“Hello?” I called out. There didn’t appear to be anyone here.
After a moment, I heard scuffling on stairs, and a woman I assumed was Susan appeared behind the register, having evidently come up from a lower level hidden behind the counter. She was probably in her mid-to-late fifties, a little on the short side, and totally unruly, just like her shop. There wasn’t a piece of clothing on her that matched the rest. And nothing in the galaxy could ever have matched the flame-red hair that stuck out in corkscrews all around her head.
“Sorry.” Smiling, she made a useless attempt to smooth down her hair. “Just feeding the cats.”
“No problem,” I said. “I like cats.” In theory, anyway. I’d yet to touch one, in fact.
I slid my fingers under the strap of my bag, shifting its bulk a little.Now for the fun process of trying to foist off stolen goods.
I didn’t feel guilty about having taken the books—they’d been completely underappreciated in that billionaire’s sterile basement—but I did feel guilty that the library wouldn’t get them. If they ended up here, though…
I looked around again.Wow. This place was nice.
“I know, I know—the shop’s a little untidy.” Susan’s gaze darted around, turning tenser. “I-I’ll straighten up soon.”
“No! Don’t!”
Her eyes widened at my sudden outburst.
I settled my voice back into a normal volume. “I mean, it’s great. It’s great just the way it is.”
She smiled again, her grin so big I could see the insides of her cheeks. “Are you a kindred spirit, then?”
“Uh… Maybe?” I wasn’t quite sure what she meant.
Her eyes narrowed, dipping up and down to look me over. I couldn’t figure out her look. It wasn’t hostile in any way, but she was still sizing me up—and very obviously, at that.
“White, gray, or black?” she asked.
It would have been a lot easier to answer her question if I’d had any idea what she was talking about, but I decided to just go with it. “None of those colors are much fun by themselves,” I said. “Mix them up?”
She nodded. “Stripes, then. Stripes it is.”
Huh. Well, weird and wonderful as that was, because anything inexplicable that didn’t kill you was actually pretty damn cool in my opinion—the Black Widow, for instance—I had business to conduct. I pulled out one of the books.
“Would you be interested in anything like this?” I asked, turning it over in my hands so that she could admire the old-style hardcover binding. The artwork on the cover jumped right off the page, looking like something straight out of a fairy tale. I hated to give it up, especially before I’d read it, and the kids on Starway 8 would have salivated over something like this, all of them impatiently waiting their turn. Mareeka or her partner, Surral, might have borrowed it from the library for them. I knew of at least one eleven-year-old boy whose eyes would have lit up like starbursts. Coltin loved a good adventure story, and I brought him one whenever I could.
“Hmmm.” Susan took the book from my loose grip and looked it over. “No seal?”
“I don’t think it ever went through the rounds.” And by that, we both knew I meant not only the stampings of approval, but the burnings as well.
“That’s unusual.” She looked at me, her fingers still lightly tracing the bold, gold lettering of the embossed title. I noticed her fingernails. They weren’t dirty, but they were definitely a little unkempt, just like the rest of her. “It must have been in a very secure location to go unnoticed,” she said.
I shrugged. Luckily, I was good at getting into secure locations and decoding locks, especially the fancy ones. Also, the galactic government didn’t seem to be actively hunting and destroying these kinds of relics anymore. They must have figured they’d gotten the bulk of them in the beginning and could let slide the spread-out, occasional, hard-to-find rest. Otherwise, places like this shop and a small wing of the Intergalactic Library would have been goners.
“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.”
