Always/Never

Chapter 6 / Rogue Inventions

My knees dug into the linoleum floor of the laundry room. I was certain I'd memorized every divot over the past few hours. Lint plagued my clothes, covering every inch of me in grey fuzz.

Not for the first time, I slid forward to check the fuse box. I ran my tongue across my teeth as I made sure I hadn't tripped a breaker. The electrical room key hung from the locked door, wrapped in blue plastic and hooked to three other keys that unlocked who knew what.

The keys had been in the lock for as long as I'd been in this residence, after somebody shorted a fuse that caused a power outage across the whole building.

It took me a couple of minutes to figure out which was which, considering the labels were scratched off, but none of them had flipped.

Begrudgingly, I returned to the dryer. In all, I'd checked the doors, the switches, the lights and power cords. Multiple times. Its plug formed a coil around my feet as I moved to try again. The motor, behind the belt at the spine of the machine, wouldn't turn.

I was going to need a screwdriver. And probably a manual.

I flicked the lint off my pants. The instant I turned to the stairway, Rory peeked from above, causing the lights to roar and flicker, as if they could get any brighter than they already were.

"Oh, you're down here," she said.

"As if I'd be anywhere else." I humoured the thought for a moment. "You thought you got rid of me?"

She shrugged, shifting the computer bag on her shoulder. Idle thoughts of what I'd done with that thing entered my mind, for no reason in particular, sort of like how I thought of old sweaters I hadn't seen in a while, the camera I'd gotten as a gift but was buried within the inner workings of my closet. I'd used that bag for years, and I didn't know where it was. Couldn't have fetched a guess. "For about two minutes there, yeah."

"Sorry to disappoint." I met her halfway across the room, near the table where the clothes were long since folded and replaced with another, a different but entirely identical, load of laundry someone had left unattended. Because, well, it was just clothes. And stuff. By the time whoever they belonged to toted it to their room, the table would be covered in the next, a never-ending cycle. "I'm going to need the toolkit."

"You're fixing it? Will that... you know, fix it?"

"It's a fifty-fifty chance." I hated to admit it, but it was true. If the machine needed to be working again, intentionally broken or not, would this cause it to resume its duty and take me back to Tandem? I didn't have the display he'd made either, which was a problem of its own kind. Without that, I'd be firing myself into the future, not knowing what day or year it was.

"Fingers crossed," Rory said, though it was more of a question than a statement of goodwill. "I'll unlock the door. You're not coming to class with me? No overbearing fake big-sister thing?"

I shook my head. "Look, it's a bit late now to try convincing ourselves this is leading to my future. So do whatever you want. Screw with the timeline. What do I care? If I'm still standing around, nothing of much consequence is different."

"That's..." She blinked. "That's not what you were saying before."

In reply, I waved my hand dismissively. "I'm allowed to have a change of heart."

"Sure, if I thought you were telling the truth, I'd believe that. But you're not, so I don't." The duality of what she was saying hung between us for a moment. Outside the slit of a window, engines fired and music filtered into the room, the lyrics fuzzy and garbled across the glass, as if I was hearing it through a memory coloured by time and distance. "Have you tried consulting Rogue Inventions? The book could help you with the machine... right?"