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

me—trusting a stranger, especially one who had just exploded a fifteen-foot-tall android with a mere clenching of his hand—but I was more naive back then, as a rule, and I had yet to realize that people who care for you and truly want the best for you can really hurt you.

I grabbed the fire pole and glanced at him.

“This is safe?”

“Probably. It’s been a decade.”

With that vote of confidence, I swung out and down, sliding about two stories as the claustrophobia began to hit. Gods, I hated small spaces. And spaces that were far below ground.

Fortunately, the entranceway the pole ended in was polished wood, smooth and ornate around the edges, the walls pure glass. Beyond, there was blue—blue like the ocean, blue like the deepest depths of the Pacific, but with no fish or kelp or signs of life. There was just water, lit only by the light coming from this room.

Indigo joined me seconds later and looked out through the glass, as well.

“The ocean,” he said. “Or that’s what you’d call it. Yours are aboveground, it seems. Ours...not so much.”

“Is it wise to build a library right above an ocean?”

He shrugged, his face spectacular and ghostly in the pale orange light of the bulbs that decorated the walls around us.

“It’s not unwise,” he said. “As long as you have an escape plan. We keep some of the archives down here.”

“You what?”

“Come on.” I followed him deeper into the room, the walls all around that heavy blue that was beginning to give me a tension headache. What if the glass cracked? What if the floor caved? What kind of magic—no, not magic, tech—kept this place together?

It was a small series of rooms with very little in the way of walls to keep them separated from each other. They were mostly doorways, actually, huge doorways whose tops almost brushed the ceiling. Each room was empty, the walls papered in old maps of all sorts of places, save the farthest from the entrance, which held an odd contraption that looked like a wheel with a series of hammers on it. It could have been a steering wheel on a pirate ship, but there was metal lining most of it, and a cluster of wires was wound around the centerpoint of it.

Indigo grabbed what looked like a keyboard from behind the wheel and typed in a series of numbers and letters, then spun the wheel with a clacking noise that sounded like knuckles popping.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

A book popped out of a box at the back of the contraption, encased in a sopping protective plastic layer. Indigo unzipped the bag and yanked the book from its casing, flipping through the pages until he came across the right one.

“We’ve always used this just for the access code,” he said, “but I’m coming to realize that the rest of the book is about magic. It’s not incomprehensible—we just weren’t looking at it right.”

“What?”

“It’s runes,” he said, waving the book in my direction. “Some are number sequences, some are drawings. They looked incoherent to me when I was younger, but now that I know magic is real, I think that’s the only thing that can explain whatever the hell is written in here.”

He found what he was looking for and tapped the code into the device before handing me the book and spinning the wheel. I tucked the thin volume into my coat pocket.

“It’s been so long I’d almost forgotten how to get there.”

“Get where—” I began, but I was cut off by something shooting through the darkness toward us. Indigo retreated to the second room over, his feet echoing on the wood, and slid open a panel I hadn’t seen before.

Beneath us was a sort of pod (I assumed it was what had hastened toward us moments earlier). The inside was a brown leather, two seats spaced across from each other. The floor was a deep bronze, very much like the rest of the library. Indigo dropped lithely into the compartment and I followed with more reluctance and much less agility. It smelled musty and ancient, as if nobody had breathed the compartment’s air in a century.

Once I was in, Indigo grabbed what looked like a joystick and sunk into one of the seats. I sat across from him and tried not to look out the windows too much. With a slight push of the joystick Indigo sent the pod careening through the midnight blue darkness, pale fluorescents on the outside of the pod illuminating the water around us.

“Are there, uh,” I started. “Are there fish here?”

“No fish,” he said, “but things.”

That was worse. Much worse. I didn’t want to know what kind of things there were. I wanted to be aboveground, in the burned forest or in the clearing or at home in my apartment. Being hundreds of feet underground in a pod that was at least a decade old with a young man who wasn’t looking in the direction we were going was not where I wanted to be.

“Trust me,” Indigo said.

“I’m having a hard time doing that.”

He didn’t say anything else. I stared out the window and wished I’d said something less abrupt. For a brief second, I thought I saw something move.

“What kind of things live here?”

“I think telling you would be worse,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’re almost there.”

Telling me would not have been worse. I’d like you to know that now. I have an active imagination (as evidenced by my ability to continue believing in magic for much longer than any other child who had been told she was delusional might have). When a person says, “I’m sure you couldn’t imagine anything as bad as the truth,” that person has just given you evidence of their imagination’s lack of scope.

There are always people who can imagine worse things.

We got to the island a few seconds later, breaching the surface with an odd plunk noise that sounded like a stone dropped in water. Indigo heaved himself out