Perfect Gravity (Wanted and Wired #2)(34)
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MUSTAQBAL INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 2045
The magical thing about the library was that no one ever needed to come here. Students could compile their audio-visual-sensory collage on a topic and feed it right into their coms. The cleverest kids double-booked their time, consuming lectures while they got in their daily ten thousand steps and five hundred calories burned. Bonus if they worked in groups, they could tick off their participatory classroom community requirement as well.
At fifteen, and after ten years of training at the academy, Angela was capable of such multitasking. Of course she was. Clean use of her time was an inherent gift, making such feats for her as natural as breathing. If she wanted to absorb information, she didn’t need to go to an old-timey library or page through buttery-smelling, soft-leather-swaddled paper books.
Which was exactly why she did those things with such frequency. She didn’t have to. She chose to.
Also, it didn’t hurt that Kellen Hockley came here a lot, the only other student who did. He was her best friend, despite the fact that all her other friends and peers dismissed him. They were all obtuse imbeciles as far as she was concerned. Plus he was her very own, her secret.
On an afternoon after scheduled activities were done, Angela sat in a window box at the library, her headset on and a lecture pouring itself into her brain folds. A book of tales by Charles Perrault was spread across her uniform-sheathed thighs, and she stared at the pictures while fundamentals of photovoltaics filled her mind. With all those inputs pushing data at her simultaneously, it was no wonder he had to poke her shoulder to get her attention. The second time, it even worked.
“Ow!” Too loud. Yikes, library! But she did look up.
Kellen loomed over her with the late-afternoon sunlight pouring through the window and washing him gold. Angela caught her bottom lip between her teeth and used two hands to lift off the headset.
“So this is what the smart kids do.” He gestured to her headset/book combo, somehow laughed without it sounding like he was making fun, and slumped down on the cushion opposite her. The reading nook had seemed cozy before. Now it didn’t have nearly enough space. It was too close, too intimate. And Angela had zero problem with that.
“You mean studying?” She felt her face set itself into a haughty expression. Which, like multitasking, was bred into her. She couldn’t do a thing to correct for these kinds of reactions, the ones he referred to as her creepifying blue-bloodery.
Energy radiated off him, like he had a zillion things more important to do than hang around here on Earth. Like he had some cosmic adventure to light off on. Every cell in her body screamed, Take me with you. Wherever you’re going, I want to go, too. Because clearly he didn’t belong here. He wasn’t like any other boy at the MIST, and all the students accepted that as fact. They laughed about him, actually, how odd he was. Only Angela thought his differentness was pretty fantastic, not something to tease or exclude him over.
He shrugged, tacking on a roguish half-smile. “I guess. But clever me for sussin’ out yer secrets. Now I too can take over the world with mah deep, data-filled introspection, bwahaha.”
Angela pressed her lips together to contain the burble of laughter. “Stop it. Your accent isn’t really that horrid. Besides, you spend just as much time here as I do. Case in point, right now.”
“Yeah, but I ain’t hiding in a corner underneath a mountain of equipment. How can you even see this pretty place with all that shit piled on your head?”
She loved that he said the expletives out loud, the same ones that littered her private thoughts. Shit shit shit. She said it silently, three times, and it tasted scrumptious.
“I will have you know that I see lots of things,” she said archly.
“Really? You seen Faiz’s granny and her cat?”
That word, for instance. Cat. It had several meanings. Angela had looked it up on the idiomatic dictionary. It could mean sly, sneaky, or genitalia. Or a small furry almost-domesticated mammal popular as a luxury item earlier this century and throughout the last.
“I, ah, haven’t.” She thought longingly of the headset next to her with its built-in cloud connection. She also wanted to look up the word granny. She didn’t think he was saying something salacious about the assistant librarian, but one could never be certain with Kellen.
“Well, come on, then, princess. Have I got a treat for you.” He popped up, and without asking for permission to touch her, no less invade her personal-space perimeter, he reached and grabbed both her hands, pulling her to her feet. The fairy book tumbled to the floor, its first-page folio splashing the synthetic carpet in gaudy color.
He let go of one of her hands but held on to the other as he led her through the stacks toward the curator’s office, itself a tiny, dark hovel near the emergency stairs. Kellen pushed a book-filled cart aside, revealing a passage Angela had never noticed before. Come to think of it, she hadn’t noticed much about this area of the library before. She’d been so focused on the books, the sum total of her interactions with the assistant librarian had been asking for location markers and firewall access passwords. Kellen had been the one to goad Faiz into showing them the rare volumes case, including that stunning blue-parchment Qur’an, the kind of object she knew she would always hold in her memory.
The passage was narrow and led to a room unlike the rest of the library. A hot little room with a slick tile floor and bare plaster walls. A refrigerator hummed in the corner, a small electric oven perched on a rickety table, and one red-and-gold-patterned curtain angled across an otherwise austere window. There were no cushions here, no details meant to evoke luxury or the vieille noblesse background most of the students would find comforting. A faint odor of cassia and cloves pervaded, like in the caravan market that sometimes set up outside the city walls.