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

I glanced to his mother.

“Go on,” she said. “Just avoid the archives. It’s dangerous down there. Also, stay away from the android storage area. It’s right next to the ladies’ room, so be careful. The label on the android storage door has three legs, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to tell them apart.”

I nodded, a little wary, and looped my arm through Indigo’s. He led me further through the entrance hall, slow enough that I got a chance to examine the place. It was much easier to take in the scenery without a gun pointed at my head.

The walls rose high up above us, extending into the darkness far over our heads. Hovering between us and the ceiling were fluorescent bars of light, a little like you might see in classrooms, but they were high up enough that the light wasn’t as glaring as it might have otherwise been.

Everything was stone and metal. There were no windows, either, even as Indigo led me into the main part of the library. Just books upon books upon books, their bindings made of all imaginable varieties of leather and fabric. The shelves stretched up for what looked like miles. The floor of the main hall was glass, thick enough that it wouldn’t crack under us but not so sick as to set my stomach at ease. Below us, another thousand miles of books.

There were no tables, no chairs. Just metal shelves, deep bronze with corners sharp enough to cut unaware passers-by. They were arranged so that if a person stood in the middle of the room, as we did, that person could see the tops of all the shelves, which were labelled with numbers in a pattern I couldn’t hope to understand. Clearly, the Dewey Decimal System was not the favored method of organization in this library.

“Okay,” I said, turning to him. “Levitating?”

He shrugged and tried not to look at me, pulling me along after him as we crossed to the other side of the ginormous main room.

“How often do you levitate stuff?”

“Sometimes.”

“Can you control it? How does it feel? Do you know why you’re able to do it?”

“No to all of those,” he told me, tugging me down the hall to a circular glass chute that was probably the equivalent of an elevator.

“How can it feel like ‘no?’”

Inside the elevator, he bashed a couple of buttons with his elbow and only turned to look at me when the doors closed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like talking about it when my mom’s around. She thinks it’s an illness.”

“But she knows it’s real, right?”

“That’s the problem,” he told me. The elevator shot downward way too fast, but he didn’t look fazed. “She’s all to aware that it’s real, but she doesn’t know why it’s happening. We have a whole section in this library dedicated to telekinesis and she still doesn’t get why I can do it.”

“Telekinesis,” I repeated. When he said it out loud, he sounded delusional. Absolutely out of it. Mental. But, at the same time, I could see him doing it. It made sense. As powerful as that idea was—and as terrifying as I imagined it being—he was the perfect person to have it. He was calm, but not detached. Perfect for that big a power.

“Show me,” I demanded. He shook his head and glanced out the window at the library as the floor sunk out of sight above us. Beneath us, the books were less organized, stacked in piles as machines sorted them—oh, gods, those were androids, metal and a spidery as they scanned and moved piles of books. The lower we went, the bigger the androids seemed to be, until we were at the floor and I could conclusively say they were about three times as tall as I was.

Indigo led me around the corner toward the closest android, his hands tucked in his pockets. It was metal, a great brass and steel contraption that was in no way beautifully crafted, with a single glass eye in the middle of its forehead. It turned to look at us.

Hello, it said, its voice impossibly robotic. What are you looking for today? Please enter your query in the search bar. It held out a long appendage with a tiny screen and keyboard on the end.

Indigo reached out his hand and, without touching the android, flattened his palm parallel with the ground. He glanced at me.

“Don’t think less of me for this,” he said.

“I couldn’t,” I said, my tone dry.

He laughed and clenched his hand into a tight fist.

The android exploded.

Shrapnel went everywhere—through the books, into the glass high above, into the ground. One large piece embedded itself into the concrete inches away from my shoe. The glass eye rolled across the floor until Indigo stopped it with his foot.

A dead silence filled the room, save for the continued clattering of some pieces with particular momentum. Androids across the library floor turned their glass toward us, frozen and glitching with the overload of new information from their exploded companion. Then, a few seconds later: “WHAT DID YOU DO?” from upstairs.

Indigo glanced at me. In an odd moment of mischievous humor—odd at the time, at least, since he smiled so seldom back then—he linked his hand with mine and took off down the hallway.

“Go, go, go!” he called. “Come on!”

We raced down the hall, feet skidding across the too-smooth concrete as something started clanking violently behind us. Indigo yanked me into a side room and slammed the door behind us.

“Indigo,” I said. “This is a closet.”

I heard him shake his head in the dark. He squeezed past me and knelt to push aside something in the back of the closet.

Light flooded in through a perfectly square hole in the wall, which was about three feet by two feet.

Indigo ducked through and I wiggled after him.

Beyond was a room unlike the rest of the library. This was not a cold room. There was no steel, no concrete—just stones across