Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore

Neel Shah and I have been best friends since sixth grade. In the unpredictable fluid dynamics of middle school, I found myself somehow floating near the top, an inoffensive everyman who was just good enough at basketball and not cripplingly afraid of girls. Neel, by contrast, sank straight to the bottom, shunned by jock and nerd alike. My cafeteria tablemates snorted that he looked funny, talked funny, smelled funny.

But we bonded that spring over a shared obsession with books about singing dragons, and we ended up best friends. I stood up for him, defended him, expended prepubescent political capital on his behalf. I got him invited to pizza parties and lured members of the basketball team into our Rockets & Warlocks role-playing group. (They didn’t last long. Neel was always the dungeon master, and he always sent single-minded droids and undead orcs after them.) In seventh grade, I suggested to Amy Torgensen, a pretty straw-haired girl who loved horses, that Neel’s father was an exiled prince, rich beyond measure, and that Neel might therefore make an excellent escort to the winter formal. It was his first date.

So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.

Now Neel Shah appears framed in the front door, tall and solid, wearing a snug black track jacket, and he ignores the tall dusty Waybacklist completely. Instead he zeroes in on the short shelf labeled SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY.

“Dude, you’ve got Moffat!” he says, holding up a fat paperback. It’s The Dragon-Song Chronicles, Volume I—the very book we bonded over back in sixth grade, and still our mutual favorite. I’ve read it three times. Neel has probably read it six.

“This is like an old copy, too,” he says, riffling the pages. He’s right. The newest edition of the trilogy, published after Clark Moffat died, features stark geometric covers that make a single continuous pattern when you line all three books up on the shelf. This one has an airbrushed rendering of a fat blue dragon wreathed in sea foam.

I tell Neel he ought to buy it, because it’s a collector’s edition and it’s probably worth more than whatever Penumbra is charging. And because I haven’t sold more than a postcard in six days. Normally I’d feel bad pressuring one of my friends to buy a book, but Neel Shah is now, if not quite rich beyond measure, then definitely competitive with some low-level princes. At around the same time I was struggling to make minimum wage at Oh My Cod! in Providence, Neel was starting his own company. Fast-forward five years and see the magic of compound effort: Neel has, to my best approximation, a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and his company is worth millions more. By contrast, I have exactly $2,357 in the bank and the company I work for—if you can call it a company—exists in the extrafinancial space inhabited by money launderers and fringe churches.

Anyway, I figure Neel can spring for an old paperback, even if he doesn’t really have time to read anymore. While I’m digging for change in the front desk’s dark drawers, his attention turns, at last, to the shadowy shelves dominating the back half of the store.

“What’s all that?” he says. He’s not sure if he’s interested or not. As a rule, Neel prefers the new and shiny to the old and dusty.

“That,” I say, “is the real store.”

Mat’s intervention has made me a bit bolder with the Waybacklist.

“What if I told you,” I say, leading Neel back toward the shelves, “that this bookstore was frequented by a group of strange scholars?”

“Awesome,” Neel says, nodding. He smells warlocks.

“And what if I told you”—I pick a black-bound book from a low shelf—“that every one of these books is written in code?” I open it wide to show a field of jumbled letters.

“That’s crazy,” Neel says. He traces a finger down the page, through the maze of serifs. “I’ve got a guy from Belarus who breaks codes. Copy protection, stuff like that.”

Embedded in that sentence is the difference between Neel’s life, post–middle school, and mine: Neel has guys—guys who do things for him. I don’t have guys. I barely have a laptop.

“I could have him take a look at this,” Neel continues.

“Well, I don’t know for sure that they’re in code,” I admit. I close the book and slide it back onto the shelf. “And even if they are, I’m not sure it’s, like, worth cracking. The guys who borrow these books are pretty weird.”

“That’s always how it starts!” Neel says, thumping my shoulder. “Think of The Dragon-Song Chronicles. Do you meet Telemach Half-Blood on the first page? No, dude. You meet Fernwen.”

The main character of The Dragon-Song Chronicles is Fernwen the scholarly dwarf, who is small even by dwarven standards. He was cast out of his warrior clan at an early age and—anyway, yes, maybe Neel has a point.