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

Not immediately, though.

I searched for the library. He wouldn’t have slept in the upstairs room if there was a library, and there had to be one in a house this big. Rich people liked owning libraries, even if they never went into them.

As clean as the house was, it had started to decay around the edges. Vines encircled balconies, a couple windows had rusted shut, and a calendar tacked to the wall next to a second-floor storage room shedded old paper across the carpet.

I found the library on the fourth floor. The door should have been grander—the rest of the house’s doors were, after all—but it was a plain slab of redwood. I pushed it open. Vivi stayed out in the hallway.

The creak of the door must have awoken Indigo, who must have fallen asleep inside. After a moment, his head peeked over a railing about a story up. The library itself was a little like a square tower, an open room that must have been the equivalent of about three stories high. Books lined the room, a balcony on every floor providing access to the shelves.

“Clementine,” Indigo said, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

I climbed onto my driftwood as though it was a surfboard and pressed my bare foot to the silver mark. The board rose slowly until my eyes were level with his.

“I need your help,” I said.

That woke him up. “What do you need me to do?”

“We need somewhere safe,” I told him. “I’m absolutely sure that whoever has been killing people can find our homes. Our families. We need a place to hide in case the killer finds us, and need a place to hide the people we care about in case they’re in danger, too.”

“I’m listening.”

“Help me research,” I said. “Your parents are librarians. I don’t want to mention it to the others right now. But we need a space, and I don’t think this house is enough. People have been here before us. They might come here again.”

Silently, Indigo reached out a hand to help me over the banister and onto the balcony. Between two shelves and in front of a small window was a smooth wooden table, a kerosene lamp in its center, and in a couple minutes, we found ourselves sitting there with a stack of books on magic realms.

Outside the window at my left shoulder, it snowed. My stomach growled. Indigo hummed and turned a page. The lamp flickered. Someone jogged past the library door. A bird scurried for shelter outside. I scratched out a note and corrected it.

This was the calmest I’d been since...well, I couldn’t remember.

“Look at this,” Indigo said at last, turning an old volume to show me a list of handwritten instructions.

I scanned up and down the writing, but couldn’t make anything of it. Cursive has never been my strong suit.

“It talks of a doorway,” he said at last. “It doesn’t work for long, but it lets you sort of...stand in the doorway between two worlds. Nobody can get you until you step out on one side or the other. It only works for a brief time, though.”

“That’s not perfect,” I said, “but it’ll do.”

“I’ll take it!” He snapped the book shut and smiled that warm smile of his. “Go to school. I can handle it from here. There aren’t any killer androids in this library, so I bet it’ll be pretty straightforward.”

“Don’t you have school?”

He shrugged. “The fire tore through it. I’ve got a week or two until they figure out a replacement option. And my mom’s letting me stay here as long as I can get a handle on the whole telekinesis thing.”

“It’d be better for her bots if you did.”

“Exactly.”

I hopped over the banister and let my driftwood catch me on my way down. Indigo’s laugh followed me out into the hallway.

XIII

Let it be known that I have nothing against school. It’s just that once you’ve seen magic—once you’ve flown for the first time—school isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a good time.

Particularly after I found another journal page outside my door when I stopped by my apartment that morning. What was school in the face of a mystery?

The page had read:

The second test was worse than the first one. Jamie took off right before Rose showed up, and he hasn’t come back, although I snuck out to talk to him yesterday. He said he’s staying away for good, although I’m not so sure. It would be a real tragedy, but I get it. I’m considering leaving, too.

I don’t know if I’ll survive the next three. Rose took us to this room and then separated us somehow. One second we were all together, but the next, we were tossed apart, in our own little worlds. It felt so real, even though I knew it wasn’t.

It took me almost three days to get out, which is why there’s that gap in time in the journal. Penelope got out in an instant. It took Artie a day, apparently. For me, the darkness was so overwhelming, I couldn’t even think. It took me a day to start breathing right.

Here’s the weird part: Rose couldn’t get the nameless kid into his own little world. She was complaining about it on the phone with someone when I woke up, so I heard her from the next room over,  but she’s refusing to talk about it with us. I think he did something—that magic he’s got is so unpredictable.

I spoke to Jamie about it when I snuck out to meet him the other night. All I know is that the nameless guy is dead set on passing at any cost, even if he kills us all in the process. He told me as much the other day.

I asked him why. He said—and I’ll remember it until I die—“I need something to make my life worth living, and this will do.”

Who says that to