Brooke ‘Bookeeper’'s Arc

Chapter 7 of 32

Brooke left at dawn with the boy, two of Sherrie's escorts, and a cart. The first stop sat three hours out — a small bookstore with half its roof caved in. Twisted beams hung over the door. Shelves leaned inside, still full. One wrong step and the whole place would fall. She stared at it from the road. The boy stared too. One of the escorts spit in the dirt and said he wasn't going in there. The other agreed. Brooke understood. She needed someone who could read a building, not shoot one. She remembered a man who worked out of an old red phone booth at the edge of a junk lot, fixing what others called broken. She sent an escort back with a note and a jar of preserves. By midday he came walking up the road with rope coiled on his shoulder and a folding ladder under his arm. He circled the bookstore twice. He pointed at the beams that held and the ones that didn't. Together they raised a frame of pipe and plank against the front wall — bracing the doorway, propping the worst sag. He tied a line around Brooke's waist. "You go in light," he said. "You come out when I pull." She went in. She came out three times, arms full, the boy stacking books on the cart in silent rows. Forty-one titles. Eleven from her list. The roof groaned but held. Sherrie's escorts watched the road. Brooke paid the man in books and a promise. One stop done. Five to go. And the cart, for the first time, was not empty.