Chapter 5

Beyond the corridor, a tail of dark fabric fluttered like a banner in the wind—there was no mistaking it. The dark glider was here, just one corridor away.

Tiger bolted towards it, dropping his mop.

"Wait—Tiger! Where are you going?!"

He barely heard Kyrie as he chased the dark tail—all other thoughts disappeared from Tiger's mind. He no longer cared about mopping floors, or enduring Kyrie's criticism and hypocrisy, or fulfilling his punishment. Tomorrow the school would likely wake up to a half-mopped floor—likely nobody would care. Ms. Needa probably wouldn't even notice, likely terrified by some new fear to demand her attention. And even if by some chance the students did notice, and if some of them did complain, and Ms Needa could pull herself out of her own neuroses to enforce something for once, what would they do? It wasn't as if they would push him off the Tower.

And what if they did? What would it feel like?

Tiger bolted around another corridor, seeing the trail of the dark glider at the far end. How did it move so fast? Far away, he could hear the pounding of footsteps. Was it Kyrie running after him? Maybe—something was calling far away, "Stop! Stop! Where are you going?!" But Tiger would not stop. Damn the rules! Here was the glider right before his eyes—the real thing in his halls, right before his eyes.

Faster and faster, Tiger pumped his arms down the halls, his heart thumping against the cage of his chest:

--------------------- Pound your feet against the pavement

--------------------- Run-run-run like the wind's at your back

--------------------- No more dreaming by the sills of windows

--------------------- Today's the day you make your catch!

--------------------- Go, Tiger! Go Tiger! Go, Tiger Go!

--------------------- You'll never catch the glider

--------------------- If you're too damn slow!

Tiger did run faster, as though under some kind of spell—in fact, he ran faster that day than he had ever run in his life. He sprinted down the hallways with such speed he was nearly gliding, his footsteps so light that he could barely feel his shoes. The more he ran, the lighter he felt until it seemed he was nearly one with the breeze, the air dutifully making its way around him, making sure no errant zephyrs got in the way.

And still he could just barely keep up!

The voice calling for him had faded away—perhaps Kyrie couldn't keep up. That wasn't his problem.

He ran until it came to a junction—left or right? Time to decide!

A little flip of black fabric teased towards the left. Tiger took it. The path way opened up, after a few more quick changes, and small hallways, out to the Great Eastern corridor.

Tiger stopped his chase. There were a few reasons for this.

For one, Tiger had forgotten the true size of the Great Eastern Corridor. If the walls of every classroom had been unfolded and laid out flat, and every other corridor lined end to end, it would perhaps just barely make it halfway across. The scale of the Corridor made him dizzy—a flat, paved walkway that went on far past his vision, making a blank horizon at the far end. Flanking the sides of this enormous walkway were columns of such size that looking up towards their tops made his legs weak. Kyrie had been right—who could have ever carved such massive things? Even one was like the base of a small mountain. Perhaps an entire town could fit neatly within its bounds. In the gaps between the columns, which were themselves quite large, the pale light of the Outside filtered in between and cast the corridor in periodic shafts of colorless light. Drifts of clouds peaked through the gaps, and the tops of the columns were shrouded in a thick, inscrutable mist.

And Ms. Needa expected him to clean this?! Impossible!

There was no way, even with a hundred thousand evenings and a million buckets, that he could clean this place by himself. Not even with Kyrie, or even with the whole school pitching in. That Ms. Needa asked such a thing of him could mean a few things: either she had set him up to fail, or that she herself did not understand the Great Eastern Corridor and its size.

Far down the Corridor trailed a deceptively long stream of black fabric twirling like a festive ribbon. What he thought was just an average kite tail or a trailing cape was, in fact, as long as the distance between the columns, whipping along the Corridor as though it had a mind of its own.

Tiger stood there at the threshold, mouth agape, the size of the thing overwhelming him, watching the trail of the black glider disappear into the distance. He would never catch up with it now.

But as he despaired, the trailing tail of the glider halted beside a faraway column, shrinking, sheathing itself back into the glider itself—a contraption like an enormous black bird, its spread out in flight. Besides the glider stood someone—too far away for Tiger to see clearly—but it was certainly a person. A rather small person. Perhaps a girl? She, too, was sheathed in the same shadow that formed the glider. Perhaps it was an illusion, a trick that distance played on tired eyes in a strange place. Yet from that distance, it looked as though the glider and the girl were made of the same material. She seemed to be an outline, a piece of the world cut out and filled with blacker-than-black, a living void from a which no light—not even the light of the Outside—could shine through.

The shape and the girl melted together. Then the glider turned around and around like a bladed seed spinning in the wind. With every turn, the glider lifted a little higher until the shadowy thing—and its pilot—lifted off the ground with a dancer's grace. Tiger watched, entranced, as the mysterious glider slid through the air like water pouring on a bed of oil.

Tiger did not follow. The size of the Great Eastern Corridor had cowed him. For this first time since Tiger saw the glider, he was was afraid of it.

"I might lose myself," he thought. "If I chase it, how will I find my way back?"

Instead, he only watched, just as he had always watched, and the glider spun and twirled until it zipped behind a column and disappeared.

Tiger let out a breath. He had seen it. He followed it as well as he could. Now it had disappeared off somewhere, Tiger thought, probably to fly around someone else's bedroom.

Instead, the glider came for him.