Derrigan sat back from the pinboard with a tired, thin laugh and reached for the small flat rectangle he carried for errands and odd confirmations. The phone felt foreign against the hum of paper and thread; he had not used it for any purpose that mattered since the ledger began to scrawl its own summons. Tonight it was a tool of verification.
He typed the novel's title into the search bar with fingers that wanted to hesitate: Emperor Rise. The result came up immediate and stark — a bare listing, the title and an upload date, nothing else. He tapped the link. The page opened to an empty frame where chapters should sit. No scrollable text. No comments. The title hung over a blank white space like a sign over an emptied stage.
"Someone scrubbed it," Derrigan said, more to the room than to Seo‑yeon. "Or it's been taken down."
Seo‑yeon leaned in to glance, eyes narrowed against the phone's glow. "Or it never had public content," she said. "A placeholder. But someone knows the title. That's enough."
He left the phone face‑up on the bench and closed his eyes for a breath. The ledger rested under Seo‑yeon's folder where she kept evidence, its spine a familiar ridge. Derrigan reached to help slide the folder nearer and his fingers brushed the dog‑eared cover.
A warmth answered, small as a pulse. The margin stitch where he had been tracing lines all week shone faintly — first a smear of color, then a soft, steady glow that pooled beneath his fingertips. He froze; the room's lamplight held still as if it were listening.
A smear of light resolved into a shape: no larger than his palm, blurred at the edges like a memory remembered wrong. It hovered, a small, unsteady body of phosphorescence, and then, with a quietness that felt like breath, it settled onto his hands as though intending to sleep. Its outline suggested a child‑sized thing folded into compact rest; it emitted no sound, only a tender temperature that ran along his skin like a tide.
Seo‑yeon made no sound either. She watched the little figure with the meticulous calm she kept for dangerous paperwork. For a moment they both forgot the pinboard and the manifests and the global cadence. They watched a floating breath of light take the shape of a small, sleeping thing in Derrigan's palms.
It rested there for a handful of heartbeats, and Derrigan felt an odd reassurement — not peace, not safety, but the sense of an old thing recognizing a hand it had known. Then the light drifted, thinner now, and the shape blurred at the edges. It folded back into itself like someone pulling a quilt over a sleeping child and seeped down into the ledger. The cover closed as if a hand had smoothed it shut.
The room exhaled. The ledger was warm where the figure had lain. Seo‑yeon's fingers went to the book with the same care she used for logging evidence and opened to the margin where the horizon‑stitch gleamed faintly as if it had been polished. The stitch's thread was dry to the touch and ordinary in ink, but imprinted in the margin was a faint luminous smear that dull light could not quite reach.
"A relic," Seo‑yeon said without surprise, the word practical and minimal like a diagnosis. "Not just paper. An object that holds…something."
"A spirit?" Derrigan asked, the question small and immediate.
She met his eyes and for once paper answers were not enough. "Relics can have voices. Some believe in sparks. Call it what you will. The book's not a simple text." Her voice skimmed over the ledger's edge like a careful pen. "It held something and let it out."
Derrigan closed his hands around the ledger as if to keep whatever had nested there from wandering again. He felt, beneath the brittle paper and ink, the memory of warmth that had rested on his skin. It was not an explanation, only evidence of one: the ledger was a thing of history and agency, not mere coincidence.
"If it's a spirit," he said finally, "it didn't scream. It came and slept. That…feels like a choice."
Seo‑yeon's jaw worked. "Then it chose you for a reason," she said. "We treat it as evidence and as a responsibility. We do not tell. We do not show. We lock it with the other files and we decide what to do with what it tells us."
He slid the ledger into the folder and closed it with the same care with which she filed the shard. The phone on the bench still showed Emperor Rise — the blank title floating over empty white. Derrigan thumbed it closed and set it face‑down. The blank page and the folded light inside the ledger both felt like warnings.
Outside, the city kept its ordinary noises. Inside, their small house held a new fact: the ledger was not only a map; it was a receptacle for something that seemed to know when to sleep and when to wake. They had assumed it was a relic. Now they also had to assume it could answer back.