Free Meta (Book 3): Rise of The Circle by Tom Reynolds Page B

look like they're emergency exits. The third one I try opens without a problem.
    Rays of sunlight pour in from the outside, illuminating the absolutely insane amount of dust coating the floors and lockers. Looks like the cleanup crew either hasn't gotten to this building yet or they forgot it exists.
    I walk down the hallway, checking the door numbers to find room 143, where Michelle is apparently waiting for me. At the end of a very long hallway, I find the room. There's a window in the door, and through it I can see an empty classroom. The walls are bare, but the desks are all neatly aligned and facing the front of the classroom. There's something else different: the room is clean, or at least much, much cleaner than any of the other classrooms I've looked into in this building so far.
    I momentarily wonder if I should just wait in the hallway for Michelle since I don't see her inside the classroom. Maybe she'll be right back. Or maybe she got tired of waiting for me and left. Ultimately I decide that hanging out in the hallway here might not be a great idea. Even though this end of campus seems deserted, it might look suspicious for me to be standing around in the hallway of an abandoned building. The windows on the opposite side of the hallway face the campus, and anyone walking by would be able to see me plain as day.
    Carefully, I check the doorknob of the classroom to see if it’s unlocked. The knob turns with little effort, so I push the door open and immediately almost jump out of my skin. Michelle is standing right in front of me, waiting just inside the door.
    "What the...?" I ask no one in particular.
    Michelle is stifling a laugh at my reaction to her scaring the crap out of me. I pull the door closed and look through the window again: nothing, just an empty classroom. Swinging the door back open, there's Michelle, still standing there.
    "Come inside; I'll explain," Michelle says with a smile as she takes my hand and leads me into the classroom. With her other hand, she closes the door. "Take a seat."
    I choose the desk closest to the door in the front row since it's the nearest, and I actually feel a little bit dizzy after experiencing whatever the hell the trick was with that door.
    "It's not a window. It's a very, very high-resolution 3D monitor panel. That's why you couldn't see me standing inside the room, because you weren't actually looking inside the room," Michelle explains.
    "So it was a video feed?"
    "Something like that. It's actually a little bit more complicated, but all you need to understand is that prying eyes won't find anything in this classroom if they come looking."
    "Why go through all of that trouble just to conceal a classroom, though? There's nothing in here that looks like it's worth keeping a secret."
    "Oh, Connor, you really think that this is just a regular classroom? You're disappointing me."
    Michelle walks over to the desk at the front of the classroom and sits behind it. She fishes a set of keys out of her pocket and uses them to open one of the desk's drawers. I can't see what's inside the drawer from where I'm sitting, but I can see a faint blue glow emanating from it. A series of blue lights in the shape of a grid appears over Michelle's face, and I realize this must be some type of security system. Right on cue, I feel the ground beneath me moving.
    It's subtle, making no noise at all. In fact, the way I notice it's even happening is that once again, I feel slightly sick to my stomach. While I'm not consciously noticing that the room is moving, my body can sense it. I look over toward the windows, and my suspicions are confirmed. Slowly, almost unnoticeably, I can see the outside view through the windows changing as the room descends and the bottom of the windowsill darkens.
    "The initial descent is slow to avoid any disruption that might be noticeable from the outside. Once we clear the building's foundation, you'll notice that it'll start to pick up a bit."
    The windows are