The marketplace was packed with the eccentric and atypical, where strangers emerged to profit from their unique offers of trade. Beginning at the northern coast, the act of trade and exchange burgeoned into the roots of the city and spread for over 20 blocks. Seafood restaurants, rubber shops, batik stores, butcher shops, chemist shops, department stores, confectionery shops, tobacconists, junk shops, liquor stores, tattoo parlors, herbal dispensary clinics; always expanding with the constant inflow of new faces and skills. Cement walls stood pale and parched under the beating sun and lights and wires hung over cobblestone streets. Grates below blew up steam, and signs hung in Indonesian, English, Thai, Vietnamese, Khmer, Myanmar, Chinese, Malay, Burmese, and Lao.
Rhea had avoided the strenuous district as best she could. So many faces moving in every direction where you could cross paths with anyone; it held the most socialization in the city and it filled her with uneasiness. She was nearly hit twice by bikers and accidentally stepped on a merchant's rug of fresh papaya and passionfruit. The man gave a colossal shout and whipped her ankles with a walking stick.
Between a café and a herb shop stood a 30-foot stone statue of a towering man with a falcon head. His arms crossed over his chest where he wielded a scimitar in each fist. The stone blades had withered away their sharp threat and the hollow sockets of the falcon head streamed red down the face. It was a figure that had stood before any of the buildings and when was first found held lavender spinel gems, quickly stolen, and soon after the red began to bleed from the stone in sorrow of what it had lost. Supplejack now crawled across the muscles and clenching veins detailed into the stone.
The place that caught her attention was a small building coated with graffiti of expensive color so thick there was no piece of the stone uncovered. Megan's Book Trade: Find Every Book Under the Sun.
Inside, books were piled everywhere in a density that reminded Rhea of the thick vegetation lingering on the city's edges. Shelves were overflowing, stacks on the floor ready to fall over; any space that could fit paper was filled. On the ceiling hung mobiles and stained-glass wind chimes that rang as she entered.
Hearing a door open, she looked to see a young woman walking out of a backroom with a pile of novels in her arms. Deep brown eyes were held behind large gold cordate-framed glasses, her long messy chocolate-colored hair pulled behind her. She was a natural beauty, no need for makeup to exaggerate her looks.
"Hi! Can I help you find anything?" she smiled, speaking in English in a bold voice.
"I'm just browsing," said Rhea.
"Well, if there's anything in particular you're looking for, feel free to let me know. I'm Megan. Man, haven't had a customer in who knows how long."
"Can't imagine there are many active readers in this city."
"No, not many."
"So what made you decide to start up a bookshop here?"
"I got stuck. Happens to a lot of fools that wander this way. No way to escape, so what else is there to do aside from trying to make the prison a little homier? Reading used to be my life. Used to want to be a novelist, but you can't always find good money that way. I thought sharing my passion would make me feel a bit better about being stranded here."
"Has it?"
The woman shrugged. "Not many are interested in what I have to offer. Nonetheless, I get someone in here from time to time looking to gain some sort of knowledge. Usually, they are decent, but my store was robbed once. Can you believe it? Hundreds of stores, almost all holding prizes more valuable than all these books combined, and some goof decides to steal psychology textbooks!"
"Have you read most of the books you sell?"
"Every single one of them. Speed reading is a talent of mine."
"I don't know that I could compete, but I too used to be absorbed by novels. It's a great way to escape."
"A nice way to ease the thoughts without degrading the body or mind."
"Do you have any records about this island? Details about it before it was colonized?"
"Afraid not. This land was a ghost up until fourty or fifty years ago. Most say when the island was discovered, it was used as a base for the Axis powers in the Pacific War. But something drove them out. Some think it was Indonesian gangs, but everyone knows what I mean when I say there is something wrong with this place. Something that was not carried here by humans. But evil men are attracted to evil places like flies to dead flesh. Uncharted, unseen on maps, it has made for a wonderful hiding spot, and the advantage of uncharted territory bred it into a part of black-market trade routes. Money was quickly invested on the island, and now it hosts as a port for international crime and runaway fugitives."
"Did you come here in hopes of hiding from someone?"
"Hiding from many. My work as a data broker pissed off a lot of people."
"What kind of stuff did you do as a data broker?"
"I mostly specialize in research on profiles."
"What kinds of profiles?"
"Primarily private and personally-identifying information of individuals or companies."
"Sounds like doxing."
"I try not to use that word…but yeah, that's the jest. I am good at following people, learning their behaviors and patterns. Most of my buyers were illegitimate businesses or criminal syndicates. I even composed profiles for hitmen. I thought I was good enough to stay hidden. Kept my information private. But my work still came back to bite me in the ass."
"What happened?"
"I composed a profile of the boss of a criminal organization when I was in America; a cult-like group engaged in serious underground gambling businesses. It was probably the most thorough and informative profile I had put together. There were so many members as I tried to lay out the twisted belief and practices. It took me down lots of psychological research paths. I would make up an accident that could get me to exchange words with members, and as I learned about their drastic followings of ancient deities and twisted devotions, I told them what they wanted to hear, and that gave me an in. I sold it to a buyer overseas that had taken an interest in American criminal affairs. It is a group long gone now: the Leone family. But the bastard boss of the family—Manoj Leone—sold me out. It was not long before the cult leader was after me. I can be an excellent absconder at times, but every angle was hunting me. No idea where to go, where I could hide, and then Leone contacted me. He had hackers just as good as I, and he was able to find my information I had worked so hard to conceal. I didn't yet know what the fucker had done, and he told me if I came to Samadoya, he would protect me. All I had to do was collect profiles of people in the city. I didn't really have a choice. Organizations across the country found me out to be the broker that violated their privacy and partook in the devastation of their illicit crimes.
"I remember I was sleeping in a motel one night a few weeks after I had taken to a life on the road when a hitman found me. That was when I realized what a massive bounty I had on my head. Word of my work spread all over! I escaped the hitman out of pure luck. A malfunction of his weaponry resulted in an explosive accident that blew his arm off. Then I pushed him into the pool and kept his head under until he stopped moving. After that, I accepted Leone's offer. When I arrived I was napped and bound and brought to the asshole who decided to call me his property as return for his safety. I was locked in a room until Leone had a job for me, kept out of the sunlight and was fed once a day. None of the men were allowed to touch me though. Leone wanted to keep me focused. But they sure had fun teasing and frightening me. But I eventually got used to it and the men did not find it funny anymore."
"What happened to Leone?"
"They were snuffed out by Silas Mendez and his Central American cartel. Power here shifts a lot, everyone trying to trample over each other. Mendez pumped one of their safehouses full of hydrogen cyanide and took out almost all the members at once. But Leone was taken alive. He believed Manoj was behind the assassination of his younger brother, second on command and found mounted on the wall of their casino with his jaw detached and fingers chopped to bits." Megan's face began to curl into a smile that rid her face of the amiable bookdealer. "He was wrong, of course, but Mendez can be thick and he never caught on. He locked Leone in a closet filled with hundreds of fruit flies and kept the door locked until his lungs were full of the bugs and suffocation took hold. The family fell apart, and I was finally free!" Megan laughed. "But only from Leone. Still no way to go home. Not really. And after living in this place, after too long it's hard to believe you can function anywhere else. You forget there is another world out there, where people are not vile and the streets do not run red. You forget what good is; what hope is. I was adapted to a lifestyle of instability and fracas. It keeps me alert and on my toes."
"There are some strange people here, but some are not as bad as I suspected. When I first arrived here, I was terrified of everything. I had no idea how to behave, how to protect myself. I'm still learning, but each day I learn a little more."
"That's the spirit! Let your surroundings mold you, and you'll find yourself beginning to fit into the cluttered puzzle. And in a city like this, you have to let yourself change if you want to survive."
"I'm determined to survive."
"Good. What's the point of life if you don't fight to keep it? It can be taken just as it is given."
A grin stretched Rhea's lips as she let her eyes scan the store. "Reading was all I did when I was little. But it's been so long since I've held a book." Her fingers brushed the worn novel spines.
"Well, here's your reminder! Remember what books can do for the mind."
Megan's collection ranged through every genre and nearly every language. Novels, dictionaries, textbooks, anthologies, biographies, comic books and graphic novels, cookbooks, atlases, religious texts, illuminated manuscripts; as Rhea browsed each shelf and corner she found some bizarre and unheard-of works.
She settled on a book in a far corner of the room—Mirror Mind by Evelyn Corso—about a girl that begins to experience episodes where she sees herself living alternate lives, each episode revealing a life where she took an alternate path or made a different decision, making her question the concept of free will and her identity. Six hundred and fifty five pages of a girl trying to piece together her fractured psych to find the true version of herself and Rhea figured that could take up at least a week of her time. It cost a little under 30,000 rupiahs and felt like the most valuable thing she had owned in years.