Low Battery

Okay so the thing nobody believes about me is that I actually was just trying to fix the wifi. That's it. That's the whole reason I was in the server room. Our school wifi had been down for like a week and the teachers kept saying "IT is aware of the issue" which is what teachers say when nobody is doing anything. And I know computers. Not like a genius or whatever, but my dad's a network guy and I'd watched him enough times. So I took the spare key from the front office (okay, I took it, but I gave it back) and I went down to the server room in the basement to look at the router. The server room was loud and cold, the way they always are. Big metal racks with blinking lights, fans going, that smell like hot dust. I found the router and honestly the fix was super easy, it just needed a restart, which proves my point about IT being "aware." But here's where it stops being a normal Tuesday. When I bent down behind the last rack to plug the router back in, there was a door. There is not supposed to be a door there. I go to that school every single day. The server room is in the basement and behind the racks is just the wall, the outside wall, you can see the foundation. There is no room back there. There is nowhere for a door to go. It was a small door. Wood, old, with iron bits, the kind of door you'd see in a movie about castles, not in a basement under a building from like 1994. And it had light coming out from under it. Not the cold blue light of the servers. Warm light. Orange, kind of flickery, like a candle or a fire. I want to be honest in this because if I'm going to tell the whole story I should tell the embarrassing parts too. I did not bravely open the mysterious door. I stood there for probably five whole minutes just looking at it and feeling my heart go really fast and telling myself it was a maintenance closet I'd never noticed. Even though it was obviously not a maintenance closet. Even though maintenance closets do not have warm flickery firelight coming out of them. Then my phone buzzed. It was my battery warning, the 20% one, the orange one. And that's such a stupid small thing but it kind of snapped me out of it, because it was so normal. Low battery. The most normal thing in the world. And I thought, okay, I'll just open it, see it's a closet, feel dumb, and go to lunch. I opened the door. It was not a closet. It was outside. It was night, and it was outside, and there was a hill going down away from me with little lights on it that were windows, a whole village of windows, and above it a sky with way too many stars and two moons, two, one big and one small, and cold air came through the doorway and it smelled like woodsmoke and pine and not like hot dust at all. And there was a person standing right there. Like they'd been waiting. An old man in a long coat with a staff, and he had a lantern, except the lantern wasn't lit, and when he saw me his whole face just — crumpled, kind of, with relief, this huge relief, and he said: "Oh, thank every star. The engineer. They sent the engineer at last." And I said — and I'm not proud of this either — I said, "I'm twelve." Which isn't even true, I'm fourteen, I just panicked. The old man didn't seem to care how old I was. He grabbed my sleeve, my actual sleeve, and his hand was cold and shaking, and he pulled me one step toward the doorway and pointed his dead dark lantern out at the village with all its little window-lights. "Look," he said. "Look closely, engineer. What do you see?" And I looked. And it took me a second. But then I saw it, because honestly it was the exact thing I'd been looking at on my phone thirty seconds before. The window-lights weren't steady. Every single one of them was slowly, slowly getting dimmer. The whole village was fading out, light by light, like a hundred little screens all running down at once. The kingdom was on low battery. And the old man was looking at me like I was the charger.