Read Chapter 12: The Turn at 2:17

The train swayed through the darkness south of Lyon, and Camille felt the cold before she saw him. A drop in temperature that crept along her skin like a warning. She turned from the corridor window, and there he was—Julian, standing at the end of the passenger car, silhouetted against the dim emergency lights.

But something was wrong.

His edges were soft. Not the crisp, almost-solid form he'd worn in their last encounters, when she could nearly count the stitches in his 1950s jacket. Now his shoulders rippled like heat haze, and when he raised his hand to beckon her, she could see the luggage rack through his palm.

"Julian." She moved toward him, heart hammering. "You're—"

"Fading." His voice came thin, like static through a bad radio. "Time is running out."

She stopped three feet from him, close enough to see the worry carved into his ghostly features. "Running out for what?"

"For the truth." His eyes found hers, and for a moment he sharpened, the way a photograph does when it comes into focus. "I've been trying to tell you. Your great-grandfather was not the killer."

The words landed like a physical blow. Camille's breath caught. "What? But the vision—I saw him watching while Pierre cut the brake line. I saw him pay Aubert to bury the records—"

"You saw what Pierre wanted you to see. What Henri allowed you to see." Julian's form flickered, and for a horrible second she could see through his chest to the empty seats beyond. "Henri was protecting someone. Not Pierre."

"Then who?"

He opened his mouth, but no sound came. His throat worked, straining, and she watched his lips form a word she couldn't hear. The train hit a junction, and the car lurched—Julian flickered violently, his body losing cohesion like smoke caught in a draft.

"Wait—" Camille reached for him, her fingers passing through his arm with a sensation like plunging them into ice water. "Don't fade. Tell me who."

He looked at her wrist. At the watch. Her grandfather's watch, the one that had started this whole nightmare, still strapped where she'd worn it every shift for two years.

"The watch," he said, and his voice was nearly gone now, the words shredding in the air. "Turn it back. It's not the past you think it is."

"What do you mean?"

"2:17." His hand lifted, transparent fingers pointing at the watch face. "The crash happened at 2:17. The watch stopped at 2:17. But look—look at it now."

Camille obeyed, confusion making her clumsy. The watch had been frozen at the same moment for decades, its second hand welded in place by whatever catastrophe had claimed its original owner. She'd checked it a hundred times over the past weeks, running her thumb across the cracked crystal, willing it to reveal something new.

Now the second hand twitched.

A single, infinitesimal movement—a shudder, like a muscle remembering how to flex. Then another.

"Time is restarting," Julian said, and his voice came from everywhere and nowhere, surrounding her. "In 1955. The moment of the crash is not what you think. Henri didn't order it. He covered it up because he was protecting the family—but the family he was protecting wasn't his."

Camille stared at the watch. The second hand was moving now, a slow, jerky circle, climbing past what would be 2:18. Past the moment of death. Into a time that should have been impossible.

"Then who was on that train?" she whispered. "Who was Pierre really working for?"

Julian's form was dissolving, his features smearing like watercolors in rain. But his eyes held hers with terrible intensity, and his mouth shaped one final word before he vanished completely, leaving only cold air and the faint smell of coal smoke.

"Moreau."

The watch was warm against her wrist now, radiating heat like a stone left in the sun. Camille looked down at it, watched the second hand sweep past 2:21, 2:22, each tick a small impossibility. The train rocketed through the French countryside, passengers sleeping in their cabins, oblivious.

Moreau.

The family name from the ledger. The family whose lawyer was drowned in the Seine. The family Pierre had targeted—or the family Pierre had served.

Camille touched the crystal. It burned her fingertip, and she pulled back with a hiss. The second hand stopped.

2:23.

Then it moved again, and she understood. Whatever Julian had done—whatever the watch was now doing—she had a window. Time was running, and if she didn't find the truth before it stopped again, it might never move at all.

She turned and ran down the corridor toward the service door, the watch ticking against her wrist like a second heart.