Chapter 2 — The Boy with Ink-Stained Hands

He stole the library's dictionary. And then he smiled at me.

The world folded in half.

One second I was in a grimy alley. The next, I was somewhere that had no walls I could see—only infinite stacks of paper rising into a darkness too complete to be an ordinary ceiling. Pages swirled around me like snow caught in an updraft, each one covered in half-vanished writing. I grabbed one as it fluttered past.

"…and the mayor knew if anyone discovered—"

The rest was blank. The words had been eaten at the edge, leaving a ragged white nothing.

"First time's always the worst."

He was sitting on a paper stack taller than my head, legs dangling, watching me the way cats watch things fall.

Up close, he looked stranger than he had across the library. His hair was the colour of newspaper left three days in the sun—not blond, not grey, something in between that didn't have a name. The ink stains on his hands formed patterns I almost recognised, the way a word looks when you've misspelled it and can feel that it's wrong but can't see where.

"You're not supposed to be here," he said.

"Where is here?"

He plucked a drifting page from the air and crumbled it to dust without looking at it. "The Between. Where words go when they're taken." He dropped the dust. "I'm Ellis."

"Why did you take the words?" I demanded.

He looked genuinely offended. "I don't take them. I save them." He turned his palms up, showing me the stains. "These are from trying to put them back."

A gust of air sent pages spiralling. One stuck to my arm and I caught a glimpse—my mother's handwriting, unmistakable—before it dissolved into nothing:

"…if Mira ever finds out about the—"

I lunged for it. My fingers closed on air. "That was my mother's writing. She disappeared last month and no one will tell me—"

"Quiet." Ellis was on his feet. His grip on my arm was fever-warm. "She's coming."

The paper stacks began to tremble. A rhythmic thumping rose from somewhere below, deep and mechanical, like a massive press cycling to life—a heartbeat made of metal and grinding teeth.

Ellis shoved something into my hands: a torn scrap with smeared ink. "Train bridge at midnight. Don't let anyone see you with that." Then he pushed me hard toward the nearest wall.

I stumbled—expecting paper—and instead hit something solid. Cold. Real.

The alley wall.

The door was gone.

In my hands, the scrap read:

CANDLELIGHT PRESS BURNS AT—

The rest had been torn away.