The woman—her name tag from a coffee shop read “ZOE”—let out a sharp sigh. “Of course. Out of print. Out of luck. I need the PDF for my thesis. The university library’s copy is ‘lost,’ and the only PDF online is a scanned mess from some Romanian server with half the pages missing.”

And he thought: maybe that is enough. Maybe a poem does not need to be owned. Maybe it only needs to be found, once, by someone who will lose it again—and then go looking for it in the dark.

Smit grunted. “No.”

Elias closed the library computer. He walked home through the rain, which had become a drizzle, which had become a mist. He did not save the PDF. He did not print it. He simply let the poems exist again, somewhere, for a moment, unlocked and free.