ONE HUNDRED SEVENTY-NINE: By Appointment
179
******
At five o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, the school library was so quiet that Alden felt like he’d sneaked into the place instead of walking through the front doors. He saw only one woman on the ground floor, and she was staring sadly at a line of empty vending machines.
There were still plenty of oddities like that around; signs that something had gone wrong recently stuck out like sore thumbs in the middle of a world that was back to running smoothly in most ways. You could go to restaurants and movies, or you could hang out in potion saunas with knights. But one of the links in the chain that made these particular vending machines have snacks in them was obviously still broken—an absent employee, a teleportation restriction, all the food being funneled into the meals that the school was supplying for the temporary dome neighborhood.
Alden’s thoughts tried to turn to the interconnectedness of the people in the village and how the attitudes of the elder and younger brothers would apply to missing chips and sodas, but he managed to stop them. He was here on campus at the crack of dawn instead of enjoying one of his two available beds because the story about the croak had plunged into him too deep. And he believed the sediment it had stirred up when it hit the bottom was best left to settle without examination.
For the first time in weeks, his affixation had woken him.
Not nightmares about affixing, but the affixation itself. Himself. Even now, he had that vivid sense of being trapped, of struggling against himself, of straining for more space and freedom.
And it wasn’t helping that he was pissed off about it in such a weird way. Specifically, he was mad that being mad was putting a damper on how unforgettable his night had been. Watching Esh-erdi correct the scale of someone’s gokoratch whiteboard art, eating leftovers with him and Lexi and Haoyu, being told an Artonan children’s story with crazy sound effects and then letting himself be talked into belch-croaking as loud as he could at the stars of the southern hemisphere…
It was cool. It won’t stop being cool just because the aftereffect was stolen sleep.