Rain hammered the roof of the old train station like a war drum. Inside, the flickering fluorescent lights barely held back the shadows. Detective Elise Voss stood alone on the platform, staring at the tracks. No train. No passengers. Just silence and a growing sense of dread.
Three days ago, Daniel Whitlock, a whistleblower from a corrupt biotech firm, disappeared. Last seen boarding a 9:45 PM train from Norbridge to Camden. But security footage showed something impossible—Daniel boarding... and then vanishing. Mid-ride. No stops. No tampering. He was there one frame and gone the next.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Elise muttered, flipping through the security stills again.
A voice crackled behind her. “Looking for ghosts again, Voss?”
She turned sharply. It was Agent Kieran Rhys—FBI, and a pain in her neck.
“I work with facts,” she said. “Ghosts leave traces. You just don’t know where to look.”
He smirked. “Daniel Whitlock’s been missing seventy-two hours. Every second counts. If you’ve got something better than grainy footage, now’s the time.”
She handed him a USB. “This is a copy of the CCTV feed from inside the train. Watch what happens at timestamp 22:17.”
Rhys popped it into his tablet. At first, it looked normal—Daniel sitting alone, tense, clutching a briefcase. The train sped through dark countryside. Then at exactly 22:17, the camera glitched. Just a flicker. And Daniel was gone. His briefcase remained.
“No door opened,” he murmured. “No other passengers. How...?”
“Exactly,” Elise said. “Now watch the next compartment. Same time.”
The screen showed an empty cabin. Then, for a single frame, a dark figure appeared. Hooded, standing unnaturally still. Then gone again.
Rhys looked at her, eyes narrowing. “What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “But I think Daniel found something he wasn’t supposed to.”
They drove to Daniel’s apartment the next morning. The door was ajar. No signs of forced entry—but the place was ransacked. Elise scanned the room, flashlight grazing overturned drawers and shredded paper.
“Whoever did this wasn’t looking for valuables,” Rhys noted. “They were after information.”
In the bedroom, Elise found a half-burnt notebook hidden beneath the floorboard. She carefully peeled apart the surviving pages. Symbols. Ciphers. A few names scrawled in shorthand.
Rhys read over her shoulder. “’Project Scepter.’ And a list of initials. D.W., J.R., M.L., E.V... Wait. That’s you.”
Elise’s blood ran cold. “What?”
“E.V.—Elise Voss. You’re on the list.”
She snatched the notebook and stared. Next to the initials, in red ink, it read: “Compromised?”
Rhys stepped back, hand drifting toward his gun. “You want to explain this?”
“I didn’t even know Daniel Whitlock,” she snapped. “I’ve never been involved with whatever this is.”
“Someone thinks you are. Maybe he did too.”
She closed the notebook, her voice steely. “I need to find out who’s behind this. And what they’re trying to cover up.”
The deeper they dug, the stranger things became. “Project Scepter” was nowhere in federal databases. But Daniel’s employment records showed he worked under a dummy division—Lab 7E, part of a biotech company called Nexisol.
Rhys made a call. “They went bankrupt two years ago after a lab fire killed five employees. One survivor. A doctor named... Milo Lark.”
“That’s another name on the list,” Elise said.
They tracked Milo to a secure psychiatric facility outside Boston. The man was a wreck—paranoid, sedated, muttering nonsense.
But as they entered his cell, he went rigid. His eyes locked onto Elise.
“They see you,” he whispered. “You’re marked.”
“Marked by who?” she asked.
He pointed to his eye. “It’s in the blood. In the lens. That’s how they move.”
Before she could ask more, he began convulsing violently. Alarms blared, and orderlies rushed in.
As they were escorted out, Rhys whispered, “What did he mean? Move through what?”
She didn’t answer.
Because deep down, she already feared the answer.
---
Chapter Four: The Passenger
Two nights later, Elise boarded the same train Daniel took before he vanished. She carried a dummy briefcase and wore a hidden camera.
Rhys tracked her signal from a surveillance van near the tracks.
“Keep talking,” he said over the comms.
“Train just left Norbridge,” she whispered. “Only three others on board. No sign of our mystery ghost yet.”
At 22:17, the lights flickered.
“Rhys,” she whispered, “I think it’s happening again.”
She turned, and the compartment was empty. The windows flickered like static.
And then—he was there.
Not Daniel.
The figure.
Hooded. Unmoving. No face, just a shimmering blur, like heat haze in a human shape.
Elise raised her phone. “What are you?”
The figure pointed to her chest. Then it spoke—not aloud, but inside her head.
> “Witnesses die. Carriers live.”
Then it vanished.
And she wasn’t on the train anymore.
She was standing in a lab.
Bloody. Burning. Sirens.
A memory—someone else’s.
She saw a body on the ground. Herself.
Then darkness.
