My Kaiju Parasite Revived Me, But a Yandere Bought My Streaming Rights

Chapter 178: The Careful Hands

Sam went to Aldgate alone, with two volumes of the Record under his arm and a reason that was true on its face and not the real one.

The real one he had not said out loud, not to Caleb, not to himself before the train. The Record needed a binding repaired, that part was real, the green volume’s spine had cracked along the old glue, and a cracked spine on a book that held two hundred and ten names was not a thing you left.

And the Aldgate shop did the fine work, that was real too.

But there were binders closer than Aldgate, and Sam had chosen the train and the hour across the city. Somewhere under the reason was a pair of careful hands setting a book on a shelf and squaring it to the edge, and a look that had closed like water months ago that he had not stopped thinking about.

The shop smelled the same. Paper and glue and the particular dust of old leather, the warm quiet of a place where things were mended instead of thrown out.

Mira was at the front counter, and she saw the volumes under his arm before she saw his face, and something in her settled, because a keeper always relaxes a little at the sight of a book coming home to be fixed.

"The spine," Mira said. "I wondered when you’d bring it. It’s been going since before you took it. You held it together with care and that bought you a few months, but care isn’t glue."

She held out her hands. Sam gave her the green volume, and she opened it across the counter and ran a finger down the failing spine.

"This is fine work. Past mine, now. My eyes went last winter." She looked up at him, and there was something knowing in it, the knowing of a mother who has watched her daughter be looked at. "June does the fine work. I’ll get her."

"You don’t have to."

"I’m not doing it for you," Mira said, which was a lie told kindly, and she went through to the rear room. She left Sam standing at the counter with his heart doing a thing it had not done since before the coma, before the two years under, before he had to learn his own hands again.

***

June came through from the back with her sleeves pushed up and a smudge of paste on her wrist, and she stopped when she saw him, the same as he’d stopped at the door.

"You came back," she said.

"The spine cracked." He said it too fast, and heard it, and tried again, slower, the truth this time. "The spine cracked, and there are binders closer than Aldgate, and I took the train anyway."

June looked at him for a moment with the same thing in her face that had been there months ago, the thing neither of them had been able to name, except that it had a little more shape now, because they were both choosing to stand in it instead of letting it close.

"Show me," she said, and held out her hands.

He gave her the book. She took it the careful way, the practiced hold of a person who handles fragile things for a living, and set it on the felt pad and bent over the failing spine.

Sam watched her hands, the same hands he’d watched square a green volume to the edge of a shelf, careful and sure and unhurried, and he understood with a quiet certainty that this was the thing he had taken the train for.

"It’s bad," June said, not looking up, studying the break. "But it’s not lost. The block’s sound. The signatures are all here. Whoever wrote in this kept the margins clean, which means I can rebind without losing a single word."

Now she looked up. "That matters to you, this book, more than a cracked spine usually matters to a person."

"It’s a record," Sam said. "Of people. Two hundred and ten of them. My family’s kept it since 1878 and my brother’s been adding names back to it that somebody tried to erase. So yes. It matters more than a spine."

"Every name in there is a person somebody decided didn’t count, and the book is us deciding they do." He watched her hands rest flat on the cover. "I didn’t say that part to anybody. I don’t know why I said it to you."

"Because I keep books for a living," June said. "People tell the truth to people who mend things. It’s the same instinct that makes them tell it to bartenders, except we give it back to them better than we got it." She almost smiled.

"Sit. This is a two-hour job if I do it right, and I’m going to do it right, because a book about people who deserve to count deserves a spine that won’t crack again. You can watch. Most people can’t sit still for it. I’ll know what kind of person you are by whether you can."

Sam sat. And he found, to his own surprise, that he could be still for it, that the two hours did not drag.

Watching June take the cracked spine apart, clean the old glue, lay in new mull and re-sew the signatures with a curved needle and waxed thread was the most peaceful he had been in longer than he could measure.

***

They did not talk the whole time. That was the thing he noticed, sitting in the warm paper-smelling quiet while her careful hands worked. They talked some, and then they were quiet some, and the quiet was not the awkward kind that wants filling.

It was the quiet of two people who handle fragile things, comfortable in a room where something delicate was being done well, and the comfort of it was a thing Sam had not felt with another person since before the world went strange.

"Can I ask you something," he said, near the end, while she was pressing the new spine under a weight. "And you can tell me it’s none of my business."

"You can ask. I keep what’s mine and I give back what’s asked. That’s the trade."

"Two years ago I was in a coma," Sam said. He had not planned to say it. It came out because the room made truth easy. "Two years under. And when I came back, my hands didn’t work right. I had to learn them again, holding a spoon, holding a pencil, holding anything."

"For a long time I couldn’t hold anything fragile, because I’d grip too hard or drop it, and I grieved that, actually, the not being able to hold delicate things."

"And I’m sitting here watching you hold a two-hundred-and-ten-name book like it’s made of moth’s wings, and I think that’s why I took the train. Because I wanted to watch somebody hold a fragile thing right. I think I’ve been homesick for it without knowing."

June was quiet for a moment, her hands still on the weighted spine.

"My mother’s eyes went last winter," she said. "I told you that part. Here’s the part she wouldn’t want me to say. She’s terrified."

"Sixty years of fine work and the fine work is leaving her, and she sits at that counter and pretends she’s relaxed when a book comes in, but underneath she’s mourning, because every book that comes to me instead of her is a small proof of the thing she’s losing."

"And I do the fine work now, and I’m good at it, and I would give it back to her hands in a heartbeat if I could, and I can’t." She looked up at him.

"So I know about grieving a pair of hands. Mine work and I’m grieving hers. Yours stopped and you grieved your own. We’re the same kind of homesick, you and me. For careful hands."

The shop was quiet around them, the warm paper-dust quiet, two people who handled fragile things sitting with a thing that was, itself, fragile, and new, and theirs, and that no one had designed.

***

Sam did not know, sitting there, the thing the reader knew. He did not know about vessels grown in pale rooms, or the woman who had owned Elara since before her name.

He did not know that his brother had spent the morning watching a wiped friend surface for sixty seconds and go back under with tears she couldn’t explain, that everything Caleb loved had a hand on it somewhere, a design, a leash, a debt called due across forty years.

He only knew that the green book’s spine was whole again, and that June’s hands had made it so. When she finished and squared the rebound volume to the edge of the felt pad, the exact gesture he’d watched months ago, something in him said *there, that, hold onto that,* and he listened to it.

"It’s done," June said. She slid the book across to him. "Strong as new. Stronger. It’ll hold long after we’re both gone, which is the point of binding a thing about people who deserve to count. You bind it to outlast the binder." She paused.

"You’ll bring me the other volumes. When they need it. There are four, you said."

"There are four."

"Then I’ll see you again," June said, and it was not a question, and there was the look once more, except it did not close behind her like water this time.

This time she held it, and let him hold it. The holding was a small ordinary brave thing, two people deciding to stand in a thing instead of letting it pass.

"You’ll see me again," Sam said.

He carried the rebound Record out into the Aldgate evening, the spine whole under his hand. For the length of the walk to the train he was just a man who’d met a woman who handled fragile things, with no clock on his wall and no number climbing and no center waiting at the end of any of it.

Just a book made whole, a careful pair of hands, a thing that was starting, slow and chosen and all the way his own.

It was the one thing in the whole story the woman did not have a hand on. And Sam, who did not know there was a woman, carried it home not knowing it was the most defiant thing in the book.

The most defiant thing a person can build, against a force that owns everything by designing it, is a thing nobody designed at all.