vision changed. The same darkness that seemed to shift behind Kal yesterday in class – that gave me the distinct impression I was being watched.

Why, oh, why couldn't my punishment have just been starvation?

-:-:-:-:-

"Come in," calls Mr Cunningham from inside the ground keeper's office, his office door little more than a wooden rectangle with his name etched into the dark wood. I had to scoff my dinner in order to get here in time, the half hour between the start of dinner and the start of my punishment barely enough time to even collect my food, let alone eat it. And now as my nerves build, the food threatens to come back up. I may as well I have just skipped dinner entirely.

I take a deep breath and go to enter. The door handle squeaks softly in my hand when I twist it, but it is quickly overshadowed by the tremendous groan of the door's rusty hinges. Inside, Mr Cunningham's office is just as I had expected it: a chipped and cheap desk, a poorly painted cement floor, walls lined with mops and brooms, buckets and cans, tools and wood. Even Mr Cunningham himself seems to fit into my predetermined idea of the room, with his old faded work jacket, worn and paint-splattered jeans, and a weeks worth of stubble coating the lower half of his face.

"Who are you?" he asks, looking up momentarily while digging noisily through a bucket full of nails.

"Uh, I'm Avalon. I'm here for my punishment."

"Ah, found it," he mumbles, withdrawing his hand from the bucket with a small gold nail between his thumb and fore-finger. He heads to his desk and sits down before starting to screw the nail into some sort of contraption resting on the table-top.

"What do you want?" he asks without looking up from his work.

"I'm here for my punishment," I repeat.

"Punishment?" he says. "What'd you do?"

"What did I do?"

"Yeah. Did you talk back, skip class, pull a prank on those bloody neph–" He cuts himself short, seeming to realise that he isn't talking to an empty room but to a student who could very easily dob him in for speaking against the Nephilim. He stares at me for a second, seeming to evaluate my reaction before continuing a bit louder as if he said nothing out of the ordinary. "Come on, which one was it? Did you find a way to get something in from the outside?"