The house was silent when they entered.
Three figures slipped through the front door, their flashlights sweeping across the ruined living room. They moved with the precision of men who had rehearsed this a hundred times: steps controlled, weapons ready, eyes cutting through every shadow. Their uniforms were plain—black, unmarked. They looked official without belonging to anything you could name.
From the back came the faint squeak of hinges. Another team entered through the garden, shadows folding into shadows until both groups converged. Within a minute, the ground floor was theirs.
The man leading them—taller than the rest, authority radiating from the set of his shoulders—lifted one hand. The others froze instantly.
"Second floor," he said quietly. His tone carried more weight than any radio. There was no buzz in his ear, no instructions fed from above. He didn't need them.
They climbed the staircase, their beams slicing across peeling wallpaper and the dust dancing in the air. Every board creaked like a whisper of warning.
The first door swung open with a long groan. The light caught a small bedroom. On the floor, sprawled beneath the weak glow of a desk lamp, lay a boy.
Seventeen, perhaps younger. His face was pale, damp with sweat. His chest rose and fell so lightly it was hard to tell if he breathed at all. For a moment, he looked like a corpse abandoned under a lamp.
"Target located," one of the men murmured.
The leader didn't answer. His eyes weren't on the boy but on something resting inches from his limp hand.
A book.
A real book.
Its leather cover was cracked and worn, yet faint light pulsed through it, veins of shadow spidering across as if the skin itself were fractured glass. Closed or not, it gave the impression of breathing. The boy seemed fragile. The book looked alive. Dangerous.
The leader's jaw tightened. "Secure him. And the book."
Orders carried weight when spoken softly. Two of the team obeyed without hesitation. One checked the boy's pulse before locking padded restraints around his wrists and ankles. Another helped lift the limp body with care but no wasted motion.
The book was handled by the second pair. They lifted it cautiously, almost reverently, sliding it into a reinforced case of dull metal etched with sigils that glimmered faintly once the lid clicked shut. The heartbeat of the cursed leather dulled, smothered by containment.
A third man approached the leader, lowering his voice. "Sir, ground floor is secure. Clear. Isn't this the same place we swept last year? The one we thought was abandoned?"
The leader's gaze lingered on the sealed case, then on the boy's slack face. His breath left him slow and measured. "Yes," he said at last. "Move them. Both. Transport immediately."
They carried the boy out in silence. No one spoke. No one needed to. They weren't moving a teenager. They were relocating a weapon—fragile, volatile, unpredictable.
***
Hours later, the boy lay strapped to a narrow bed in a room stripped of personality.
The light above was harsh, sterile. Machines lined either side, their hum steady, screens alive with shifting graphs. Heart rate. Neural activity. And something stranger: alien symbols crawling across the displays in rhythm with the faint glow flickering inside his chest.
Across the room, on a steel table, the book rested inside a transparent cube. Scanners rotated around it in slow arcs, measuring every pulse, every shiver. The case was not just reinforced; it was excessive. Suppression seals. Auto-locks. Fail-safes stacked on fail-safes. These were precautions designed for nuclear material, not paper and leather.
Two guards flanked the door, rifles trained forward. Their arms hadn't dropped once since the boy was brought in.
In the adjoining observation chamber, separated by a wall of thick glass, stood a man.
He was tall, still, hands folded behind his back, posture cut from stone. His eyes—cold, sharp blue—never left the figure bound to the bed.
He saw everything. The twitch of the boy's eyelids as he dreamed. The erratic spikes flashing across the monitors. The faint tremor of the book in its prison. He watched with the intensity of someone who trusted nothing, not even silence.
A technician entered at last, carrying a tablet. He offered it with both hands. "The report, sir."
The man with blue eyes accepted it without looking away from the teenager.
For a long moment he held it unopened, then finally lowered his gaze and scrolled through the file. His jaw tensed. He continued downward: family background, school history, medical charts. His expression didn't flicker until his eyes caught on one line.
His lips pressed thin. A shadow passed across his face—too brief to name, gone before it became expression. He exhaled slowly through his nose, shook his head once, and closed the file.
The technician hesitated. "Sir?"
"Thank you," the man said flatly. "That will be all."
Dismissed, the technician withdrew, leaving the chamber quiet again.
The man shifted his gaze back to the young. Under the bright lights the boy looked hollow, more like a shell than a body. Fragile, breakable. Yet the readings told another story. Surges of energy that no human body should endure. The boy wasn't just alive. He was overflowing.
The man reached into his pocket, unwrapped a stick of gum, and placed it in his mouth. He chewed slowly, mechanically, his jaw tight. His boots whispered against the floor as he paced once, twice, always returning to stand at the glass.
Inside the cube, the book trembled faintly, as if acknowledging his watch.
"Sir," one of the guards said carefully from the room beyond. "Are we even sure he'll wake up? He's Unbound."
The man with blue eyes didn't answer right away. He studied the boy, then the book, and finally said, "Sure? No. We don't know where he's been, or what he's seen. We don't know what kind of world was inside that book. What wakes here may not be what we carried out of that house."
The guards exchanged uneasy looks. They didn't reply. Some silences carried their own orders.
Time passed like water dripping from a cracked pipe. The man hardly moved, chewing gum in slow rhythm, pacing when the stillness grew too heavy. Every so often he reopened the file on the tablet, staring again at the same lines, as though repetition might turn them into something else. When the record of the detention center appeared again, his head gave the smallest shake. The thought was buried once more.
Then the monitors spiked.
The boy's pulse leapt. His brain activity surged. His fingers tightened against the restraints until the padded straps strained.
"He's waking," the technician whispered.
The guards raised their rifles in unison, the sound sharp against the hum of the machines.
The man with blue eyes stepped closer to the glass. He watched the boy's eyelids flutter, his breath rasping fast and shallow. Slowly, the teenager's eyes cracked open. The light stabbed at them until tears formed.
At first, relief spread across his face, raw and unfiltered. Then laughter bubbled up, manic, unsteady, as if waking alive was reason enough to mock the world. But it faltered. The relief twisted into something sour. Confusion, then fear, then anger hardened across his expression as he realized the straps held him tight.
The silence grew unbearable.
The man turned to his men. "It's time. Let's see what we're dealing with."
The technician's voice cracked. "Sir…should I…?"
"You stay here, Lars," the man cut him off, calm but absolute. "Don't worry."
"Yes, sir."
The man and his guards left the observation room, boots striking in perfect rhythm as they crossed the sterile hall. At the door he paused, drew in a breath, and pushed it open.
The boy startled at once, eyes widening at the rifles aimed his way. He pulled against the restraints until the leather cut his wrists.
The man stepped forward, his presence filling the room. His blue eyes fixed on the young with the certainty of a predator deciding whether the prey was worth killing.
He leaned closer, voice calm, steady, almost kind.
"Hello, Reader."
For a moment the words carried the softness of greeting.
Then his expression darkened.
"If you try anything stupid…" His lips curved into something colder than a smile.
"…you're a dead man."