Behind him, in the attic doorway, a silhouette made of folded newsprint and old magazine pages stood perfectly still. It had his grandfather’s posture—the slight lean to the left, the tired slope of the shoulders.

The crow snapped its beak shut and collapsed into a flat sheet of black cardstock, exactly as it had started.

The final step: “To program, whisper a sound into the beak. The crow will repeat it exactly once, then the cams reset.”

The old book didn’t have a title on the spine, just a worn depression where one used to be. Elias found it slumped between a cracked atlas and a forgotten encyclopedia in the attic of his late grandfather’s house. The dust made him sneeze, but the kanji on the cover— Karakuri —made him freeze.

Elias laughed. A toy. He leaned close to the paper beak and whispered, “Hello, Grandfather.”