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

the options and didn’t feel particularly keen about any of them, so I picked up one with pale blue bread and no unfamiliar meat and took a seat on the picnic blanket Ginger and Lilac had spread out in a sunny spot between two of the impossibly giant trees. It took me a moment to realize that the blanket was red and white, but once I noticed, I couldn’t stop staring at the flash of non-blue color in the bruised blue forest.

“So...the ash,” Lilac said at last. She leaned against Ginger’s shoulder and stirred her lemonade.  “What...who do you think it was?”

The conversation paused as my stomach bottomed out. We hadn’t talked about this side of our bond yet: the fact that all of us had seen death—that we had seen it when we were young, and all in the same way as each other.

The day Vivi had dissolved had been the worst day of my life. Now, people were dissolving again. I didn’t want to go there—didn’t even want to get close—now that it wasn’t my only route toward magic. And yet...staying away was wrong. It was wrong, and terrible to even think about. What if someone had intervened when I was young? What if Vivi had lived?

You would never have gotten here, a little voice in the back of my head said. You would be in Dallas with your parents, blissfully unaware of the best secret in the world.

“The death must have been some hiker,” Ginger said, too blasé to sound genuine. “People get lost in these parts.”

“I mean who did it, of course.”

I glanced to Indigo, who shrugged.

“Mint said—” I started. “Mint said that the reason we were all chosen for this is because we all saw the same thing when we were little. I don’t know about you all, but this...this matches up with my experience. Sort of. And earlier today, Indigo and I saw a version of this in my world. That’s how we got here.”

“What?” Lilac asked.

“A pile of ash in a parking lot,” I replied. “We got too close and it brought us here. That didn’t happen with the ash on the platform, though. We got close and it didn’t send us anywhere.”

“I don’t know,” Lilac muttered, taking a sip of her lemonade, “but these deaths are happening too often and too close to us to be a coincidence, don’t you think? Or is that incredibly self-centered to say?”

“I don’t know,” Ginger interjected. “But there’s got to be something bigger, right? Or else Mint wouldn’t have contacted us. What’s this Robin College place? Maybe it has something to do with that?”

“Speculation is useless,” I declared. “We should just ask Mint, right?”

“But what if he doesn’t tell us anything useful? He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would answer our questions. Or listen to us. Or, like, even bother to show up today.”

“Yeah,” Indigo added, breaking his quiet spell. “What’s up with Mint? He always looks pained. Is he…” he paused, glanced down at his sandwich. “Is he even on our side?”

I remembered his face—the blankness, and under it, the struggle. He was at war with something. I wasn’t about to get in the middle of that.

“Bad question,” Lilac pointed out. “But the test has to have something to do with the deaths, right?”

What had Mint said? If these tests only happened once a decade, they had to be a big deal. And there hadn’t been a death like this in a decade, either. We were intimately involved with these new deaths, then.

“Enough people are in danger to require we get involved...right?” I asked.

I glanced from face to face at that moment. Really, we were all strangers to each other. I had yet to learn Indigo’s habits, Ginger’s way of speaking, Lilac’s likes and dislikes. I had yet to fall in love, to make friends, to make enemies. But in that moment, in that brief second of clarity and foresight sitting on the forest floor in a world I had never seen before, I knew that these people would be important to me in a way nobody else had ever been before.

If I hadn’t already believed in magic, I would have started believing in that very moment.

V

A few hours later, we found ourselves in the version of the burned clearing Ginger’s world presented us with. From the outside, it looked a little different—the trees, in particular, looked different out here than they looked back home—but stepping into it was the same as it had been last night. Between two trees, I spotted my ocean in the distance.

Indigo raced to his side of the clearing, gazing out across the charred and blackened forest that had formerly been so green. Lilac found her side of the clearing, too, the opening between the trees looking out on a plain of red grass. In the distance was a house, charred at the top. Farther away, a village looked torn apart by wind.

“Ugh,” Lilac groaned. “It’s destroyed.”

Ginger pulled her into a tight hug as Lilac began to sniffle.

As one, we sunk to the ground, dust billowing up around us.

It was too much. All of it was too much. Indigo looked crestfallen, as if the ash in the forest had filled his own lungs and had begun to choke him. I watched carefully for the onset of another panic attack.

He took a seat away from the rest of us, his shoulder against one of the trees that bordered the portal to his world. The burned skeletons of the forest behind him created an odd contrast with his peaceful, exhausted expression—both were blank, borderline dead, but there was something hopeful in Indigo, as if the fire had helped him let go of something he hadn’t wanted in the first place. I kept a close watch, but listened in to Lilac and Ginger’s conversation.

“You can come stay with me,” Ginger was saying. “I’ve got a spare bedroom until the new year, and that’s months away.”

“I wouldn’t want to