“You don’t understand. There are hundreds of people just like me out there. Thousands.”

Bob cocked his head. “Once you sell a chapter to someone, how will you stop them from turning around and selling it to someone else?”

“We’ll sell it as a PDF and disable the copy-paste and print features.”

“You really think that will work?” Bob snorted. “My publisher has a whole team devoted to book piracy. There’s no way to stop someone from screenshotting it page-by-page. Run the screenshots through an optical character reader, and they’ll have it back again, more or less. I’ve seen some crazy mistakes creep in that way, but all the pirates say sharing is caring.”

“We’ll get the biggest fans before anyone else. They don’t even want to wait another day. Not if they can read it now.”

AJAY

A Bridge Too Far

“You outdid yourself, Ajay,” his grandmother said, taking a bite of halwa. The dessert’s orange color was set off perfectly by the topping of bright green chopped pistachios.

“Everything was delicious,” his grandfather agreed.

Ajay had spent weeks preparing for tonight’s Diwali celebration. At school nearly everyone else had been preoccupied with thoughts of Halloween, which this year coincided with Diwali, or the Festival of Light. In many ways, Halloween, with its emphasis on death, was antithetical to the spirit of Diwali. (When he was little, his parents had always tried to find a balance, decorating with jack-o’-lanterns instead of ghosts and ghouls and steering him away from all-black costumes.) While the stories of Diwali varied depending on what part of India you were from, all had a common thread—marking the victory of good over evil, light over dark. It was one of the biggest holidays on the Hindu calendar, as important as Christmas to Christians.

Diwali meant feasting. New clothes. Decorating the house with strings of twinkling lights and painted diya—clay lamps. Like every year, his mom had created a rangoli at the end of the driveway, filling the design of an oil lamp surrounded with flower petals with bright red, green, purple, and pink sand. After dinner, they would go outside and light sparklers.

To celebrate the occasion, most of Ajay’s extended family was here. His older sister, Aprita, home from medical school. His three living grandparents. Papa’s brother and his wife and two little girls. Later they would FaceTime with Mama’s sister’s family in Seattle.