The plans had been laid out. The roles had been given. They were all ready to receive the next part of their life.
And
now that it was all set, the disputes were finally starting to die
down, the last member anyone expected spoke up and told them all what
they needed to do.
Glass hadn’t been silent out of boredom or want to
hear what the others were saying. She hadn’t wanted to stay inoffensive
or hide her true intentions. She simply didn’t have any. She needed
time to think about who she was. It was hard to know, wasn’t it? They
all argued and squabbled, as if everything was perfectly clear. Glass
didn’t even know if she could speak, the first two days. She didn’t know
her own thoughts.
So while they all finished, she spent her time discovering herself.
She walked the halls, combed through the surroundings, pulling things
apart and mending them back together. She found halls and halls of
materials, equipment, tools, woodwork, metal, plastic, electronics, and
every possible way to use them she could think of. There were hundreds
of ways of dealing with everything, a thousand ways to change and
process a thing, to turn it into something else.
There were
warehouses of stuff, yet all of it seemed to be there for a purpose. It
was larger than anything she could imagine. And yet she knew perfectly
how it all fit together, as if she could see through the walls.
She went back to the others, and told them what she had seen. They
had never heard her speak. She told them what she thought. What it all
meant.
It wasn’t the Noise’s goal to keep us locked here. We are
supposed to do something, she said. This was all someone else’s stuff.
Yet it all stood there, unfinished, on shelves, unused. The Noise
must’ve woken us all up to do something with it. That was the only
possible explanation.
The others stared at her in varying degrees of blasphemy, outrageousness and disbelief.
That
can’t be right, they said. That doesn’t make sense. Why’d they not told
us anything then, those who were so kind as to wake us up (and some
still did not believe it to be a kindness)? No, it made no sense we were
supposed to do anything when we had received no word at all.
It was the Silence who failed us. It was the Silence who went away and that was who was to blame.
Glass
stared at them all in disbelief. They had seen what she had seen. They
knew where they were. She did not believe they could be so naïve, but
she realized also that her words couldn’t convince them.
They turned away and were about to go back to their business of not
doing much, when they all heard a sound. Not like the Noise, not a
constant awakening—no, a loud twang. A ringing, spring of a sound. A
gorgeous, dancing bell that flew at them from up high.
They all looked at the board.
They
hadn’t paid it any attention since the first day. It had just been
black—the only piece of the place that seemed useless. It had just been a
black void.
But now, it lit up. Not all of it, just one tiny line in the bottom, glowing red.
Mary, A Doll.