CHAPTER 13 — THE BOOK ARRIVES
Sunrise Print & Bindery looked exactly the same as it had two days earlier — same stenciled gold letters, same smell of ink and warm paper — except that this time, walking in, Raghav had the distinct sense of being recognized rather than evaluated.
"We came for dinosaurs," his sister announced to the room at large, apparently under the impression this explained everything.
As one of the men in front of them broke into a laugh, Malhotra made his appearance from the rear in no time at all, using an old and dirty cloth to dry his hands.
"The famous family," he said, and shook Raghav's hand first, again, which Raghav was starting to suspect was simply a habit rather than a courtesy extended specially to him. "Come. Today's the day it stops being yours and starts being ours for a while."
---
They gathered around the big production table at the back of the office with the manuscript and the sheet of paper that was full of Malhotra's writing and examined it all, line by line, as though they were going over a contract that they meant to keep.
A hundred and one thousand, eight hundred and forty-two words, once counted properly. Trim size six by nine, standard for the kind of paperback that sat comfortably in one hand. Three hundred fifty-two pages of actual text, Malhotra said, tapping a calculator, plus front matter — title page, copyright, a blank page or two for good measure — call it three hundred sixty total.
"That's a real book, by the way," he added. "Not a pamphlet somebody's proud of." He lifted the sample block of pages in one hand, testing its weight the way you'd weigh fruit at a market stall. "Finished copy will come in just over a pound. Heavy enough to feel substantial. Light enough that nobody minds carrying it around."
"Have you applied for your ISBN?" he asked next, almost as an afterthought, already reaching for a form.
No, I had not done so; not correctly, at least. Malhotra was patient when he explained to him: Every book that is sold by any physical bookstore must have one, a number which is as unique as a passport and without which the system of the bookstore will not be able to process it. "The barcode should be put on the back cover of the book," he further added.
"And you'll want a proper copyright page," Malhotra said, sliding a template across the table. "Notice, first edition, printing location, the ISBN, and a publisher name." He glanced up. "You'll need one of those too, unless you want the page to just say your own name looking a little lonely."
Raghav and his father looked at each other for a second, and something unspoken passed between them — the small, strange realization that this question hadn't come up yet, and someone was going to have to answer it before the day was over.
"First Light Publishing," his mother said, not looking up from the template, like she'd decided it before either of them had finished thinking about it. "Simple. Nobody has to explain it twice."
His father considered that for exactly as long as it took to realize there was nothing to improve on. "First Light Publishing," he agreed.
Malhotra wrote it down without comment, exactly the way a man writes down a hundred small decisions a day and has long since stopped being surprised by how quickly some of them get made.
---
"Matte or glossy," Malhotra said, laying two identical test covers side by side, same dinosaur, same title, two entirely different finishes catching the light in two entirely different ways.
His mother picked up the glossy one first, turning it under the lamp. "This one looks more expensive."
"It photographs better," Malhotra agreed. "Catches the light nicely on a shelf."
His father shrugged, entirely unbothered either way, which Raghav had come to expect from him on anything that wasn't measurable with a calculator. "Whichever holds up better."
Raghav picked up the matte version instead, running his thumb across the surface. No glare, no fingerprints already ghosting where his mother had touched the other one. "Matte," he said. "It looks more serious. And a thriller shouldn't look shiny."
His mother made a small, resigned sound that suggested she'd expected to lose this particular argument the moment her son opened his mouth, and Malhotra simply nodded and wrote it down.
He measured the stacked page block next, running a strip of card against its thickness. "About point seven-eight inches," he said. "Matters more than people think — get that wrong, and your cover art doesn't line up with the actual book underneath it. I've seen titles printed sideways on a spine because somebody guessed instead of measured."
"You don't guess," Raghav said.
"I measure twice," Malhotra said. "Guessing is for people who enjoy reprinting things."
---
The proof arrived the next afternoon, a single copy, still warm faintly from wherever it had been printed, and the family passed it around the table like something slightly fragile.
His mother found the typo first — a doubled word, three chapters in, easy to miss and easier to fix. His father caught a sentence in the genetics section that read correctly but awkwardly, and rewrote it on the spot in the margin, the same small careful handwriting he'd used through half of Chapter 11. Raghav found one formatting inconsistency, a chapter heading sitting slightly off from the others, more a printer's error than a writer's.
Three corrections. That was all.
Malhotra flipped through it after them, slower, more critically, the way Raghav imagined he read every proof that came through his shop. "This is clean," he said eventually, sounding faintly surprised by his own verdict. "Cleanest first proof I've had this year, honestly." He looked at Raghav. "Most authors send me something that needs a full page of notes."
Raghav didn't say anything about the two people whose handwriting was still all over the margins of the actual manuscript sitting in the next room. He didn't need to. He already knew exactly who deserved that particular compliment, and it wasn't entirely him.
---
Before the full run began, Malhotra ran twenty-five copies first and set them aside on the table like evidence.
"Press check," he said, beginning to flip through the first one. "We don't run five thousand copies into the ground on an error that could have been caught in a quarter hour." He held up a page to the light, checking the placement of the ink on the page, then ran his thumb along the edge, making sure it had been cut straight.
Raghav watched him work through the small stack with the unhurried precision of a man who'd clearly caught expensive mistakes this way before and had no intention of missing one now. Only when he was satisfied did he pick up a red grease pencil from the shelf beside the press and write, in block letters, across the production sheet clipped to the machine: *APPROVED.*
He nodded once to the press operator, who pressed a large green button set into the console.
The machine accelerated. Ink began flowing steadily into the rollers. Five thousand books had officially entered production.
---
The presses started properly on the twenty-seventh, and the noise hit Raghav before anything else did — a steady, enormous, mechanical roar that swallowed conversation whole, forcing Malhotra to half-shout the tour rather than deliver it.
He showed them the plates first, thin sheets of aluminum, each one etched with a mirror image of a page that would soon exist five thousand times over. Then the paper — enormous rolls of it, taller than Raghav's sister, feeding into the machine in a continuous sheet that came out the other side already printed, faster than Raghav could comfortably count the sheets going by.
"How many an hour?" he shouted.
"Around five thousand impressions, if everything behaves," Malhotra shouted back. "Printing's the easy part. Drying, folding, binding, trimming — that's where the real time goes."
"It's not printing one page at a time," Malhotra shouted, holding up a single enormous printed sheet, dense with what looked, at first glance, like nonsense. "Thirty-two pages on this one sheet. Folded right, cut right, and page two ends up sitting next to page thirty-one, not page three."
Raghav stared at the sheet, trying to trace the logic of it, and found he genuinely couldn't, not by eye. "That's — " He shook his head. "That shouldn't work."
"It works because somebody a long time ago was better at arithmetic than either of us," Malhotra said, and folded the sheet once, twice, and once more, and there, suddenly, impossibly, was a small, ordinary section of the book, pages running in perfect order.
Raghav's father, standing a step behind them, was watching the whole process with an expression Raghav didn't often see on him — not the careful, checking look he wore over calculators, but something closer to plain delight.
"It's funny," he said, mostly to himself.
"What is?" Raghav asked.
"I spend all mt time making silicon wafers. Machines that build machines that think." He nodded at the press, still roaring through its cycle. "This one just makes ideas. Same principle, somehow. Feed it the right pattern, and it turns into something nobody could hold in their hands a minute ago."
Raghav didn't have anything to say to that for a moment, and found, standing there in the noise, that he didn't need to.
---
By the twenty-ninth of may, the warehouse floor had filled with cartons — stacked in neat, waist-high rows, each one holding twenty finished copies, two hundred and fifty cartons in total, enough that the space that had felt merely large on their first visit now felt genuinely full.
"Five hundred books to a pallet," Malhotra said almost automatically, glancing over the stacks. "Ten pallets, for the whole run."
Before anyone touched a single copy, Malhotra pulled one from an open carton and bent it back, almost flat, spine straining, pages fanned wide open. Raghav's mother winced despite herself. Nothing happened — no pages loosening, no crack along the spine.
"Good," Malhotra said, letting it close again. "If the glue's going to give up, it gives up here. Better than in someone's hands six months from now."
His mother picked up a single finished copy from an open carton and simply held it for a moment, turning it over in her hands the way you'd hold something you weren't entirely sure was real. She opened it, not to the first page, but to the dedication, and ran two fingers slowly across the printed line there, saying nothing at all. Raghav didn't ask what she was thinking. He didn't need to ask that either.
His father crouched down and examined the spine with an engineer's attention, running a thumb along the binding, checking the alignment of the cover against the pages beneath it.
"It's good work," he said, mostly to Malhotra, and Malhotra accepted the compliment with the particular satisfaction of a craftsman who'd expected nothing less.
His sister found her own copy somewhere in the chaos of open cartons and lifted it straight to her nose before anyone could stop her, inhaling with tremendous seriousness.
"This one smells different," she announced, entirely delighted with her discovery, and the whole warehouse, workers included, laughed.
She wasn't wrong. Fresh ink and new paper had a smell all their own, and Raghav found, breathing it in himself for the first time, that he understood exactly what she meant.
---
The trucks came on the morning of the thirtieth, backing carefully into the loading bay while a forklift began carrying pallets across the warehouse floor toward the ramp — twenty-five cartons to a pallet, twenty books to a carton. Two pallets in, the truck bed was already half full: a thousand copies bound for thirty-eight independent bookstores, three museum gift shops, and one science center bookstore that Malhotra swore would move copies faster than any of the others — the remaining four thousand staying behind in the warehouse until they were needed.
Before the first carton went up the ramp, Malhotra pulled one copy free and pressed it into Raghav's hands.
"Open it anywhere," he said.
Raghav did, at random, somewhere past the middle, and found himself looking at a paragraph he barely remembered writing, in a version so far from the blank pages he'd once stared at that it hardly felt like the same story at all.
Malhotra watched him read for a moment, then nodded, satisfied.
"That's your responsibility now," he said, and took the copy back gently, and set it into the nearest carton with the rest.
Raghav watched that carton go up the ramp and disappear into the dark of the truck bed, and felt a small vertigo settle into his chest, larger than the one he'd felt watching the manuscript carried off to typesetting a week earlier, harder to fully hold.
His sister, perched on their father's hip, waved with her whole arm as the truck's engine turned over. "Bye dinosaurs!" she shouted, at a volume the whole loading bay could hear.
The driver, catching it through his open window, leaned on the horn once in reply, and she looked as though this was the single greatest thing that had happened to her all week.
The truck doors swung shut with a heavy, final sound. The engine climbed slowly through its gears as it pulled out onto the road, until the sound of it faded into the ordinary noise of the street outside.
A thousand copies were on their way to shelves. Four thousand still sat behind him in the warehouse. Which meant, Raghav understood, that the easier half of the job was already finished.
For three weeks, the story had belonged entirely to him — his memory, his notebook, his family's kitchen table, a printing press he could still walk into whenever he wanted.
Watching the truck disappear around the corner, Raghav understood, with a clarity that felt both exciting and slightly frightening, that this part was over.
Tonight, the story belonged to the world.
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