A boy, desperate to escape the drudgery of life in his small town, gets caught up in the machinations of a traveling time keeper, and slowly watches his town and his life unravel by the seams.
Content warnings 1
death-of-a-loved-one
Ian R. MacLeod
2 free-to-read stories indexed on Quasar
1,000 years after the final war, the robot overseer of a repository of knowledge on an asteroid at the Earth-Moon L4 point finally gets a message from Earth.