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and had already hoisted it over her shoulder on to her back and was heading for the door as Myko joined us. He was clutching the one book we’d missed on the landing. It was
The Lilac Fairy Book
and there were a couple of spatters of what looked like blood on its cover.
    “Here. You carry it.” Myko shoved the book at me. I took it and wiped it off. We followed Sunny out. I looked at him sidelong. There was blood on his sword too.
    It took me two blocks, though, jogging after Sunny through the rain, before I worked up the nerve to lean close to him as we ran and ask: “Did you kill that guy?”
    “Had to,” said Myko. “He wouldn’t stop.”
    To this day I don’t know if he was telling the truth. It was the kind of thing he would have said, whether it was true or not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say back. We both kept running. The rain got a lot harder and Myko left me behind in a burst of speed, catching up to Sunny and grabbing her bundle of books. He slung it over his shoulder. They kept going, side by side. I had all I could do not to fall behind.
    By the time we got back the Show was long over. The crew was taking down the stage in the rain, stacking the big planks. Because of the rain no market stalls had been set up but there was a line of old people with umbrellas standing by Uncle Chris’s trailer, since he’d offered to repair any dentures that needed fixing with his jeweler’s tools. Myko veered us away from them behind Aunt Selene’s trailer, and there we ran smack into our moms and Aunt Nera. They had been looking for us for an hour and were really mad.
     
    I was scared sick the whole next day, in case the old people got out their guns and came to get us but nobody seemed to notice the old man was dead and missing, if he
was
dead. The other thing I was scared would happen was that Aunt Kestrel or Aunt Nera would get to talking with the other women and say something like, “Oh, by the way, the kids found a library and salvaged some books, maybe we should all go over and get some books for the other kids too?” because that was exactly the sort of thing they were always doing, and then they’d find the old man’s body. But they didn’t. Maybe nobody did anything because the rain kept all the aunts and kids and old people in next day. Maybe the old man had been a hermit and lived by himself in the library, so no one would find his body for ages.
    I never found out what happened. We left after a couple of days, after Uncle Buck and the others had opened up an office tower and salvaged all the good copper they could carry. I had a knee swollen up and purple where the old man had hit it but it was better in about a week. The books were worth the pain.
    They lasted us for years. We read them and we passed them on to the other kids and they read them too, and the stories got into our games and our dreams and the way we thought about the world. What I liked best about my comics was that even when the heroes went off to far places and had adventures, they always came back to their village in the end and everybody was happy and together.
    Myko liked the other kind of story, where the hero leaves and has glorious adventures but maybe never comes back. He was bored with the Show by the time he was twenty and went off to some big city up north where he’d heard they had their electrics running again. Lights were finally starting to come back on in the towns we worked, so it seemed likely. He still had that voice that could make anything seem like a good idea, see, and now he had all those fancy words he’d gotten out of Roget’s The Saurus too. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that he talked Sunny into going with him.
    Sunny came back alone after a year. She wouldn’t talk about what happened and I didn’t ask. Eliza was born three months later.
    Everyone knows she isn’t mine. I don’t mind.
    We read to her on winter nights. She likes stories.

 
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