Eleanor Reed had lived in a small, modest apartment above a milliner’s shop, tucked between two taller buildings on a street where gas lamps burned low to save fuel. It wasn’t a place of significance, just another corner of the city where people went about their lives unnoticed.


    The owner of the shop—a Mrs. Langley, a woman in her sixties with sharp eyes and a mouth permanently set in disapproval—answered the door when I knocked. She looked me up and down, taking in the dark coat, the gloves, the weariness that clung to Undertakers like a second skin.


    “She’s gone, then,” she said, voice clipped.


    “She is.”


    She exhaled through her nose, not surprised, not grief-stricken. Just resigned. “Well, I suppose someone has to take her things. I already gave everything to the runners. She didn’t have much.”


    “I’m not here for that,” I said, watching her carefully. “I need to ask you some questions.”


    She frowned but stepped aside. “Make it quick. I don’t like talking about the dead.”


    I stepped inside. The air smelled of dust and old fabric, the lingering traces of perfume clinging to the wooden staircase. I followed Mrs. Langley up to the small flat Eleanor had rented, a cramped space with a narrow bed, a writing desk, and a wardrobe that had seen better days.


    I glanced around. No photographs. No personal decorations. Just the bare essentials of a life. Nothing to suggest that Eleanor Reed had ever truly lived here.


    I could relate. My own home was not much more than a place to sleep and write.


    “You knew her well?” I asked.


    Mrs. Langley scoffed. “No one knew her well.”


    I turned my head slightly. “What do you mean?”


    She sniffed, folding her arms. “She kept to herself. Paid rent on time, never caused trouble. But she was... odd.”


    “Odd how?”


    The older woman hesitated, as if choosing her words carefully. “She was two people, depending on the day.”


    I stiffened. “Go on.”


    “Some nights, she’d come home quiet as a ghost. Wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. Other nights, she’d swagger in like she owned the damn place—smirking, tipping an imaginary hat at me, talking like she’d just stepped out of a bar fight.”


    I stayed very still. “You ever see her with anyone?”


    She shook her head. “Never brought anyone home. But she had places she went. Never told me where.”


    “Did she ever mention the name Nathaniel Kade?”


    Mrs. Langley’s expression darkened.


    “She never said it to me. But I heard it. Once.”


    I waited.


    “She was talking to herself,” she murmured, more to herself than to me. “Not mumbling. Not dreaming. Talking. Like there was someone else in the room.” A pause. “It was in the middle of the night. I could hear her through the walls. Arguing with that name.” Her voice hardened. “So no, sir, I didn’t know her. And I don’t care to know anything more about it.”


    I ignored her tone, letting the silence stretch. It took her only a moment to fill it, words slipping past her lips as though they’d been bottled up too long, now desperate to escape.


    “That girl was troubled. Not in a natural way. She had a... a wrongness about her.” Mrs. Langley shuddered. “As if she weren’t right in her own skin. Or as if her skin weren’t right for her. You think she was possessed.”


    She stared at me, and I returned her gaze without blinking.


    I’d expected gossip. Ignorance. Maybe even some empathy for the poor, strange girl who’d rented her rooms.


    Not this. Not fear. Not accusation.You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    Mrs. Langley’s eyes burned with it.


    “She wasn’t,” I said quietly. “But I know what you mean.”


    I exhaled slowly.


    Not an act. Not a disguise.


    A mind at war with itself.


    I turned toward the wardrobe and pulled the doors open. Inside, I found only women’s clothing, pressed and neatly folded. Coats, skirts, blouses. No trace of Nathaniel Kade.


    Except—


    A small, locked drawer near the bottom.


    I glanced at Mrs. Langley.


    She sighed. “You might as well. Not like she’s coming back for it.”


    I knelt, pulled a thin wire from my pocket, and jimmied the lock. It clicked open with barely any effort.


    Inside the drawer, beneath old papers and a dried-out inkwell, I found a single crumpled scrap of parchment.


    I smoothed it out against the floor, my pulse steady, controlled.


    It was a letter.


    Handwritten.


    Short.


    <blockquote>


    “I can’t do this much longer. The lines are blurring. I don’t know where I end and she begins. If something happens to me, please—let me be remembered for who I was. Not for who they think I am.”


    </blockquote>


    There was no signature.


    Just a single initial.


    N.


    <hr>


    I left the apartment without saying much else. Mrs. Langley didn’t press me. We both knew that some doors were best left unopened. I didn’t blame her. Some people preferred their dead to stay silent, their pasts neatly sealed like a book snapped shut.


    But this wasn’t a story that wanted to stay closed.


    The day was fading, shadows lengthening. Above, a crow cawed, wings beating against the darkening sky.


    I kept walking.


    I needed to think. To process what I’d seen, what I’d learned. What I thought I’d heard.


    The air outside was cool—a light rain starting to fall. I pulled my coat tighter around me and stepped out into the street. The letter burned in my pocket, a scrap of paper that spoke of a life lived between two selves.


    A mind at war with itself. Or a soul determined to express itself even through the limitation of its flesh.


    The idea had been written about before, both in medical texts and in the annals of the Library. Mental instability wasn’t uncommon, and neither were the various ways that a soul could fracture under stress or injury. Some fractured by circumstance, becoming hollow imitations of the person they had once been. Others were broken so thoroughly that no single identity could contain them. Minds splintering, dividing against themselves.


    One of the older Undertaker texts had a name for those cases: Dissociative Identity Disorder. A soul fractured, in two or more parts, warring against itself.


    Had that happened to Eleanor Reed? Was this second identity—the one called Nathaniel Kade—a product of a broken mind?


    Maybe.


    It would explain a lot.


    The different handwriting in the book. The disjointed memories, the changes in tone. Maybe even the desperation with which that letter had been written.


    But it didn’t explain everything.


    I walked down the street, letting my feet carry me away from the main thoroughfares.


    The gas lamps flickered along the street, casting long, wavering shadows as I walked. The city hummed with its usual nighttime rhythm—distant carriage wheels rattling over cobblestone, the occasional echo of laughter from a tavern doorway, the muffled strain of a violin filtering through a second-story window. Life moved on. It always did.


    But Eleanor Reed had left something unfinished.


    I needed more than fragmented memories from a landlady and a scrap of parchment soaked in regret. If Nathaniel Kade had been more than just a passing thought in a troubled mind, there had to be something else—somewhere they had gone, someone who had met them, even if they never realized who they truly were.


    The library had texts about multiple personalities, but they focused on the symptoms, the effects on the living mind. None had dealt with the concept of a second persona finding a way to express themselves in defiance of the primary identity. And none of them had dealt with books that spoke back.


    None had described multiple identities fighting through Transcription to create a book that wasn’t their own—at least none from this city’s Library.


    Maybe elsewhere.


    But I had neither the time nor the connections to reach out to Libraries in other cities. My counterparts were too far away to be of any use, and the couriers between cities were slow, unreliable, and often dangerous.


    I passed by a newspaper stand, the headlines proclaiming another factory accident that had taken the lives of seventeen men. The article went on about the dangers of steam technology, the inherent instability of the machines, the risk that workers took by working in such environments. It quoted the manager as being “shocked” at the event, and promising to take steps to make sure nothing like it ever happened again.


    A familiar line. One I’d heard too many times before.


    These days, it seemed like everything was built to fail. Like we were all just one accident away from disaster.


    The streets grew darker as I went further into the older parts of the city, where gas lights were few and far between. Here, most of the buildings were old, crumbling at the edges, worn down by time and neglect. Many had been abandoned, their windows boarded up, their doors barred. Those that remained had the look of places that had seen too much and remembered too little.


    This was a part of town where no one bothered to remember what happened, because remembering meant acknowledging that something had gone wrong. And that was not a comfortable truth.