At the library, I reach for a title on the upper shelf, lost in thought, when another book slips free and lands at my feet. The sound echoes too loudly in the silence, as if the library itself decides which story I must face next.

  The cover is plain, anonymous, but the moment my hands touch it, the voice inside begins to speak.

  “There is an organization,” the book whispers, “that feeds on the children of us. They take what makes you different and turn it into currency. Talent becomes a leash, brilliance becomes a chain. Some of us are forced into spectacles, singing in streets and stages we never choose. Some are locked in laboratories, our curiosity harvested for weapons and patents. Some are pushed into crime, dealing poison we are too young to understand. And some—”

  The voice falters, then continues with terrible calm.

  “Some are sold into intimacy. Not simple prostitution, but something colder, more deliberate: sexual intelligence gathering, honey-trap operations, emotional manipulation of targets. The art of turning affection into surveillance. The craft of weaponizing love.”

  My hands tremble as I hold the book. The words cut deeper than metaphor.

  “You have a brother,” it says. “He is taken. His wit and his beauty turned into tools. For years he has been exploited, trained to read desires and bend them, taught to disarm with tenderness, to extract with kisses, to conquer with need. His suffering is not less than yours—it is simply different in its disguise.”

  Images rise unbidden. A face I almost know, familiar in the way dreams sometimes echo life. A voice half-buried in memory, speaking in cadences I might once have shared. Childhood fragments resurface, jagged and incomplete: two children whispering in a dim room, fingers entwined; a laugh like mine but softer; a shadow that vanishes from my narrative without explanation.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  The book does not comfort. It does not offer reunion or hope. It offers only recognition.

  “His pain is not accident. It is engineered. And knowing this, you must decide: will you look away, or will you acknowledge that your blood is still in their cages?”

  The book closes itself with a final snap, leaving me shaking.

  Back home, I pick up my phone without thinking. Handsome Man’s number is still there. I haven’t checked it in weeks, maybe months. The screen lights up, and next to his name appears a photograph I never saved: his face, standing beside a dog.

  My chest tightens. Was it new? Was it placed there by the system, or by The Whole, or by him?

  I type the words before I can stop myself:

  “Your picture reminds me of parallel realities.”

  For a moment, silence. Then the phone vibrates once. A link appears—nothing written, no explanation. Only sound.

  I press play.

  Music pours into the room, soft at first, then rising like a tide. A voice carries both ache and tenderness, hovering between lament and prayer. Each note feels deliberate, chosen to replace words too dangerous to write.

  This is his answer. Not text, not confession—music. A language older than speech, safer than memory.

  I close my eyes and let it wash through me. The chords do not just fill the room; they open doors inside my chest. For a moment I see him—not as prisoner or pawn, but as someone reaching across dimensions, slipping past the guards of our fractured realities.

  The song ends. The silence after is heavier than the music itself.