Always/Never

Chapter 7 / The Library, a Neutral Territory

A few minutes and painkillers later, June had left me with the machine. I wasn't certain what I'd do if someone found me there, tearing out the panelling so the drum was exposed, then removing it along with the one from its neighbour. Kind of like I was switching the batteries in TV remotes. I lay on the floor, surrounded by clamps, 13/16 inch wrenches, and one more screw than I remembered there being at the beginning.

I wiped my hand against my shirt and came away with another fistful of lint. The lights overhead traced in pointless lines like a garden maze. Occasional car engine fire filled the room, along with the zoom of planes somewhere in the sky I couldn't see.

Dalford was hours away from Havens, folded into a smattering of smaller towns, which it had absorbed in its massive university-town appetite. One of them had a military training camp, so every now and then, parachutes dropped from the sky and contrails painted the clouds shades of neon yellow and orange.

The residence windows shook with the sheer number of them, loud even from the basement. I sat up and sighed, causing the Out of Order sign to flap in the burst of CO2.

At the back of my mind, I thought about what I'd do when Rory got back. If I remembered right, which I wasn't certain of, she had multiple classes on Thursdays. It would take me at least another couple of hours to finish, and I would be lying if I said I hadn't considered waiting for her. Taking her laptop so I could fill out a ticket for repairs and get someone to fix it for me.

There was a decent chance that reparations would come to the same conclusion I had. The machine needed to be binned. For them, this wouldn't have been a major loss. If this residence had one dryer less than there were washers, so what? Nobody would protest. Nobody would look at the machine and see anything less than an old, off-white dryer, paint-flecked and dented on the inside. Nobody would see the time machine, because that was the point.

Infernal timelines and circles...

I stood. The pain across my back had subsided to a slight twinge in my neck. Sometimes, I attributed it to my technopathy, even though that wasn't entirely true, simply because it seemed to fit better in my suffering.

I took the basement steps two at a time, cutting across the residences. My shoes tracked through freshly clipped grass, and the dampness in the air made my sneakers wet, prone to collecting strands of green-dyed hair on my way to the library.

Despite the fact that the library was free, barely two minutes away from campus, and massive, I rarely used it. I didn't need textbooks when I could look up what I wanted, and when I had my technopathy, I didn't need a laptop either. More than one library worker had tried to recruit me to work there in my fourth year for the sheer amount of articles and information I dug up with the system and sent to them to fill in the gaps in their research. I hadn't taken them up on it.

Flanking the smaller gym building, the library's large frame touched the sky, and as more training airplanes—rich blue and adorned with two apex-predator eyes on either side—crossed, they seemed to give it a wide berth.

I stepped inside. Rode the clunking elevator to the third floor, where the door stuttered open to rows and rows of books. Rolling carts filled with new additions lined up by the wall, piloted by employees bringing them to the front desk to be swaddled with a little white sticker on the spine with their Library of Congress codes. I dodged the students as I weaved through the rows, on the hunt for a computer.

It struck me like a craving, some kind of dependence, that the closer I got to the monitors, the more my brain needed it.

Kicking the upholstered chair aside, I threw myself sidelong into place and set my hand against the corded mouse. The last time I'd touched a mouse had to be years ago. It squirmed under my hand like the live animal for which it was named, too small to be ergonomic with my palm. I shook it, trying to summon the login screen, and it slid halfway across the table.