Read Chapter 24: Midnight Showdown

The train lurched, and Camille’s hand was already inside her coat pocket, fingers closing around the cold brass of the watch. The full moon was three hours out, and the countdown had become a tremor against her palm, a pulse that would not slow.

Julian was standing at the far end of the carriage.

He had never appeared like this before—no gentle flicker of lamplight, no soft approach. He was simply there, solid as the velvet seats, his coat dark with rain that did not exist. And his face was not the face she knew. The softness was gone, replaced by something carved and sharp. His jaw was set. His eyes—those grey eyes that had looked at her across a century with wonder—were flat, hard as river stones.

“Julian,” she said, stepping toward him.

He did not move. The train swayed; he did not.

“You found the watch,” he said. His voice was different too. It scraped, like metal on metal.

“I didn’t—” she began.

“Don’t lie to me.” He took a step forward, and for the first time, she saw the anger move through him, a current beneath his skin. “You found it, and you’ve been wearing it down. I can feel it. Every second you carry it, I get thinner. You’re pulling me apart, Camille.”

Her breath caught. “No. It’s a spirit clock. It’s supposed to help you. I talked to a woman who knew about it—Élodie—she said it could rewind time.”

“Rewind time,” Julian repeated, and the words came out wrong, stretched, like he was speaking through water. “You mean erase me. You think if you go back far enough, I won’t have died. I won’t have met you. I won’t exist in your memory at all.”

The train entered a tunnel. The lights flickered. For an instant, Julian’s face was striped with shadow, and he looked older, like the photograph in the archive—the one taken days before the derailment.

“That’s not what I want,” Camille said. “I want to save you.”

“You want to save yourself.” His voice cracked. “You want to wake up and not carry this. You want to be the girl who never found my letter, never walked the track bed, never heard my name on the night wind. You want to be innocent.”

She shook her head, but her throat was tightening. The watch in her pocket was hot now. Burning.

“Give it to me.” Julian held out his hand.

She stepped back. “I can’t.”

“You can’t, or you won’t?” He advanced. The air around him was cold, impossibly cold, and she could see her own breath for the first time since summer. “You think you’re the first Laurent to hold that watch? Your great-grandfather built it. Your grandmother wore it. Your aunt—Marguerite—she keeps it in a drawer, afraid of what it can do. And you, you think you can be different.”

“You don’t know me,” Camille said.

“I know you better than you know yourself. I’ve watched you for months. I’ve seen you carry guilt like a second spine. You want to change the past because you can’t forgive yourself for the present.”

His fingers closed around her wrist. She felt the cold lance through her skin, up her arm, into her chest. The watch slipped from her pocket.

It fell.

The sound it made was small—a soft clatter on the carriage floor—but the silence that followed was vast. Julian released her. They both stared at the watch lying on the worn wood, its face gleaming, its second hand frozen.

The train braked.

Camille stumbled, grabbed a seat back. Julian did not move. The lights went out.

When they came back, the carriage was empty. No—not empty. The seats were different. The upholstery was older, the brass fittings dull. Outside the window, the landscape had changed. Gone was the modern blur of highways and power lines. Instead, the train was crossing a stone viaduct, and below it, the valley was dark, unlit, raw.

A train was coming toward them.

Camille pressed her face to the glass. It was the midnight train—the *real* midnight train, the one from 1955. She could see the steam, the glowing windows, the faces pressed against the glass in laughter and sleep. It was crossing the same track. Heading toward the same break in the rails.

She looked down. The watch was gone.

Julian stood beside her now, quiet, no longer angry. He looked at the approaching train, then at her. “You can still stop it,” he said. “But you know what it costs.”

Camille’s hand was flat against the cold window. She felt the minutes draining out of her—not just the countdown, but the memory of Julian’s laugh, the feel of his hand in hers on the platform at Gare de Lyon, the way he said her name, *Camille*, like it was a song he’d been waiting a century to sing.

She had to decide.

The 1955 train was close now. She could see the engineer in the cab, his face lit by a coal lamp, unaware. And she could see, impossible and bright, her own reflection in the glass—and behind it, the ghost of a man she loved, fading like frost at dawn.