Brooke ‘Bookeeper’'s Arc

Chapter 6 of 32

Brooke closed the library door behind the last stranger and pulled out her spiral notepad. The pages were already bent from her pocket. She wrote every title down, every name attached to it, until the list ran two pages deep. The boy watched from his chair. She tapped the pencil twice and knew she could not do this alone. She walked to the warehouse she used for staging, the one with steel shelves and a long wooden counter for sorting. She spread an old map across the counter and circled six places in red ink — abandoned libraries, a school, a clinic with a reading room. Six stops. Two weeks if she was lucky. She needed hands she could trust, and a gun she did not have. She found Sherrie at the edge of town, leaning against a post. Brooke laid the notepad on a crate between them and spoke plainly. "I have a list. I have a map. I need someone who can shoot if it goes bad." Sherrie picked up the notepad, thumbed the pages, and set it back down. "I don't run errands," Sherrie said. "But your column brought people to this town. People I can sell to." She tapped the map once. "I'll lend you two of mine for the first three stops. After that, you're on your own. And you owe me a favor I'll name later." Brooke held her eye, then nodded. She rolled the map, pocketed the notepad, and walked back to the library to tell the boy she was leaving in the morning. The crowd outside had thinned. The shelves were still empty. But for the first time, the road did not feel like one woman's weight.