Page9 ✦ No Sign-up

Elias didn't look up. He closed his eyes, gripped the paper, and tore it in half.

"Page 9 is gone again," Elias whispered, sliding a dusty leather-bound journal across his desk. He checked the next one—a Victorian romance. Then a technical manual on bridge building. In each one, the story skipped from Page 8 to Page 10. The jagged edge left behind was always clean, as if sliced by a razor.

Elias froze. He turned to the very last page in the stack. It was fresh. The ink was still slightly damp.

The "collected" Page 9 told the story of a man who lived in the basement of an archive, cataloging books, until he discovered that his own life was being written by someone else.

Elias began to read them. On their own, they were fragments of different lives—a confession of love, a secret blueprint, a recipe for a poison that left no trace. But as he laid them out on the floor, he realized they weren't random. When read in the order they were stolen, they formed a new story entirely.

Every single book in the "C-12" section was missing exactly one thing.

Elias worked in the basement of the City Archive, a place where books went to be forgotten. His job was simple: catalog the "damaged" goods. Most of the time, "damaged" meant a coffee stain or a torn cover. But lately, he had noticed a pattern.

Elias reached for the final sheet of paper, his heart hammering against his ribs. He looked at the words and realized that to stop the story, he would have to stop reading. He looked up, and for the first time, he noticed the shadow standing in the doorway of the archive.