Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  Bookburners Season One: Volume 1: Copyright © 2016 text by Serial Box Publishing, LLC.

  All materials, including, without limitation, the characters, names, titles, and settings, are the exclusive property of Serial Box Publishing, LLC. All Rights Reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part, in any audio, electronic, mechanical, physical, or recording format. Originally published in the United States of America: 2015.

  For additional information and permission requests, write to the publisher at Serial Box Publishing 175 Varick St. 4th Fl, New York, NY, 10014.

  Serial Box™, Serial Box Publishing™, Bookburners™, and Join the PlotTM are trademarks of Serial Box Publishing, LLC.

  ISBN: 978-1-68210-060-8

  This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Written by: Max Gladstone, Margaret Dunlap, Mur Lafferty, Brian Francis Slattery

  Cover Illustration by: Jeffrey Veregge

  Art Director: Charles Orr

  Lead Writer: Max Gladstone

  Editor: Marco Palmieri

  Producer: Julian Yap

  Bookburners original concept by Max Gladstone and Julian Yap

  Episode 1: Badge, Book, and Candle

  by Max Gladstone

  1.

  Sal Brooks would have described herself in a police report as early thirties, female, brown hair, five nine, exhausted, borderline breakdown case, shaking hands, haunted eyes. Then she’d have deleted everything after “nine” and continued with the details of the incident. In this case: Forensic analysis of the museum theft yielded an Astoria address. Arriving on the scene with warrant in hand, Detective Collins and I were fired upon from the window by a white male, late forties. After a brief exchange of fire, Detective Collins forced the door. Behind the door—

  Sal set her badge and gun on her bureau and gripped the first two fingers of her left hand. Her stomach ran a floor routine even the Russian judge would give full marks.

  She’d seen blood before, and bodies. The severed fingers in the ashtray on the coffee table in Astoria that afternoon . . . those were worse.

  They’d yield prints, at least. Which would not help her sleep tonight.

  Her cell phone rang. Perry. She didn’t pick up. The ringing stopped before the call forwarded to voice mail, then started again. Still him.

  “Perry, this isn’t a good time,” was what she started to say, but she didn’t get halfway through her brother’s name before Hurricane Perry struck shore.

  “Sal, thank you, thank you, thank you for picking up. I’m so glad, it’s wonderful to hear your voice, I missed you, how’re things, how long has it been anyway, can I come over, like, now?”

  “It’s been a month.” She thumbed a gap in her blinds. The sidewalk under her window was bare, and the street almost empty. Red Toyota pickup, Honda Civic, garbage, two young guys staggering home after drinking off a Thursday night. Thank God. The last time she’d heard Perry talk like this, he was on the run from some crazy scenester drama and hadn’t waited for her permission to come over, just called her from the sidewalk in the rain and looked up, dripping, with that hangdog John Cusack look she knew he practiced in the mirror. “Since the last time you were in trouble.”

  “It’s nothing big, Sal, I promise, nothing you should worry about, just, you know, internet stuff, and then I started arguing with my roommates and you know people can get crazy sometimes, like, crazy. It’s not the same thing as last month, I swear, I just need a place to be, you know. I’d get a hotel if I could.” If he had money for a hotel.

  She peeked out her corner window just to be sure. He wasn’t down there either. “I’ve had a very long day, Perry.”

  “I know, I know, every day’s a long day for you, I’m so sorry, but I just kind of need a place to rest for a little while, and I did apologize for last month, and I sent you flowers.”

  “David still isn’t returning my calls.”

  “You deserve better than a guy like that, a guy who doesn’t understand the importance of family.”

  “David has a huge family. He’s a good guy. He just doesn’t like being kicked out of bed because my kid brother’s locked himself out of his apartment. That was a good thing, emphasis on the was. And the flowers you sent were fake.”

  “Better that way, they don’t die, right? And it wasn’t just that I locked myself out. And anyway I’m improving, I mean, you don’t have anyone over now. Do you?”

  Her eyes narrowed. She glanced out each window again. “Where are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She realized she could hear his voice twice: once through the phone, and once from the hall.

  Sal marched from her bedroom past kitchen and living room to the door. She unbolted the bolt, unchained the chain, and pulled the door open.

  Perry was less wet than she’d last seen him, at least. One hand pressed an oversized Star Trek phone to his ear. He wore a dirty tan trench coat, open, over a ratty black T-shirt with three pixelated hearts on the front and a fourth half-full, and jeans torn at the knee—from his nervous habit of clawing them while he worked on his computer, rather than from wear. His other hand held a large rectangular parcel wrapped in more T-shirts and duct tape, which he waved at her, then stuck under his arm, and waved again with an empty hand.

  He deployed John Cusack version 1.2.

  She clicked her phone shut.

  He started warming up John Cusack version 1.7.

  She sighed, and smiled, and hugged him. “Come in, doofus.”

  • • •

  He set up in the living room, and she put water in the kettle. “Do I want to know why you’re here?”

  “Thank you so, so, so much.” He set the parcel on her living room table and undid the duct tape. “It’s not dangerous, I mean, I’d tell you if it were, you know, but I got into a fight with the roomies over a project we’re working on together, sort of, and I want to make sure I’m right before I go home. Just need some time to work on this thing myself. Bunch of posers. Don’t know Altaic from Aramaic.” He unwrapped the T-shirts layer by layer, each silk-screened video game reference worse than the last.

  “I get that one,” she said. “It’s the, what, the game with the dysentery. Why all the T-shirts?”

  “Sal, do you have any idea how old this thing is?” He folded a Mario shirt back to reveal a thick tome bound in pale leather, with gold wire on the spine. The pages’ ragged edges were dyed blood-red. Sal remembered severed fingers in an Astoria ashtray, and her stomach made a second pass at the floor routine.

  “No?”

  “Old, and I mean old. I shouldn’t be handling it without gloves.”

  The kettle cried, and Sal followed its protest to the kitchen. “You should get new roommates. You fight more with those guys than I ever have with an ex. Even Jeremy.” She returned with two mugs of coffee.

  “It’s just professional differences, I mean, we’re working on big problems, borderline intractable, arguments get heated. There are different strategies about how to approach the artifact. Aiden, you know, roommate Aiden with the crush on you, he wants to scan the whole thing for word frequency analysis, which just seems patently silly, the codex form factor suggests it’s supposed to be read, like by people, and anyway Aiden’s security protocols are hella lax, which matters when you’re under surveillance.” He took a sip, made a face. “Is thi
s instant?”

  “Wait. Surveillance?”

  “Todd says it’s the Bookburners, that’s why they wanted the book out of the house, which is just so dumb—if the Bookburners were after me, how would I have even made it here?”

  He set his hand on the book’s cover. Sal hadn’t noticed before how the leather was discolored: most of it matched Perry’s skin, but a crimson bloom spread beneath his fingers. She heard a sound she couldn’t name: a footfall, maybe, or a whisper, very soft. Goose bumps chased goose bumps up her arms.

  “Perry, who are the Bookburners? Do you think someone’s following you?”

  “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

  She leaned over the couch, over his shoulder, and checked through the blinds. Street still bare. Red Toyota pickup. Honda Civic. Garbage. E-Z Carpet Cleaner van.

  “Please, Sal. They would have nabbed me on the way. They did not. Ergo, I wasn’t followed.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  Someone knocked on her door.

  “Shit,” Perry said.

  “Jesus Christ, Perry.” She grabbed her phone off the living room table. “Who is that?”

  “Aiden. Probably.”

  “Mister Brooks?” The man on the other side of the door was unquestionably not Aiden—too old, too sure, too calm. An accent Sal couldn’t place twined through his words. “Mister Brooks, we’re not here to hurt you. We want to talk.”

  “Shit,” Perry repeated, for emphasis.

  Sal ran to her bedroom and returned with her gun. “Who are you?”

  “I’m looking for Mister Brooks. I know he’s in there.”

  “If he is, I doubt he’d want to see you.”

  “I must talk with him.”

  “Sir, I’m a police officer, and I’m armed. Please step away from the door.”

  “Has he opened the book?”

  “What?” She looked into the living room. Perry was standing now, holding the book, fingers clenched around the cover like she’d seen men at bay clutch the handles of knives. “Sir, please leave. I’m calling 9-1-1 now.” She pressed the autodial. The line clicked.

  “Stop him from opening the book,” the man said. “Please. If he means anything to you, stop him.”

  “Hello. This is Detective Sally Brooks,” and she rattled off her badge number and address. “I have a man outside my apartment who is refusing to leave—”

  Something heavy struck the door. Doorjamb timbers splintered. Sally stumbled back, dropped the phone, both hands on the pistol. She took aim.

  The door burst free of the jamb and struck the wall. A human wind blew through.

  Later, Sal remembered slivers: a stinging blow to her wrist, her gun knocked back against the wall. A woman’s face—Chinese, she thought. Bob haircut. Her knee slammed into Sal’s solar plexus and she fell, gasping, to the splinter-strewn carpet. The woman turned, in slow-motion almost, to the living room where Perry stood.

  He held the open book.

  His eyes wept tears of blood, and his smile bared sharp teeth.

  He spoke a word that was too big for her mind. She heard the woman roar, and glass break. Then darkness closed around her like a mouth.

  • • •

  Summer sun baked her skin. Sal lay, fourteen years old, on a raft atop the pond out back of her grandparents’ Carolina homestead, while Perry read aloud on shore. Her hand trailed into the still water. The water was still, but moving too, the raft rocked her head back and forth, and her body wasn’t fourteen anymore, and dammit she was dreaming, wasn’t she?

  If she strained, she could hear voices on the other side of the dream.

  “You lost him.” A man’s voice, lilting, close—a different voice from before. “How did that happen?”

  “He opened the book, is how.” A woman’s voice. “Do you need a picture?”

  “I have crayons in the truck if you’d like to draw one.”

  “He tried to hit me,” she replied. “Got her instead. I pulled her out, but he made the window before I could catch him.”

  “So the boy’s off-grid with a rider in his head, in a city of eight million people. Wonderful, I think we’ll call that. A-double-plus effort.”

  Sirens.

  “Christ,” the man said, “they answer calls quickly here. Come on. Is she—”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Don’t open your eyes when lying on your back. Bad for them. You’ll see too much of the sun.

  She forced them open. The man kneeling over her was red-haired and beautiful. “Sorry. Have to run. Have a nice rest. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  He pulled away, and the ceiling grew new shadows which fell to crush her again.

  2.

  Sal, in the department clinic, with whatever she had to hand, was how the Clue solution would read if someone didn’t start making sense soon. She glared over the doctor’s head at Collins, her partner, who leaned against the wall, arms crossed, looking like he’d rather be anywhere but here, carrying anything but the news he carried. Her head swam. “I’ve told you three times,” she said. “My brother came to my apartment. Two people followed him. I gave you their descriptions. They broke down my door. There was a fight, and I woke up when the officers arrived. It’s not that complicated a story.”

  “You’re sure you saw your brother?”

  “Of course I’m sure. It was Perry. He had some kind of fight with his roommates.”

  “Breathe,” the doctor said.

  She breathed. The stethoscope chilled her skin. “So what’s the problem?”

  Collins shifted, but if he’d been trying to get comfortable, his expression suggested that he’d failed. “Who says there’s a problem?”

  “Come on, Collins.”

  “Here.” He passed her a tablet. “Hit play.”

  Security camera footage rendered her apartment building hallway in ghoulish greens and whites. She saw herself open her door and peer out into the hall, smile, step back, swing the door wide and close it again. “This is the wrong footage.”

  “It’s not, though. Check the time stamp.”

  “Perry’s not there.”

  Collins lowered his chin toward his chest. It didn’t touch due to the extra chin in the way. “Scratch one theory.”

  “You thought I was seeing things.”

  “Who knows? We got your testimony, we got a living room with broken glass and two cups of instant coffee, we got a tape that doesn’t match your story, and falls apart ten minutes later.”

  “Stare up at the ceiling,” the doctor said, “just with your eyes. Keep them wide, please.”

  The doctor’s flashlight burned the world. Sal forced herself not to blink. “So you don’t have the intruders, either.”

  “Tape falls apart, like I said.”

  “Shit.”

  “Sal, come on. Chinese woman, white guy with red hair, unnamed third guy with—quote—old, accented—unquote—voice, doesn’t give us a lot to go on.”

  “Irish,” she said. “The white guy had an Irish accent.”

  “Great, Sal. In New York, that sure narrows it down.”

  “Someone must have doctored the tapes.”

  “First responders pulled them. If someone messed with the footage, they did it fast.”

  The doctor released her eyelid, and she blinked pink bloodwebbed blotches from her vision. “The other eye, please.” And again the world was light.

  “They planned this,” Sal said. “Whoever they were. It couldn’t have been random. They were after Perry. They hacked into building security.”

  “Which would make sense—I mean, it’d be possible, if paranoid—except those cameras don’t talk to the internet. They’re not even digital. There’s an actual, honest-to-God tape system in the building basement, looks like it was installed back when I was hunting Playboys under my big brother’s mattress.”

  “Gross, Collins.”

  “There was a rat nest on top of th
e cabinet. Good thing we still have a VCR. Nobody got to that tape before our boys did, trust me. And you should find a new landlord. That building’s a dump.”

  “My brother’s out there. Somewhere. I saw him.”

  The doctor finished with the flashlight and stepped back. “She’s good to go. If anything’s wrong, I can’t see it.” Sal squeezed both her eyes shut until the pink went away.

  “Thanks, Doc. Can you give us a minute?”

  When the door closed and left them alone, Collins sank into the doctor’s chair with a long hiss, as if he was under such pressure he had to let out steam to bend. He looked at the back of his knuckles rather than at her.

  “You know none of this makes sense,” he said.

  “I know what I saw.”

  “And the more you say that, the weirder it sounds. Nothing on the cameras. I mean, nothing. No blood.”

  “What, do people think I just snapped, imagined my brother being kidnapped, beat myself up, broke my own damn living room window?”

  “You were upset when you left yesterday.”

  “Of course I was upset. We found fingers in an ashtray! I freaked out, but that doesn’t mean I’m nuts.”

  “We went to your brother’s apartment. His roommates say they saw him this morning.”

  “Did you see him?” she asked. Collins shook his head. “Then they’re lying. Or he escaped. Either way, he’s into something big. He needs help.”

  “We told the boys to call us when he shows up again. For now, you should take a day or two, calm down, rest.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  He shifted his weight back on the chair, which creaked. “The Lieutenant asked me to tell you all this, so it doesn’t have to get formal.”

  “I have to find my brother.”

  “Sal—”

  She pushed herself off the table and grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door. “If you won’t do it, someone has to.”

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said. “Stay out of trouble, okay?”

  She laughed, opened the door, and walked fast until she hit the street.