Chapter 2 A Name That Isn't Mine

POV: Imogen

I waited until the woman across the aisle put her phone away before I searched the name myself.

My hands weren't shaking. I noticed that with a strange, distant pride, the kind that comes from years of practice staying calm while everything underneath wants to fall apart.

The first result loaded before I'd finished typing.

ROBBERY SUSPECT SOUGHT IN CASTRYN: POLICE NAME IMOGEN VANCE

Same headline. A jewelry store hit two nights ago. The footage was too blurry to show a face, but a shop clerk ,badly shaken, according to the article ,swore the woman had given her name out loud before running.

Given it. Like she wanted it known.

I never did that. Not once, in ten years. You don't hand a stranger your name on your way out a door you're about to burn behind you.

I scrolled further. The second article stopped my breath entirely.

BANK FRAUD CASE REOPENED ,NEW SUSPECT NAMED

Different city. Two hundred miles from Castryn. Same week. A different reporter, a different crime, a different blurry photograph. And there it was again, halfway down the third paragraph.

Investigators have named the suspect as Imogen Vance, though her current whereabouts remain unknown.

I read that line four times before it made sense, and even then, it didn't. Two crimes. Two cities. Same week. Same name.

That wasn't luck. Luck doesn't work that hard.

I turned the phone face-down and pressed my palm flat against it, like that might stop the headlines from being true. Outside the window, fields were going gray with evening, my own reflection ghosting over the glass. My reflection didn't look scared. It looked like it was already thinking three steps ahead, which was worse, because thinking meant some part of me had already understood something my chest hadn't caught up to yet.

Somebody was spending my name. On purpose. In two places, close enough to my own arrival that it couldn't be chance.

Either someone had dug up the real Imogen Vance, buried under ten years and half a dozen other names —

Or someone wanted her found.

I didn't like either answer. I liked the second one considerably less.

Castryn's train station rose out of the gorge like something built to remind you the whole city sat inside a crack in the earth. I stepped off the platform into noise ,porters shouting, a busker sawing away at something fast on a violin, a family arguing cheerfully in a language I didn't recognize. Masks were already appearing on foreheads and belts, cheap five-dollar ones from street carts, two full days before Veil Week officially began.

"Masks, get your masks, half price before the week starts!" a vendor called, waving one at me as I passed.

"Not yet," I told him, and kept walking.

I was halfway across the platform when a shoulder caught mine ,hard enough to turn me half a step sideways, gentle enough that it could have been an accident.

It wasn't.

I knew that the second I looked up and found him already looking back. Tall, dark coat, a plain black mask hiding everything above his jaw. No eye color to read, no age to guess, nothing but a mouth curved just slightly, like he'd found something about me funny.

"Sorry," he said. He didn't sound sorry at all.

Then, quiet enough that only I could hear —

"Welcome back."

Every muscle in my body locked in place.

"Excuse me?" I said. Steady. I was proud of that too, in the same distant way.

He was already walking, unhurried, like he had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there.

"Wait," I said, pushing after him, "who are —"

He didn't stop. He didn't even turn his head. By the time I reached the spot where he'd been standing, there was nothing ,no coat, no mask, just the crowd closing over the space like water after a stone drops through.

My heart was going too fast. I made myself breathe, slow, four counts in, four counts held, four counts out, until my pulse settled somewhere close to normal.

Welcome back.

Not excuse me. Not sorry, miss. Two words, chosen on purpose, aimed at me specifically, by a man wearing a mask that hid everything about him except one simple fact ,he knew exactly who I was.

Nobody knew who I was. That was the entire structure of my life, built one careful lie at a time over ten years. Sabine Cole didn't exist anymore, deleted the moment I stepped off her last train. Celeste Duquesne didn't exist yet, still folded inside a manila envelope waiting in Otto's shop.

Imogen Vance existed even less than either of them. She was supposed to be the safest ghost of all.

I stood on the platform while the crowd moved around me on both sides, and understood, with a certainty I couldn't argue myself out of, that someone in this city had looked at my unmasked face and known precisely which ghost was wearing it.

He'd picked me. Not Sabine. Not Celeste.

Me.

And whoever he was, he'd found me before I'd even had the chance to disappear into the one name meant to keep me safe.