Chapter 11: Black and Blue

As Lucy slid out the dining hall and fell into step alongside Amelie to go to her next lesson, thoughts of the key also slid out of her mind. Her thoughts steered clear of the matter, forgetting it entirely as she traversed through the rest of her lessons: English and History. Lessons finished at 4pm, after which the rest of her class headed back to the common room to relax, whilst Amelie and Lucy embarked on a tour.

As it was September, by the time the girls had circled back round to the library (where their tour had begun), the sun had already begun to sink lower in the sky, filling the horizon with its golden hues. Amelie sat down on a bench, leaning against the library walls, as they both gazed at the wondrous view. A bell began to ring from the direction of the living quarters, and Amelie jumped up out of her seat, “time for dinner!”. An involuntary smile spread over Lucy’s lips in anticipation of more dessert, and she quickly hurried along beside Amelie towards the dinner hall. (May it be noted, that a now well-fed and therefore more amicable Lucy decided that actually she didn’t mind sitting next to, and conversing with, Amelie for this meal).

After dinner the students were dismissed to attend sports clubs, study groups, or one of the various other activities the school offered. As it was still Lucy’s first day (and thus she had not yet signed herself up for, or familiarised herself with, any of the activities), she decided to spend some time in the library, as she had seen a very nice section on architecture, and a very nice cosy study space at the back. Lucy flopped down on a cushioned armchair and pulled out a sheet of pale blue paper, along with a black pencil from her bag. 2 hours and 1000 streaks of graphite later, a rough map of the spaces she’d toured were spread out on the page in front of her. Her own set of blueprints.

~

In another corner of the school complex, a 19 year old girl walked out of a prayer hall. Her uniform had 4 stripes on the back - a dark purple one, a dark green one, and a black one with a thin cyan stripe through its middle. Her name was zainab. She was briskly making her way over to the headteacher’s office to file a complaint about the insufficient supply of 1m rulers for the Architecture workshops. It was slowly getting later in the night as she headed over.

~

As Humerah diffused the crowd, everyone began to shuffle back to their classes, and the three troublemakers were forcibly led to the headteacher’s office to be assigned their punishments. Unsurprisingly, someone else was also heading towards the office - it was Hudhayfah. As Aisha and Humerah were part of the six, their watches contained an electromagnetic key which allowed them to go straight in, but because they wanted to avoid the commotion of passing by the crowds with three rowdy boys in tow, they headed back along the corridor to ‘Meeting Room 2’ (making sure to update Hudhayfah of their plans along the way). The girls deposited the boys on the plush chairs (usually intended for visitors), whilst Aisha’s thoughts were distracted, focused instead on the growing pile of work she still had left to complete, which was waiting for her back in her office. This included hordes of new students’ files to be uploaded onto the schools database (which could only be accessed by the six). A sluggish 7 minutes ticked past, before Hudhayfah finally entered and sat down on the vacant velvet-and-gold seat at the head of the table.

~

Hudhayfah never had time for anything, but still managed to look focused for the duration of the meeting. The blue bruises stood out beside the black of the trio’s pupils. Fighting was by no means tolerated in his school, but a few cases still managed to crop up each year. The punishment system was dependent on the remorse of the student, their story, and was proportional to the damage they dealt (to either school, property, or people). Detention was thought to be a waste of both the students’ and the teachers’ time. Instead Hudhayfah liked to be more creative with his punishments, and assigned they boys each cleaning duty in various departments across the school - Umar was given recycling duty in section ab from 5-7am, Uthman and Yunus were both given bathroom cleaning duty in their own section (mb) from 6-9pm, so that they would have adequate time to reflect upon their actions. Their punishment was to last till the end of the term. With that the meeting was adjourned, Aisha led the boys back to their wing of the school, Hudhayfah began to head underground for dinner, and Humerah over to the monitoring room to swap with Salih. But as Hudhayfah walked past his office, he found he still had to arrange to get more 1m rulers to be dedicated to the architectural studies department.