Brother in the Shadows

In the library’s hush, my mind adrift, I reach for a volume on a high shelf. As my fingers brush its spine, another book dislodges itself, falling not as an accident, but with the deliberate finality of a verdict. The sound it makes as it strikes the floor is too loud, a punctuation mark in the silence, as if the library itself has dictated the next story I must endure.

The cover is unmarked, anonymous. But the moment I lift it, the voice within begins its quiet confession.

There is an organization, the book whispers, that consumes the children of us. They transmute what makes you different into currency. Talent becomes a leash. Brilliance, a chain. Some are forced into spectacles, singing on streets and stages they never chose. Others are sealed in laboratories, their curiosity harvested for weapons and patents. Others still are funneled into crime, pushing poison they are too young to comprehend. And some

The voice hesitates, then continues with a terrible, measured calm.

Some are sold into intimacy. Not crude prostitution, but something more calculated: sexual intelligence, honey-trap operations, the emotional manipulation of targets. They have perfected the art of turning affection into surveillance. They have weaponized love.

My hands grow unsteady. These are not metaphors; they are diagnoses.

You have a brother, it states. He was taken. His wit and his beauty were reforged into instruments. For years he has been exploited, trained to read desire and twist it, taught to disarm with tenderness, to extract with kisses, to conquer through need. His suffering is not lesser than yours—it is merely disguised in more elegant clothing.

Images surge, unbidden. A face almost remembered, familiar in the way of a dream that lingers at dawn. A voice half-buried, echoing my own cadence. Childhood fragments surface, sharp and incomplete: two children whispering in a dim room, small fingers interlaced; a laugh like mine, but softer; a shadow that vanished from my story without leaving a reason.

The book offers no comfort. It promises no reunion. It offers only the cold, stark weight of recognition.

His pain is not accidental. It is engineered. And knowing this, you must choose: will you look away, or will you acknowledge that your blood remains in their cages?

The book closes itself with a soft, definitive snap. The sound leaves me trembling.

Back home, I pick up my phone on impulse. Handsome Man’s number is still there. I haven’t looked at it in weeks, perhaps months. The screen ignites, and beside his name appears a photograph I never saved: his face, a dog standing patiently at his side.

My breath catches. Is it new? Was it placed there by the system, by The Whole, or by his own hand?

I type the words before reason can intervene:

"Your picture reminds me of parallel realities."

For a moment, nothing. Then, a single vibration. A link appears, no text, no context. Only sound.

I press play.

Music floods the room, soft at first, then swelling like an incoming tide. A voice carries both ache and tenderness, suspended between lament and prayer. Each note feels intentional, a substitute for words too dangerous to commit to text.

This is his reply. Not a message, but a manifestation. A language older and safer than speech.

I close my eyes and let the current pull me under. The chords do not merely fill the room; they unlock chambers within my chest. For a suspended moment, I see him—not as a prisoner or a pawn, but as someone reaching across the divide, slipping past the sentinels of our fractured lives.

The song ends. The silence that rushes back in is denser than before.