2/2

The young teen didn't even get halfway home before her best friend managed to track her down instead. That was a usual enough situation that she gave him her attention instead of asking if he had been taught to drive yet.

Him seizing her by the wrist and dragging her along confused her, she had thought he was out of this habit, until well after they arrived at one of the fairgrounds near the edge of Moscow and she saw a specific sign.

It was an advertisement for a motorcycle race, the prize being the very motorcycle the winner won on.

The Storm-Cloud supposed that answered if he ever learned how to drive. If he was this excited over the prospect of winning one of those deathtrap machines, obviously he had some experience to tell by. Enough to think he might win against someone that drove one for a living.

"I suppose there is a reason for this…?"

"I can afford the entrance fee." He came to a stop right up next to the sign-up booth, flashing her a bright, eager grin. "So, I'm going to try. Thing is, our bet was for one."

"…yes? However. One, we don't know who won that yet and two, it's mostly just for the funds to buy one."

"Which means if I win, we may need to change my stipulations on the bet."

Sonya narrowed her eyes on him. "You want to renegotiate your end."

"…maybe?" Cherep tacked on, flashed her another boyishly bright grin. "I might want a different motorcycle in a few years. So only if I win. Erm… in both cases, actually."

She looked at him, at the racetrack set up, and then at the crowd. "And why am I here, again?"

"Moral support?" He didn't have the genetics to sprout a lot of facial hair, meaning he generally got away with not shaving every day. The stubble when he forgot still seemed to itch, given how often he would scratch at it. "Please?"

"Are you nervous? You've only been wanting one for five-six years now." She rolled her eyes at the sheepish twitch of his features, running a hand through shoulder-length blonde hair to keep it out of her eyes in the wind. "Go win yourself an ear-breaking deathtrap, you dork. We'll talk later, after you decide what you want."

When he ran off to sign himself up, she took steps to ensure she had a good view of both the finish line and the bulk of the track.

Sonya, very firmly, put her hands over her ears and resolved to buy her friend a helmet for his birthday.

She spent most of the race despairing over the likely fate of her hearing.

LXXXVI (Wednesday the 19th of May, 1965 continued. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

Tatiana's expression could only really be called pained. "It's… very loud."

"I know." Sonya informed her flatly.

Cherep won himself a motorcycle. A red and black 1965 Planeta 350, built by the Izhevsk Machine Building Plant.

Problem was, they were thieves. Safecracking was just one reason why a good thief needed equally good hearing, and loud machinery like that did not help them there.

She was now nursing a headache, too. "I think… he can make it quieter."

The foster sisters had taken refuge in the house, since it seemed as if the ear-breaking noisemaker would not be shutting off until their foster brother got over his glee at winning it.

"Isn't that against the point of a motorcycle?" The redhead questioned lightly, stretching her long limbs out on the couch. "I mean, he has been looking forward to this for… how long, again?"

Her younger sister sighed heavily, sprawling herself out on the safecracker's legs in revenge for crowding her out of her little corner. "Way too damn long, honestly."

She'd be a little concerned for her spot as Cherep's best friend, if said best friend didn't already look a little in absolute love with his metal bike. Lover was entirely a spot the damn motorcycle could occupy, as far as she was concerned.

A little disturbing, but all the bloody bike's.

"So now you're slumming it with me, I feel so special." Tatiana mocked lightly, jostling her legs and by association Sonya's ribs. "Now what are you going to do? I'm going, Cherep's got a way to leave himself, and that just leaves you now."

"Probably leave sometime after you finally go."

Sighing a bit herself, the redhead pulled herself upright. "Yeah… about that. We're leaving in two weeks."

"Already?"

"No point in lingering. I'll be back for your birthday, and consequently Christmas, but that's really only to handle my gang's clan dues for the next two years." The Sun's usually cheerful mien faded a little, and the young woman quirked a wry smirk for her little sister. "This time next year, we may not even be in the USSR anymore."

Sonya blinked up at her, thinking.

It was going to be odd to be living at home with Tatiana gone. Ten years living in close quarters with each other, while it hadn't exactly started out well… she at least like to think the older girl was a very good friend now.

"Suppose I'm just waiting on Cherep to leave for good myself. Poor Arseniy. He's going to have to deal with Lisa after we're all gone, and she gets mopey over the empty house."

The confident young woman that grew out of that jealous little girl she met long ago scratched at her cheek, pursing her lips and making a show of thinking hard. "You want to… do Christmas every year? Here, I mean? I don't exactly want to never look back, this place was a lot of fun while we were growing up."

"I don't think we can manage that right away… but in a couple years I wouldn't mind trying." She gave the older teenager a smirk of her own. "I promise to drag Cherep back with me."

She barked a laugh, tugging her legs free to sit up fully. "I'll hold you to that. I also finished what I could of your little handbook for Dying Will Sun Flame users, it's on your desk along with the rest of the possible Sun gems I've never got to work for me. Keeping a couple of the heliodor crystals for myself."

The younger thief sighed again, drawing a hand down her face. "Alright. I suppose I should go see what Dmitriy managed on his end and write that all up, shouldn't I?"

"Might be a good idea to get that one out of the way." Tatiana nodded, rising to her full height and stretching out again. As if she hadn't gotten more than her own fair share of space on the couch.

"I reserve the right to ask questions like an annoying brat when I want to."

"Noted. It's not like you hold off on that as it is."

Sonya rolled her eyes, finally moving to get upright herself. "I'm… going to write out a full copy of all that I've got for you to keep. I'm leaving the jewels here, under Arseniy's control, but… well… it seems as if when there is one Dying Will Flame user there is another somewhere nearby. So, you might want to have a quick reference if you find someone else."

Like Galina, because it was entirely possible the other female thief was a Lighting user without the active Flames.

"How many of those do you intend to write?"

"…five. One for our clan to keep, one for Arseniy, one for you, one for me, and one more just in case."

Her wrist was already hurting just thinking about it, and while that extra one wasn't entirely needed it was best to have extra than not enough. She had already learned that over the gemstone issue. Dmitriy could keep it for now.

The stripped copies would remain with their respective array of gems, being as the Storm-Cloud wondered what parts of Dying Will Flame knowledge was true and which ones were merely assumptions propagated by rumor. Not everything written in books was true, and she'd been disproving a few things already in her best book on Flame users as it was.

She couldn't objectively look at herself anyways. Best to leave it to those that hadn't been opinionated and biased a little beforehand.

"Well you best get cracking on that. I've got to go pack up my room."

"…what in hell are you going to do with that beanbag?"

"You mean you don't want it?"

She stared at Tatiana, shook her head, and climbed the stairs ahead of her.

"Hey! What's wrong with my beanbag chair?"

"The fact you're colorblind."

LXXXVII (Wednesday the 19th of May, 1965 continued. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

Gleefully abandoning Tatiana to managing her mass of clothing just as the Sun had done to her and her books some years ago, Sonya instead worked on making clean and full copies of her research on Dying Will Flames.

Her wrist ached even before she put pen to paper, but with a lack of a typewriter in the house she was forced to do everything by hand.

The younger thief carefully copied out her work of simplifying the Flame types and how to identify them by personality alone, wrote in the little she had on Skies and left twice the amount of space blank as she had for their application and nature since she didn't know much of anything on them.

Same for Sun and Rain, adding Tatiana's own work in after the little Sonya had done and what Dmitriy had learned over the years in their respective sections and skipping space for the polarized opposites.

Then she got to the Storm section.

To be brutally honest, she had not managed much with her Storm Flames as she had with her Cloud one.

The best she could do was atomize things… everything her Flame touched. Even if she hadn't wanted everything to begin flaking away under her red fire, her Storm was virulent enough to eat everything anyways.

She had started with a wooden board, at first. Trying to carve into it, or strip it bit by bit. Instead the board Disintegrated almost immediately, and successive experimentation hadn't improved that to any manageable degree.

Painting one of her practice pieces hadn't helped, it Disintegrated just as easily as an unpainted one.

Sandwiching a wooden board between two others didn't change anything, her Storm ate through all of it. Had she not been holding the testing materials in one hand, it might have tried eating away the ground too.

Getting her hands on stone slabs and then putting a wooden board between them resulted similarly to her earlier tries.

There seemed to be nothing Storm Flames wouldn't eat away at a steady or fast rate, other than the Flame user that called them forth. Even Sonya's clothing hadn't withstood the ability, though thankfully she only lost a coat to her inner fire rather than the very shirt off her back.

She hadn't tried one of her Flame resistant Bec de Corbins yet, and probably wouldn't at this rate. Not even one of the four new tungsten ones she got commissioned last year at a small local jewelry store and picked up this one for testing.

The Storm-Cloud gratefully liked buying jewelry more than stealing them, and those had to be custom ordered as miniaturized weapons of war 'display pieces' weren't a popular style.

While her Storm Flames were still useful even in an uncontrolled state, it wasn't exactly something she'd be able to use on the sly. It was more like the very last option, if her own will and Cloud-imbued strength failed she could always melt things from reality instead.

The best result with them, that she ever got no matter what she tried to do, was with a pointed crystal of red tourmaline. Even if Sonya could summon her Flames without a stone needed to focus them for her, the tourmaline cut into a teardrop shape worked almost as a laser pointer instead of as a wash of Disintegration fire that ate everything.

That didn't mean to say the Storm Flames didn't eventually eat everything anyways, but it started slowly and from only one point at all.

She went back to the store that did her tungsten Bec de Corbins and asked they cut a crystal she supplied in the shape of a slim skeleton key. That had been way too amusing to give a miss to, and if she managed to figure out how not to overly power Storm Flames in the future her red crystal key would work as a master key to everything.

By melting the internal workings of any lock, but the point stood.

Even if she couldn't manage that in the future, the delivery of Storm Flames into the mechanics of a lock would allow her to open doors or lids before it Disintegrated. Both the container/door itself and whatever/whoever was behind it.

The only problem was that she wouldn't be able to use that key in anything but a dire emergency or within mafia held territory.

Something Disintegrating without apparent cause other than red fire in front of a civilian would give rise to a panic that she wouldn't be able to stop. In the unlikely event such a civilian kept his or her head and tried to investigate how and why, the lack of physical agents apparent to cause such a thing would either incite the same kind of panic or trip some poor civilian onto the existence of spiritual Flames of the Sky without mafia involvement to keep it quiet.

Same reason why she didn't copy fakes with Cloud Flames to help cover her tracks, other than the point of it taking time and power she didn't usually have to spare. If one winked out of existence at an ill-advised moment, like say when someone was filming it due to whatever reason… the obvious lack of how could likely give police agencies around the world a clue to several other incidents that probably traced back to Mists and a few other unwary Flame users that got caught in bad situations.

She might use that if she was dealing with other mafia people, but not something she'd ever do when just out stealing from civilians.

Sonya didn't want a visit from the Vindice. She had only heard rumors so far, only when in Mafia Land, about them appearing when Omertà was breached or the concords between major groups was violated and it risked large-scale turf wars happening. Knowing what and who they were once made her not want to meet one, or touch that situation with a ten-foot-pole.

She grudgingly added in the very little she found out about Storm Flames, then pointedly turned the pages to start in on Lightning users and their quirks.

That one she knew Tatiana might need, so she was especially careful in copying that down.

LXXXVIII (Thursday the 3rd of June, 1965. Ivrea, Italian Republic.)

Sonya didn't like doing goodbyes.

Instead, she followed Tatiana's group out to the first leg of their journey. The Sun's gang would be lurking around the southern edge of the USSR for her first few months on their own, close enough for getting help in an emergency but far enough away not to suggest they were Zolotov members on the hunt.

She also handed over the full result of her Dying Will Flame research on all of them, which had more holes in it than she liked but was also comprised of everything they had compiled and sought out together. Before she left them to it, the Storm-Cloud did inform her foster sister that she could be reached by sending a letter to Mafia Land in care of the Thieves' Hall.

Once the sisters broke off, Sonya headed further out.

Italy awaited her, especially if she was going to clear off the favor she was doing Adrik sometime this century.

Olivetti was headquartered in Ivrea, province of Turin, in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. It was at least far enough into the mainland part of the country the thief could take the train lines the entire way and not have to switch to a ship or ferry to finish her traveling faster.

The basin the town thrived in did have a fair share of lakes dotted around it, but as this was business related and not just traveling for the sake of it, the thief ignored that.

Roberto Olivetti, who had left his namesake company late last year, had been the one that suggested a table-top computer about three years ago. From all reports that Adrik managed to learn of and was confirmed by Renato, while the electric division of the company was now in General Electric's hands the team that developed the idea for him into a working project did something tricky.

They changed their project's definition from 'computer' to 'calculator', because no matter the memory it had for all of eight calculations it was still a computing number machine. Renaming the project spared them from being sold, and part of the mechanical division of the Olivetti company.

Thus the 'computer' was still in Italy under Olivetti, technically.

Sonya had last heard some conflicting reports on whether the computer would still be marketed. Which confused her, because computers would become something greater from this clunky beginning. It might just be confusing because she knew what kind of fire it would light under other companies, but if a company had done all that developing then why were they waffling over the decision to start selling it?

Her first order of business would be to find out what the bloody hell was going on, then if she could steal one of the damn things here or not.

Which, as an obviously blonde-haired Barbie doll from the inner Soviet Union, would be harder than just asking around. Thankfully the country was in the middle of the Italian economic miracle, meaning that while she stuck out like a sore thumb among the dark haired and mostly tanned natives they wouldn't be necessarily automatically hostile to her.

The only major problem was that she didn't speak fluent Italian. Hers was broken, barely enough to speak simple things, read a slight bit more, and maybe ask for basic help.

She hadn't been able to devote a lot of time to learning it between traveling around and stealing.

She did wonder if Renato would mind helping her out a little on that. Native speaker as he was, he was the best to teach it to another.

…on the other hand, he was an Inverted/Soft Sun. Those Dying Will Flame users and the word 'help' didn't go together well for the student.

Sonya sighed again, put her 'Russian to Italian' dictionary into her luggage, and waited for the train to finally pull into her station.

For the time being, she was pretending to be a backpacker. Foreign, but also notable as such. She'd ditch the ruse and her 'backpack' in a hotel or hostel somewhere, then sneak her way to the Olivetti company's manufactory to scout it out once night fell.

If she did do a bit of theft, the fact whoever saw her knew she went into her room or apartment alone and didn't use the door to leave again would supply her with some cover. Even if she got caught sneaking around.

With some time to kill, the Russian played tourist. She found the bed and breakfast she'd be using, the Olivetti Company factory, a castle, a cathedral, and that was as far as she got before she found a library.

A capitular library of religious books, but it did distract her for a good few hours. Not letting herself walk out brazenly with a tome or scroll had been hard, but religious books were something she had to draw a line at.

There had to be one somewhere, or Sonya really would have a serious addiction problem with the written word.

Having killed her mood to go sightseeing, not even seeing the cool and high bridge on the edge of town made it better, she checked into the bed and breakfast using her broken Italian and a large number of euros.

Which the nice elderly lady pressed back on her, only taking as much as the price for a night when the thief double checked why.

Then, after spending enough time until dark fall brushing up on her Italian with her host in the vain hope it would help her at least a little, she went hunting for answers.

She had to resort to copying down whole reports and notes, then hightailing it back to her room over the course of three nights to make sense of what she got. At least the elderly couple that ran the bed and breakfast were nice about her taking up their extra room for four days.

They even helped her practice her Italian even more than just the basics, laboring under the mistaken impression she was looking for a good city to find a man and settle down in.

Days of painstaking translations, four major errors that she had to go back to correct, and three nearly incomprehensible pages of notes later, and the Russian Storm-Cloud finally knew what was going on.

The project lead, one Pier Giorgio Perotto, had gotten fed up with the stalling his company was doing on his project and would be traveling to the 1964-65 New York World Fair in order to first show off then sell the Programma 101 to the public. With or without his company's permission.

She would only have to wait until October, and she could avoid stealing in Italy entirely.

Vongola's reach spread farther than the region their 'Iron Fort' resided within, which it seemed as if no one outside of Italian mafia, the Famiglia itself or their allies knew where it was, but the 'rules' laid down by them was enforced widely enough to be… suggestive.

Instead of risking more that she could know of before she trod on someone else's territory, it was time to plan a visit to the good 'ol US of A.

LXXXIX (Tuesday the 3rd of August, 1965. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

"Again?" Cherep protested from her bedroom's doorway. "You just got back."

Sonya paused in her repacking, because he had a point.

After clearing up the situation in Italy with the first-generation computer design, she had gone southwest to a port town to hitch a ride to Mafia Land. One-month round trip later to handle her third heist of the year, the thief had returned to Moscow to resupply for a trip to and from America via the Mafia Land smuggling routes.

Once she stole the Programma 101, it would have to be shipped to Arseniy's care using the same route until Adrik could pick it up while she went back to Mafia Land herself and finished the last two heists she would do this year alone. That would take her right to the end of the year, and she was probably only just home long enough for her brother's birthday, so she had planned on gifting him a damn helmet before she left again.

Maybe a month or two of rest, of which her own fifteenth birthday and Christmas were included in, then she'd have to start next year's rounds of heists to keep the storage unit she would be packing up her wealth of books within until she had a permanent home.

"Well… yes." She considered her best friend closely. "Hey… Cherep?"

He gave her an inquiring wet-kitty look, which really didn't work like it had when he'd been nine anymore.

"Want to come to America with me? I'm going to the World Fair, mainly to steal something… but I think we might be able to fit in some sightseeing for a week or so."

Cherep's expression as he floundered between hesitant, not wanting to be involved on one of her jobs, and excited, wanting to go just because sounded interesting, was fascinating to watch.

Sonya really should have thought of this before. Tatiana being gone left a rather big hole in the house, much worse than the week-long absences they were used to when she went off with her gang for either practice or minor jobs. With her bouncing in and out so much this year, that left Cherep home alone with Lisa and Arseniy.

There was little for him to do in the neighborhood without his sisters around, besides learn the ins and outs of his Russian made motorcycle and maybe visit Dmitriy once or twice a month.

She already knew he continued to fail to go to Aleksandr's without her and Ziven had spilled the beans of how he got typically treated when she wasn't around, so she didn't greatly mind anymore.

Besides, the two of them should at least get used to traveling together.

There would be a lot of it between next year's end and whenever it was she got fed up with it and demanded him to buy a house for them to use as a home base. They had done a small bit on Cherep's first visit to Mafia Land, but that had been under 'adult supervision' and had Tatiana as a distraction.

Speaking of…

"If you want to come with, grab whatever you would need for a month and shove it somewhere portable." She informed him, returning her attention to folding her newly laundered traveling clothes. "And your paperwork, all of it."

America was currently in the middle of fighting in the Vietnamese war, and there was a draft in place. She did recall that much at least. He would need to prove he wasn't a citizen probably regularly, even if a World Fair would be attracting a lot of foreign attention from all corners of the world.

Vietnam was not something she even wanted to touch until well after the last of the chemical warfare was over and done with. Napalm and Agent Orange were just two things she didn't ever want to know if her foster brother could survive contact with.

That was part of her drive to leave the USSR herself, her biological home country was getting into some questionable nuclear testing and she couldn't recall if asbestos was a problem over here just like it would become in the States.

The Storm-Cloud didn't really care if the nuclear testing over here were supposedly for 'peaceful' purposes. She was damn sure the lake made by one such attempt, Lake Chagan, was now radioactive and would be for years.

One of the things she could clearly recall was that one of the cities would become just as hot as that lake, or it might have been region, but the point was the same.

She'd like to go somewhere safer, thank you very much.

"How… long are you planning on being there?" Cherep sounded a bit off, and a glance at his face didn't help her figure out why.

"All I know is that my target will be there in October, which could mean any part of the month." Sonya tucked the traveling hygiene supplies away into their own pocket, musing on the fact she seemed to live out of her luggage on a regular basis. "So, at best maybe a week at worst the entire month of October."

He ran his hand through his shaggy but short purple hair, considering it. "That's the New York one, right? The one that was implemented even if they didn't have permission for it?"

"Yes, which means it might not be all that great but it will be different enough to us so we'll not care much."

"Think there will be anything on mechanics or engineering there?"

"Its theme is influenced by the space race and the industry heavy culture over there." She informed him, shutting her luggage closed to check it would. "Might be."

"Like… maybe Harley Davidson?"

Cherep and his damn motorcycles. She shot him a narrow look over one shoulder. "Probably."

"Well," the absolute, utter brat informed her with a smirk, "we never did fix the terms of our bet, and you may just still owe me a motorcycle."

"If you're coming with me, go pack already."

XC (Saturday the 14th of August, 1965. Trans-Siberian Railway.)

Lisa had given them an entirely knowing and accepting smirk when they announced Cherep would be going with Sonya to America, so the older couple had the house to themselves for the first time in a decade.

It had been a touch sad, which made the younger woman weakly echo it.

The thief was mostly living on the road now, she had spent less than half the year in Moscow and wouldn't really be going directly back with her brother after they were done in the US. She had two more heists to do this year for Mafia Land, to get a storage locker/unit they would shove her books and what little Tatiana decided to keep herself next year.

She might be able to take Christmas, and consequently her birthday, off. Then she had to start managing the last of her loose ends in Moscow, like her father.

Next year was also the year she'd be leaving home for good, once her fellow Cloud picked a semi-decent circus to join. He had found a couple, but after she poked into it she hadn't liked a few of the rumors that persisted among the respective members of the groups about their experiences on the very edges of the Soviet Union.

It seemed as if Lisa already knew Sonya was half gone already, merely waiting on her best friend even if those plans hadn't been stated as much to them in so many words.

Arseniy had given her an incredibly awkward hug when he saw them off at the train station himself, which… again, touching but awkward. There was also a small fact of a childhood crush she still had the lingering remnants of, which didn't really help the situation nor Cherep's curiosity at all.

She seriously wondered what they would do after she was gone, as it didn't look like either would be taking on more foster kids to raise. Even if there were new Mafiya brats in with Tatiana's gang leaving the neighborhood, no one was now living in the redhead's bedroom turned guest room yet.

Quite frankly, she wondered what their foster mother would do to occupy her time now that there weren't two little girls in need of some guidance of the womanly sort.

"Sonya?"

"Hmm?"

Cherep turned his attention away from the scenery their train was chugging past, peering over at her curiously. "I probably should've asked this before, but… how are we getting to the US?"

"By way of my other workstation." Answered the Storm-Cloud just as casually as he asked, turning a page in her paperback novel. Lloyd Alexander's The Black Cauldron

Not exactly new to her but still a good reread. Even if it was just freshly published.

"Err… great. Fantastic."

"Oh, stop pouting. We're not even going to disembark, it's just a pit stop midway through the Atlantic Ocean." She dug one-handed into her backpack, digging up a Russian to English phrasebook. "You might want to take a look at this anyways, so the extra time will only help."

"It's always a book with you, isn't it?" He took it from her anyways, giving it a weird look. "Why would you even have this? I didn't think English was a language you spoke."

"It is, actually. I learned… years ago." Sonya wondered, vaguely, if she should put effort into making Renato and Cherep meet since they would be nearby.

Then again, they were vastly different men. Her brother was still way too damn nice, he even let Dmitriy take possession of his beloved motorcycle for the duration of their trip. Mainly to ensure the bike would come to no harm being left for what could be a month in a Moscow fall/early winter season, but a little because the mechanic had begged to be allowed to play with it.

The thief wasn't sure if the motorcycle would be in one piece when they got back, but it was likely the Rain already figured that if he did something to Cherep's baby then she would do something to his head.

Renato was a charming asshole, but he was still a hitman with the screwed morals of a magnetized compass.

That… might not be a good mix, now that she thought of it.

"I take it your on translator duties when there, then?"

"Of course, unless you prove to be a linguistic genius somehow I don't see how you could gain fluency in just over a week." Sonya tapped the spine of her book thoughtfully, looking at him over the top of it. "If you had been, you might not have sucked as badly with the French or German immersion practice Lisa had us go through."

"Or the Italian?" He asked dryly, which did make something twinge guiltily in her.

That had been rather sprung on him by surprise, when she had asked their mother for a month or so of Italian practice after her one visit to the region. The fluency she got by just speaking with that elderly couple had helped her immensely, and so she asked for more on a month she spent at home before this trip.

Cherep hadn't known Italian, and Tatiana was gone already. He ended up keeping his mouth shut for a couple weeks if the older woman had been around.

She was very sorry about that. Her brother did pick up a bit, but not nearly as much as she had to her.

Learning Japanese would have to be done on her own but she had a lot of languages under her belt as it was, so she didn't mind that was going to have to be her own effort.

"Really, I am so sorry about that."

"The smirk you're wearing says otherwise." He refuted dryly, cracking open the books she gave him.