“For your next lesson: find Volume 9. It doesn’t exist yet. You’ll have to invent it.”

The tape glitched. When it cleared, the Magician was holding a deck of cards. “Pick a card,” he said. “Any card.”

The Magician raised his left hand. A coin appeared between his fingers—then vanished. Elias had seen this a hundred times. But then the coin reappeared inside a sealed glass jar on Elias’s own coffee table .

The white light resolved into a mirror. Elias saw himself, but older. Weary. Holding the same black tape. Behind him stood a younger version of himself, watching from the doorway of the same apartment, eyes wide.

The Magician flipped the top card. Ace of spades. “You’re thinking, ‘That’s a trick.’ But watch.” He snapped his fingers. The card in his hand changed—to a photograph. A photograph of Elias, age seven, sitting in front of a television, watching Volume 1.

Below that, a single playing card: the joker.

Not for the magic. For the nostalgia. As a kid, he’d watched Volumes 1 through 7 obsessively: the top hats, the doves, the slightly-off-key carnival music. But Volume 8 was the unicorn. A rumor. The store’s original owner, a man named Gustav who had vanished in 1995, had claimed it was “not for public eyes.”