Read Chapter 6: The Borrowed Name

The hiring board at the Crofton & Western rail yard was a scarred oak plank laid across two barrels, and the man behind it had the look of a butcher who’d found cheaper meat. He chewed a plug of tobacco, squinted at Jack’s application, then squinted at Jack.

“Says here you’re Elias Mullins.”

Jack’s heart skipped a beat. His brother’s name felt foreign on the page, a borrowed coat that didn’t quite fit. But Elias had been dead seven years—a fever in a Liverpool boarding house, far from anyone who’d known him—and his name was clean. Cleaner than Jack’s, anyway.

“That’s right,” Jack said, keeping his voice level. “Late of the Grand Junction, out of Birmingham.”

“Grand Junction don’t keep fellas long these days.” The foreman—the nameplate on his chest said HOBBS—spat a brown stream into the dirt. “You ever run a hack engine? The old ones, with the timpani valve?”

Jack had rebuilt one from scrap parts at fourteen. He didn’t say that. “I’ve worked on the pattern, sir. The new ones run cleaner, but the old ones… they need a man who listens.”

Hobbs’s eyes flickered with something like interest. He pushed a grease-stained hand through his gray hair. “We got a number nine that’s been coughing like a consumption patient since Tuesday. Chief engineer says it’s the firebox. I say it’s the engineer. You want the job, you prove it.”

The test was brutal. Jack spent four hours in the sweltering repair shed, stripped to his waist, tracing steam lines and checking seals while the shift hands watched. The number nine’s problem wasn’t the firebox—it was a cracked feedwater heater, a subtle failure that had the crew chasing ghosts. Jack patched it with a sheet of copper shim and a prayer, and when he fired the engine up, the exhaust came out in a steady, healthy rhythm.

Hobbs watched the steam gauge climb, then nodded once. “You’re hired. Twenty-eight shillings a week, and you bunk in the shed’s back room. You start tomorrow. Don’t be late, Mullins.”

Jack didn’t let himself breathe until he was out of the yard, walking the muddy main street of Crofton with its rows of brick shops and soot-stained windows. A guilt he’d buried all morning swelled in his chest. Elias’s name. Elias’s clean record. His brother had been a good man, a printer’s apprentice with a gentle hand and a dream of owning his own press. He’d never wronged anyone.

Jack was about to pay for that.

He found a cheap boarding house on the edge of town, paid for a week in advance out of his thinning coin purse, and collapsed onto a straw mattress that smelled of hay and old sweat. For the first time in weeks, his eyes closed without the weight of a wanted man pressing on them.

He’d been at the yard for six days when the constable came.

Hobbs’s office was a cramped room off the main shed, but it had a window that looked out over the turntable, and Jack was standing at that window, wiping his hands on an oily rag, when the man walked in. He was tall, thin-faced, with a star pinned to his coat and a hand resting on his hip.

“Elias Mullins?” the constable said.

“No—I mean, yes.” Jack’s blood went cold. “That’s me.”

“You’ll come with me.”

“What for?”

The constable’s hand tightened on his hip. “Fraud. You’re wanted for a scheme out of Preston, three years back. A man fitting your description took deposits from twelve families for a railway excursion that never left the station.”

Jack’s mind raced. Preston. He’d never been to Preston. But Elias had, briefly, before the fever took him. And someone had used his name.

“That’s a mistake,” Jack said, stepping back. “I’ve never—I haven’t been to Preston in my life.”

The constable pulled a folded paper from his coat. “This is a warrant. Your name’s on it. You can sort it out at the courthouse.” He nodded toward the door. “Walk easy and we’ll make it quick.”

Jack saw the arithmetic in that instant. Even if he proved his innocence—and he had no proof, nothing but Elias’s grave and a grief he couldn’t show—the delay would crush him. The yard would hear. Hobbs would fire him. The story would spread, because bad news always did, and then someone would match the name to the face, and the real wanted poster would surface.

The constable reached for Jack’s arm. Jack didn’t think. He moved.

His body had carried him through factory fights and engine fires, through the day Whitfield’s sabotage fell a bridge and he’d run to the widow Oates’s door with blood on his hands. He knew how to move when staying still meant dying. He ducked low beneath the constable’s reach, swept a leg through the man’s footing, and sent him crashing into Hobbs’s desk in a clatter of papers and ink.

Then he was out the door and running.

He didn’t run to the town. He ran through it, past the boarding house where his few possessions sat in a canvas bag—the map, the locket, the remaining unopened papers from the strongbox. He couldn’t go back. The constable would have help by now, would be sweeping the streets, waiting for him to return to his belongings like a trout to its feeding spot.

He ran out of town instead, along the railway tracks that led west. The going was rough—ballast stones slipping under his boots, sleepers catching at his heels—but the tracks were his territory. He knew the rhythm of a railway, the way the terrain graded and the curves bent. He could feel the slight vibrations through his soles, the distant hum of an approaching train.

Behind him, a whistle sounded. Not the train—the constable’s call.

Jack veered off the tracks and into a dense copse of birch, dropping to a crawl through the undergrowth. He lay there for what felt like an hour as the sounds of pursuit grew, faded, grew again. Shouts in the distance. A dog barking. Then silence.

When he finally dared to move, the sun was low and his limbs were cramped. He forced his way to a shallow stream, washed the sweat and grime from his face, and tried to think.

His brother’s name was spoiled. His own name was worse. He had no money left, no job, no tools, nothing but the clothes on his back and a dead man’s legacy he couldn’t even show to anyone without risking everything.

The map was still in the boarding house. His father’s survey. Ashworth’s stolen plans.

He’d have to go back. He’d have to risk it.

As he pushed himself up, his fingers brushed against a new vibration running through the ground. Not the stream’s gentle current. Something deeper, heavier. A train.

He climbed out of the stream bed and saw it: a slow goods train crawling along a siding line a hundred yards off, the same line he’d been following. It was moving hard and west, toward Manchester. Toward Stoketon Valley.

Jack’s breath quickened. He had no money, no name, no papers. But he had his hands, and he had the memory of every line on his father’s map burned into his brain.

He jogged toward the train, keeping low, timing his steps. The brake van at the rear was open, swinging its heavy door on rusted hinges. A small fortune in coal briquettes inside, no human guard.

He took the name Elias Mullins—he had nothing of Elias’s left except that—and buried it deep in his throat. He’d find the road to Stoketon and find whatever else was lurking there, and when he did, every man who’d wronged his father, killed Oates, and blacklisted him would bleed for it.

The train’s brakes hissed. Jack seized the ladder, pulled himself up, and swung into the dark belly of the car.

The iron sun was setting over the rails. The ride west was just beginning.