“If you like that one, I have four more with me today, and I can get you sixty-seven others. Really good stuff.”
She hummed a little under her breath. “So many. Did you steal them?” she asked.
First Shade with his bullets, and now this? Do I look like a thief? Apparently, yes.
I lifted my chin. To hell with it. I was always living on the edge. And from the looks of this place, the utter lack of order, I was pretty sure I was safe. “I heard about their unjust imprisonment and liberated them from an unappreciative source.”
There was total silence for a moment, and then a laugh cracked out of her. “Anyone who talks that way about books is definitely a kindred spirit.”
I was beginning to understand what she meant by that. A slow smile spread across my face. “Can you take any of them?” I asked, hope for my new armored door bubbling inside me.
“I…” She shook her head in what seemed like pretty easy surrender. “If they’re all as beautiful as this one, they’ll be hard to resist.”
Yes! “I need five thousand in universal currency,” I said in a low voice.
She sucked in a sharp breath. “That’s…not easy.” The book lover’s gleam in her eyes turned into distress.
“I know. I’m sorry. I would give them to you if I could, but that’s my best price.”
She leaned toward me, her soft waist pressing into the counter, her even softer brown eyes pleading with me to drop my price. “Why? Why do you need that much?”
All the frustration and want and hope and sadness inside me punched out, seeming to blow holes right through the slots between my ribs. “So I can repair a door, fly off this rock, and liberate more things that need freeing.” I didn’t confine my mission to books. As much as I loved and appreciated them, other things ranked higher than novels on the list of what to deliver from tyranny.
Susan closed her eyes and took a deep, long breath, her hair like a halo of fire around her head. When she opened her eyes again, I could have sworn they were wet. For some reason, that made a hint of tears burn behind my own eyes, when I hadn’t cried in years. This amazing place—and woman—were wreaking havoc on my heart.
She finally nodded, her look saying it all. How can I? But how can I not? Her skin seemed to scream it from every pore.
“Bring me the rest in two days,” she said, “and I’ll have what you need.”
Relief sang through me. That was perfect.
Her eyes suddenly darted to look at something beyond my shoulder, and she shoved the book under the counter, whispering an urgent “Get behind here.”
Years of living on the run honed certain instincts in anyone. That tone of voice—low and brittle, with rising panic just underneath—I knew it so well that I didn’t hesitate for one second. In two steps, I was around the counter and diving down faster than a comet about to inflict Armageddon on some poor, unsuspecting planet.
Chapter 10
The bell tinkled loudly just as I landed on all fours behind the counter. Susan stayed close to the register and used her foot to nudge me toward the stairs, sending me oozing down the steep, tight spiral. I held the bag of books against my middle, trying not to make a sound. I stepped quietly, hardly even breathing, and ended up in what must have been her living space, although it closely resembled the bookshop.
My heart racing, I eased backward until I was out of sight entirely but could still hear the conversation above. It sounded as though three, possibly even four people had come in. They were loud—of mouth and step. Military-issue boots always hit the floor with a distinctive thud.
I glanced around to make sure I was alone. I was—except for cats. Cats were everywhere.
I darted anxious looks from side to side and up and down. Cats occupied much of the available space, even sitting atop furniture and bookshelves.
Did they bite? How many colors did they come in? There were some bright-orange ones draped across the back of a tattered couch, parts of the animals almost pink, especially their noses. The rest of the felines mostly came in whites, grays, and blacks.
Susan’s odd question suddenly made more sense. Had she been talking about cats?
A striped one approached me and weaved between my ankles, rubbing against my legs. The sinewy motion reminded me of a snake. Not that I’d ever been around snakes, either. In fact, the only living thing I knew how to deal with besides people was bees. How weird was that?
I stood there, still and quiet, nervous about what was above and nervous about all these unfamiliar creatures below. I tried not to startle the felines or seem threatening in any way. If they ganged up on me, they would totally win.
The smallish cat continued using my leg as a head scratcher while I gazed up, listening for clues as to what was happening overhead. Customers wouldn’t have freaked the owner out. But the Dark Watch… And those boots…
My gut clenched. I’d had my back to the door and a bag of stolen, unstamped books in my hands.
Bad move, Tess.
Did Susan get visits like this often? A military patrol banging into her shop?
“When are you finally going to clean this place up, Susan?” a woman demanded. I heard a chair clatter and scrape across the floor, as if roughly kicked aside.
My hands fisted at my sides. I was going to have a fit if they touched those wooden tables.
“Oh… Um… Soon. I’ve been meaning to.” Susan went quiet for a moment. “I got distracted by a book and…forgot.”
Someone snorted loudly. A male. “And what book had you so interested that you couldn’t clean up this shithole like we told you to last week?”
Shithole! This was the most amazing place I’d ever seen besides the apiary on Starway 8.
I swallowed the rage and protest burning up my throat. Now wasn’t the time to shout them out.
I could tell that Susan was moving out from behind the counter, probably drawing them away from me. She must have walked over to a shelf. “This one. It’s…it’s a bit older. All about the legends that sprang up around Mall Hall after its orbit changed and its moon drifted off.”
“No seal on it,” a third voice said a moment later.
“Oh? Yes, well, look at that. I’m not sure anyone minds so much about that anymore,” Susan said.
“The Overseer minds,” the man grumbled.
Actually, I was pretty sure the Overseer had bigger fish to fry, like the rebel squad that had just found and destroyed the unmanned probe that had been sneaking around Sector 17. It had probably been gathering information about the possible location of the rebel base.
Asshole goons. They’d never find what didn’t want to be found.
Even from downstairs, I heard the Dark Watch soldier scrape the saliva out of his throat with a vulgar grating sound and then spit. I didn’t have to see it to know he’d spat on one of Susan’s beautiful books, and it was all I could do not to tear upstairs and spit on him. If I hadn’t been outnumbered and armed with nothing but four books and a clingy cat, I might have tried it.
“Well, now it’s got somethin’ on it, doesn’t it?” the man drawled.
“It does,” Susan agreed without a hint of animosity in her voice.
Feet stomped, trooping all over the floor above. “Now clean this place up before we come back!” the first man growled. “Or we’ll double the fine from last time.”
The bell chimed violently, and then they were gone.
My pulse continued to roar, at odds with the new quiet in the bookstore. The cat still wove between my legs with long, sinewy caresses. The feline was small. Not a baby, I didn’t think, but slight and lithe. The rumbling vibration coming from its body was curiously soothing and helped to settle my incensed spirit and rattled nerves.
Susan wound down the spiral staircase and located me in the maze of cats. “Sorry about that. They were just…”
“Harassing you?” I supplied.
She nodded, adding a fatalistic shrug that told me this had happened before—and would happen again. Everything about the movement said it is what it is.
But something in her eyes seemed suddenly forlorn. Not defeated, but unsure and maybe a little scared. I put a hold on the rebellious rhetoric I wanted to spew with angry and justified words. She was already fighting in her own way, bravely, and I had no right to try to persuade her into more. The reason more people didn’t rise up was because it just meant getting beaten down. That kind of life was something a person had to choose.