Even with 15 trillion books to read, some bastards just refused to learn.
I blew on my freezing fingers and my breath steamed. Repurposed reading room lights were strung between the alley stacks. They lit the slum beneath in an acidic white. A grandmother turned the spit on her roadside cooking fire; fat dripped off roasting rats and hissed in the flames. A fuel picker shoved past me, his back bent under his load of torn, pressed, book covers tied in thick bundles with twine. Old men sat on mats around a book cart that had been converted into a tea stand. The tea seller swapped between half-emptied black rupees to power his electric kettle. One of the tea drinkers stared at me with watery eyes before opening his book.
"What do you do?" Asked the urchin boy as he lead me through the street.
"I'm a hunter," I half-lied. "I go after the bandits that prey on the intra-library loan caravans."
"Is it an important job? Do they pay you in black rupees or silver?"
"Depend on the bandits."
A frown formed in his dirty face.
"So why are you hunting Sai Ganesh?"
"Sai Ganesh is an old friend," I shook my head at a waving rickshaw driver. I'd made eye contact; he kept on waving. "I owe him some money, and I have come to return it."
"Are you a librarian?"
"No," I lied.