The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

“Where else are you going to go?”

Lilac sighed. “You’re sure?”

I glanced to Ginger as a tender smile swept across her face, a smooth breeze along a jagged hillside. “Of course I’m sure.”

Lilac glanced to Indigo, who was absolutely motionless against the pale blue-grey sky behind his portal. The sound of crickets filled the air as afternoon began to fade into evening.

There were no crickets back home.

“You have somewhere to stay?” Lilac asked. Indigo didn’t immediately respond. He was so spaced out, he probably didn’t know she was talking to him. After a moment, he glanced her way.

“I’ll go home,” he said.

“What home? There’s nothing but ash as far as—”

“I’ll go home,” he repeated.

I interjected. “You’re welcome to come stay with me for a while. I know the futon isn’t comfortable, but—”

“I’ll go home.”

Lilac and I glanced at each other. She shrugged, confusion flashing across her features, and scooted closer to Ginger, who was tapping away on something that looked a little like a cell phone if cell phones had been spherical.

Needless to say, we’ve never been able to text each other. That’s the issue with having friends in different worlds: AT&T doesn’t have a plan for that.

“Let’s play a game,” Ginger suggested at last. It’s one thing to spend hours in the company of friends, but it’s quite another to spend hours in the company of strangers. We didn’t not get along, but it’s hard to keep up a conversation with people who you are only connected with through death.

Trauma is a weird way to start a friendship.

“What game?”

“Mafia—no, kiss, marry, kill. No, there’s only four of us. And I doubt our worlds share many celebrities we could use in a game like that. That’ll go quickly. Truth or dare gets boring fast. And there’s no liquor, so truth or chug would be boring.”

“Two truths and a lie,” Indigo suggested.

Ginger opened her mouth to object, but Lilac nudged her and gestured at Indigo, who had melted into a pool of despair and exhaustion. Lilac and Ginger exchanged whispered words before Ginger sighed her defeat.

“Fine,” she said. “But Lilac goes first.”

Indigo waved agreement. Through the portal behind him, a tree toppled to the ground.

“Okay,” Lilac said. “Here we go. One: I’m good at skiing, but I’ve never snowboarded. Two: I speak five languages. Three: I have no idea how to spell ‘necessary.’”

“The last one is obviously true,” I noted, “because nobody knows how to spell ‘necessary.’”

“You don’t speak five languages,” Indigo suggested.

“Correct!” Lilac exclaimed. “I speak six.”

“That’s really cool. Where’d you learn them?”

“My family speaks a number of languages. Our town is a couple miles away from a port, too, so sometimes foreign language teachers will dock and teach classes. If I find one that interests me, I’ll study it until I’m fluent. I’ve got an ear for them.”

“Wow,” Ginger said, starstruck and staring. “Okay. Indigo, you go.”

Indigo shrugged. “I’m the youngest child,” he started. “I’ve never been in a fight. And I saw my sister turn into ash in front of me when I was nine years old. That should help you narrow it down.”

Silence settled again. For people who had spent so long thinking about death, we were very uncomfortable talking about it with each other.

His sister, I thought. It was one thing for your worst enemy on the playground to evaporate in front of you. It was a whole other thing—infinitely more complicated, infinitely more grief-ridden—for that loss to be a sister.

From Lilac and Ginger’s expressions, it seemed that neither of them had lost a sibling in this. That didn’t mean they hadn’t lost anyone, I reminded myself. Mint had mentioned friends, siblings, enemies. We had all felt grief.

But...Indigo’s grief must have been impossible to bear.

“Easy,” Ginger said at last, since nobody else wanted to say anything. “You’re not the youngest child.”

“No?”

“You’re the oldest child of two. Or, uh.”

“I was, yeah,” he said.

At long last, with a ripple and a flash, our fifth companion stepped out of the final portal.

Before you get to make your own judgment of him, here’s something you should know about Adrian: Adrian is a peculiar person in that he isn’t bad, per se, but he’s very good at making other people dislike him. He doesn’t look mean (he’s always smiling, after all), but there’s something about him that’s just insufferable. It might be that he always wears suit jackets, even when it’s ninety degrees out. He was wearing one that day, under a trench coat, his black hair back from his face. He stuck his hands in his pockets and practically grinned.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Adrian Tsai.”

“Why would we take notes?” Ginger demanded, her tone flat. He examined her in that way men sometimes examine you—you know, that head-to-toe thing that rests a little too long on your abdomen. It’s an icky look. Ginger knew it, too, and glowered at him in a way only she could manage to make both threatening and curious.

“And you’re not supposed to tell us your name,” Lilac added.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said, as though he hadn’t just given us the one thing that would allow any of us to enchant him. “Sorry.”

He was the one he should have been apologizing to.

Back then, I didn’t really think about what it meant to tell someone your name. I knew it was dangerous, and I suspected why, but that was a time when the stakes felt distant. That was near the end of the Before Magic era. I think of my life as three eras: Before Magic, when I knew magic existed but thought I was crazy for believing that; Sort-of Magic, when I knew magic existed and thought it was something beautiful and worthwhile and unpredictable; and...well, the third era.

We’ll get to that era later.

So when Adrian told us his name, I didn’t think of it much differently than he did; neither of us thought of it as anything more than a minor slip-up. Later, I’d come to rethink that notion.

So would he.

“I assume you all came up with