Bookburners The Complete Season Two by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: paranormal, mystery
Publisher: Serial Box Publishing
Published: 2017-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

4.

Grace’s text had summoned them to the Elgin Street Diner, an all-night place that was empty except for a bored-looking staff member playing games on his phone. Sal, Liam, Grace, and Asanti crowded the corner farthest from the door; across a table from them sat Aisha, now in jeans and a bright red T-shirt with an oversized yellow star in the middle of it, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee the size of her face, while the other hand methodically depleted the contents of a bowl of raw sugar cubes, bypassing the mug in favor of delivering them straight to her mouth.

She looked at them, level and cool and a little curious as she crunched the cubes.

“Well,” she said, licking her lips, “I guess it’s nice to see the Bookburners have diversified their hiring practices in the last hundred years.”

Sal didn’t rise to the bait. “Were you around then?”

“No.” Aisha sipped her coffee. “My great-grandmother was. Bookburners fucked up her job then too.”

“And what is that job?” asked Asanti, with a frank, open curiosity that made a line in Liam’s jaw twitch.

Aisha smirked a little, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it. She tucked a loose lock of her thick hair behind an ear, and looked into her coffee as if to read the answer there.

“Immigration and citizenship. Or more to the point recently—border security,” she said, and the bitterness of it could’ve been dredged from the bottom of her cup. “The tide is rising, all that—it means migrants. It means refugees. We help … translate people into this plane of existence.”

“You mean—” Sal started to say before Liam sputtered, “You’re deliberately bringing demons into the world?”

Aisha looked as if she was about five seconds from transforming into an ice pick and driving herself into Liam’s eye. Grace and Sal both tensed; Asanti reached out a hand, not touching her, but resting it palm down near Aisha’s coffee mug, looking calm and interested.

“Please,” said Asanti. “Continue.”

Aisha exhaled. “You know how there’s no such thing as a fish?”

Everyone, almost in unison, blinked. Aisha continued.

“It’s one of those colloquial phrases that annoys scientists but makes for a good metaphor. There are loads and loads of sea creatures, but that doesn’t mean they’re closely related to each other, any more than a bat is a bird because it can fly. Go back far enough and we evolved from fish, but we’re not fish. You know?”

“Sure,” said Sal, frowning a little at the fact that Asanti’s eyes were widening in a comprehension she herself hadn’t yet reached. “So …?”

“So there’s no such thing as a demon.” She looked straight at Liam. “There are spirit peoples. There are ifrits, there are djinn, there are peri. There are nations and ethnicities and complications. There’s the further fact that these aren’t monolithic groups any more than ‘Muslim’ or ‘queer’ or ‘woman’ is. I mean, fuck, this is so goddamn basic I can’t believe I have to explain it to adults.” Her mug trembled as she raised it to her lips, sipped, shook her head.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.