A young officer leapt out of the nearest squad car and rushed to the boy’s side. She hadn’t seen a dead body before, but had been warned that when she did it could appear almost serene, more as if it were sleeping. Serenity described him perfectly. Though no older than twelve or thirteen (it was difficult to judge beneath all that dust), the boy looked as though he was clasped in the grip of a pleasant dream.
“Is it Bobby Nusku?” said the radio clipped to her breast pocket.
“I think so, sir, it’s difficult to tell,” said the rookie.
“Well, is he dead?”
“Yes, I think he is.”
She slid her arms beneath the boy’s body. Cradling his head in one hand, and with her other under his knees, she started to lift.
“No,” Sunny said, opening his eyes, moist wells in the desert of his dry, dirty face. “You’ll need to drive over me.” The rookie screamed and dropped the boy.
She ran back to the car, still screaming, and slammed the door behind her.
Another, more experienced, officer found that he couldn’t lift Sunny either. When he tried the boy stiffened his arms and swung them around in the air, catching him flush on his left eye socket, where a bruise immediately blushed.
“I’m a robot! Drive over me,” he yelled, “drive over me!” The officer tried again. The metal plate in Sunny’s arm caught him sharply on the bridge of his nose. Blood stained the collar of his crisp white shirt. “I am a robot! I am a robot!” Swallowed by the commotion was another order through the radio receivers, this time in crackled unison.
“Just move him!” And they did, after almost five minutes of trying, two torn police jacket lapels and a badly cut constable’s chin. It took one officer holding each limb, and another at the head, to carry Sunny to the garage doors, where he was arrested. By the time his protest was over, the mobile library had a lengthy head start on the cars that sped off in pursuit.
Bobby Nusku was right, Sunny thought, barely capable of containing his glee. Stories did happen to people like him.
• • •
“We must get to the coast,” Val said, “all we have to do is get to the coast.”
“To the seaside?” Rosa asked.
“Exactly, to the side of the sea.”
The mobile library seemed easier to drive than it had before. It was an extension of her, its wheels her feet, its windows her eyes. The books in the back were things she had done, places she had been to, people she had met. The same could be said for all of them. The library had imbued them with its gift. Words. Microscopic traces of human experience that would be forever carried in their blood. Every decision would be made with the hindsight of a thousand characters whose lives were contained within its walls. Every problem they would face had been solved in countless next chapters already. Love, loss, life, death, these mighty winds that test us, had been weathered on the pages so that they would not be faced alone again.
“We had an adventure, didn’t we?” Bobby said. Despite the speed with which they hit the corners of the lanes, and how the truck’s enormous body smashed overhanging branches from the trees, Val was able to look over at the boy beside her in the cab. Bobby Nusku, who had changed her life.
“It isn’t over yet,” she said.
The white paint had now been all but flayed completely from the mobile library’s livery to reveal its flecked green underlayer, and so, from a distance, speeding through the patchwork countryside, it did indeed look like a mirage moving on the breeze.
Rosa wound down the window and let the fast air whip her hair into a nest of snakes. Bobby held her by the waist so that she could lean out further still, combing the leaves with her fingertips when the mobile library pulled close enough to touch the trees.
Val floored the accelerator, vying to beat the sunrise to the horizon. Disappearing would be easier by night. Disappearing is what night is for. The mobile library vibrated more violently than ever. Parts of its underside shook themselves free, clanking as they hit the road and spun off into the past, as if it were alive and shedding, preparing for the end.
As the roads narrowed, the mobile library was forced to slow. The sea came into view before them just as the first police siren appeared in the rearview mirror. Above, a helicopter was chopping up the sky. They were too late.
“We didn’t make it,” Val said. Bobby kissed the soft skin where her neck became her collarbone, then picked the bubble of a tear from her cheek and let it search his hand like a tiny spider.
“We did,” he said.
The police convoy gained on the mobile library, but the roads were too slim for them to overtake it. Val slowed the pace and led them through the sleepy clifftop village, a funereal procession toward the sea at dawn.
• • •
Detective Jimmy Samas, thanks to some uncharacteristically assertive radio instruction, was able to muscle his car through to the front of the pack behind the mobile library. As the mobile library’s front tires came to a stop on the very edge of the clifftop—the slightest tickle of the accelerator could have sent it plunging over—he called a halt to the slow, surreal pursuit. Now just a few hundred feet of grass separated the police, with him at the front, from the people for whom he’d searched for months. Any closer and he worried that the woman might be spooked by their presence. With a three-hundred-foot drop just below them he didn’t want to provoke any rash decisions. Clearly she’d be sensitive, sleep-deprived, a real test for the negotiation training he had recently passed with flying colors. He needed to talk to her, to look her in the eye. The helicopter now buzzing overhead reported a woman and two children in the cab, but no sign of a man. The detective instructed it to stand down. The noise from its propeller was disconcerting. Who knew how it might frighten the children. After it had flown on, and the sirens on the police cars muted, the morning, now beginning, sounded just like any other, when it was anything but.
“Keep your weapons trained on the back of the truck,” he said into his radio, “do not aim them at the cab. The danger here is Joseph Sebastian Wiles.”