The light on her arm flared, but this time she was ready. She thought of the word the voice had given her—a word of her own—but her mind came up empty. Her name was a hole, and every word she tried to fill it with fell through. Then she remembered her mother’s humming, a tuneless sound that used to drift through the house when she thought no one was listening. It wasn’t

a hollow that ached like a pulled tooth, a vacancy where her identity had been sutured shut. She pressed her fingers to the spot, feeling the unnaturally smooth skin, the absence of letters. The book sat on the table, its pages closed now, but she could feel its attention—patient, watchful, waiting for her to make the next move.

The voice from the floorboards spoke again, quieter this time, like a secret passing through grain. "It will try again. When it does, you'll need something to hold onto. A word of your own."

She opened her mouth to ask what that meant, but the sound that came out was not her voice. It was the book's—the same hum, the same pressure behind her teeth, the same taste of old paper and burnt matches. The light on

She collapsed forward, catching herself on her palms. The script on her arm had gone cold, the letters dimming like coals losing their fire. But she could feel them still, etched into her flesh, waiting. The column of light had withdrawn into the floorboards, leaving the room in near-darkness, save for the faint glow of the book on the table.

Her name was gone. She knew that with the same bone-deep certainty that she knew her heart was still beating. There was a hollow where it had been, a

It moved like a living script, each tendril of light curling into the shape of a letter against her skin. She watched, breath held, as the glow traced a word across her forearm—not a word she knew, but one her bones understood. *Unwritten.* The light pressed deeper, and with it came a flood of sensation: the weight of a library at midnight, the smell of old paper and burnt matches, the echo of a voice calling her name from very far away.

She tried to pull back, but her arm was no longer hers. The light had woven itself into her tendons, reading the story of her muscles, the history of every scar. It found the paper cut on her index finger, the one she’d gotten when she first opened the book. It lingered there, tasting the dried blood, and then it wrote again. A sentence, long and looping, spiraling up toward her elbow. She could feel each stroke like a needle stitching thread through fabric.

*You opened me. Now I open you.*

The hum grew louder, filling the room until the walls trembled. The light at her feet began to rise, forming a column around her, and in that column she saw fragments—images torn from her own memory: her mother’s hands folding laundry, the cracked spine of a dictionary, a door she had never noticed before at the end of a hallway in her childhood home. The light was not just reading her. It was rewriting her, replacing her memories with its own.

She forced her other hand to move, to claw at the glowing script on her arm. But the light was already inside her, deeper than skin. It had found the place where she kept her name, and it was erasing it letter by letter.

Then the hum stopped.

The light froze, mid-crawl, as if listening. A voice—not hers, not the book’s—whispered from the floorboards beneath her knees. *Don’t let it finish.*

And the light, for the first time, recoiled.

She felt the light crawl up her arm, not burning, but tasting. It moved like a