"I have no past, no parents, and no name for what I am...
In a world of all ordinary humans, my secret is etched into my very shoulder blades."
The rain hadn't stopped for two days straight. It turned the city's edges to mirrors and washed the colour from the streets until everything looked like wet glass and smoke.
Rahma Noor sat at the small table in her flat in Hackney, the kind of rented space where the heating worked when it wanted to and the windows hummed with draught. Her laptop's glow lit her face pale blue. She stared at the message for the twelfth time, trying to decide whether to believe it.
No subject. No sender. No signature. Just one line:
If you want the truth about DUSK, meet me. Waterloo Station. 9 p.m. Don't tell anyone.
Below it, an attached image — blurry, compressed, official-looking. A government seal, half visible through static.
Rahma leaned back in her chair. Her pulse tapped against her throat.
DUSK.
She hadn't heard that name since the investigation five years ago — the one that ruined her career. Back then, "Project DUSK" had been a rumour whispered through closed newsroom doors. She'd chased it for six months and lost everything to it: her job, her reputation, the trust of people who used to quote her byline with respect.
She opened the image again, magnifying it. The seal read Ministry of Energy and Environmental Oversight.
Her cursor hovered over the delete button. She could forget this. Pretend she never saw it. Write her article about food price inflation like she'd promised and send it in before the midnight deadline.
But curiosity had its own pulse.
She reached for her mug — cold coffee, half-empty — and stared out the window. Down below, the city moved like a restless animal. A siren somewhere near Mare Street. A bus sighing to a stop. The orange glint of wet pavement.
You're not chasing ghosts anymore, she told herself. You learned your lesson.
Still, she clicked "Reply."
Who are you?
She hesitated, then added:
What's DUSK?
The message bounced back instantly — undeliverable. No such address.
Her stomach tightened. She checked the time. 8:04 p.m.
Waterloo Station was twenty minutes by Tube if the Jubilee Line was running on time.
She stared at the clock. Then the message. Then the rain.
Her decision was made before she realised she'd stood up.
Rahma pulled on her long black coat — the one with a missing button at the collar — and looped a scarf twice round her neck. She slipped her recorder into one pocket, her notebook into another. Her phone buzzed on the table: a message from her editor, David Kaur.
Need a copy for tomorrow. Keep it light — no politics. Deadline 11:59.
She ignored it. Locked the door.
The hallway smelled of damp plaster and cheap detergent. On the stairs, she passed Mrs. Keene from 3B dragging her rubbish bag, muttering about the council. Outside, the rain hit her face like needles.
By the time she reached Waterloo, the city had swallowed the last of daylight. The station was a cathedral of movement — trains hissing, people shouting, shoes slapping against the floor.
She stood near the clock tower, scanning faces. Specter, whoever they were, could be anyone.
A man in a suit checked his watch and frowned. A cleaner pushed a yellow mop bucket across the tiles. Two teenagers laughed, their reflection caught in the glass storefronts.
Rahma kept moving, pretending to browse the magazine stand. Her notebook stayed tucked under her arm.
At 9:07, her phone buzzed — unknown number.
Under the bench. North platform.
Her chest tightened. She started walking, steady, deliberate.
The north platform was quieter — fewer passengers, just the echo of distant footsteps. A train wailed somewhere down the tunnel.
She found the bench — scratched wood, empty except for a discarded newspaper. She crouched, pretending to tie her shoelace, and ran her fingers underneath.
There. Taped to the underside: a small brown envelope.
She peeled it off carefully, heart hammering. Inside, a folded piece of paper and a memory card.
On the paper, printed in neat black font:
You're late.
Rahma's gaze snapped up. The platform stretched empty. A man in a grey coat waited near the far end, head bowed. When she looked again, he was gone.
A shiver crawled up her spine.
She slipped the memory card into her pocket and turned back toward the main concourse — just as a scream sliced through the air.
She ran.
A crowd had gathered near the edge of the south platform. People shouted, pointed. A woman sobbed into her hands.
Two paramedics fought their way through the crowd. Someone shouted, "He jumped!" Another said, "No, he was pushed!"
Rahma forced herself to look.
The man's body was twisted on the tracks, soaked and pale. His face was almost unrecognisable, but the coat — long, grey, heavy — she'd seen it in the blurred reflection of the café window hours earlier.
Specter.
Her throat went dry. She reached for her phone, fingers trembling, snapping a photo before security pushed everyone back.
A uniformed officer shouted for witnesses to clear the area. The crowd began to scatter.
Rahma stumbled towards the exit, the memory card burning against her thigh through the fabric of her pocket.
Outside, she stood under the station's overhang, trying to breathe. The rain had turned the air sharp. She looked down at her phone. The photo she'd taken was blurred, barely usable — but she could see part of his face.
Whoever Specter was, he'd known she would come.
And he'd died anyway.
A black car crawled past the kerb. Inside, she caught a glimpse of someone watching — a face shadowed by the reflection of the streetlights.
The car paused, then pulled away into traffic.
Rahma tightened her grip on the envelope.
She had the only piece of evidence left.
And someone already knew.
She didn't go home. Instead, she took the Tube to Southwark and found herself in a twenty-four-hour café, the kind that smelled of burnt toast and tired stories. She ordered tea and sat in the corner booth, coat dripping, fingers still cold.
The memory card sat on the table like a live thing. She hesitated before sliding it into her laptop.
The folder was encrypted. Of course it was. Files labelled "DUSK_1," "DUSK_2," and one labelled simply "Y.N."
Her heart tripped over itself. Yusuf Noor. Her father.
She opened it — but the screen went black. Then flashed.
A new message appeared.
You weren't supposed to find this alone.
Rahma's breath caught.
Then — the screen flickered again, and went dark.
Smoke — faint, electrical — curled from the laptop's hinge.
The hard drive was fried.
Her reflection stared back at her from the black screen — wide eyes, trembling mouth, the faintest trace of fear she hadn't felt in years.
She shut the laptop and looked around the café. A man near the door pretended to scroll through his phone. The waitress at the counter kept glancing her way.
Every instinct in her body screamed run.
But Rahma Noor didn't run.
She took out her notebook, wrote down every detail she remembered — the message, the envelope, the file names, the body. Then she tore out the page and slipped it into her coat pocket.
Whatever DUSK was, it had already cost one man his life.
And now, it was watching her.
The rain had thinned to a fine mist by the time Rahma stepped back onto the street. Southwark after midnight was a different creature — the pubs emptied, pavements slick with reflection, the Thames breathing cold air between the buildings. She zipped her coat and kept moving, one hand clamped over the pocket with the envelope.
Her mind replayed the last two hours in brutal detail. The email. The platform. The body. The fried laptop. It didn't add up; none of it ever did when someone wanted a journalist quiet.
At the corner, a bus rumbled past. Its headlights caught a man leaning against a phone box, cigarette glowing. He looked up as she crossed the road. For a second their eyes met. Then he turned away, dropping the cigarette into a puddle.
Rahma didn't look back.
She cut down an alley lined with locked shutter doors. Somewhere a radio murmured behind a wall, the faint rhythm of an old song. Her flat was miles east; she couldn't risk going there. Whoever torched her drive could torch her building next.
A sign ahead flickered: "THE LOCK & KEY – OPEN LATE." She ducked inside.
The pub was nearly empty — one bartender polishing glasses, two men half-asleep at a corner table. She ordered black coffee, the closest thing they could manage, and sat near the window.
Her phone vibrated. Unknown Number.
You should stop digging.
She froze. Three seconds later, another message.
Or you'll end up like him.
Rahma's thumb hovered over the keypad. She typed Who is this? and hit send. The message failed to deliver.
The bartender approached with the coffee, gave her a curious glance, then drifted away. She stared into the cup, watching the surface tremble from the bass of the jukebox.
This was the part of the job no one warned you about — the silence after the noise. The moment when fear became a shape in the room.
She took a sip. Bitter. Too hot.
Think.
Who could have known she'd gone to the café? Only the sender. Only Specter — and he was dead.
Unless someone else had been reading his messages.
She opened her notebook and began a timeline.
Email received — 19:42.
Arrived at Waterloo — 20:56.
Message under bench — 21:07.
Death on tracks — approx. 21:10.
File opened — 22:37.
System fried — 22:39.
Every event followed contact with the data. Whoever orchestrated this had been tracking digital movement in real-time. That meant access — government-level, or corporate with clearance.
She underlined one word: DUSK.
The letters looked heavy on the page, like they didn't belong in ink.
The door opened behind her. Cold air spilled in, carrying the smell of the river. She glanced up — just a delivery driver collecting crates. Still, her body didn't relax until the door shut again.
Her mind flicked to her father. Yusuf Noor had been an engineer for the Ministry of Energy until his death twelve years ago — a car accident on the M25. Or that's what the report said. She'd been twenty-two, still at university, still believing official statements.
But the file name Y.N. on Specter's card — that couldn't be coincidence.
She pulled out her phone and opened the notes app. "Dad accident records — cross-check 2013–2014 Ministry contracts." She'd start there.
She drained the coffee, left a few coins, and walked back into the night.
The streets had emptied completely. Her reflection followed in every dark shop window — a tall woman in a drenched coat, eyes sharp with exhaustion. London buzzed faintly in the distance; sirens stitched through the rain.
She reached the riverfront. The Thames shifted like black oil beneath the bridges. Across the water, the lights of the Ministry of Energy glowed pale yellow.
If DUSK was real, she thought, it started in that building.
She stood there until her phone battery hit ten percent. Then she turned east, heading toward a cheap hostel she'd used once during an assignment. It wasn't safe, but nowhere was.
She checked in under a false name — Sara Omar — paid cash, and climbed to a third-floor room that smelled of bleach and rust.
The single window overlooked a car park. She locked it, then wedged a chair under the door handle.
Only then did she let herself breathe.
She opened the envelope again. Apart from the card, there was something she'd missed earlier — a tiny scrap of paper stuck to the inner seam.
Printed in typewriter font:
If I don't make it — look for the river cameras.
Her pulse quickened. Waterloo had CCTV everywhere. But river cameras were controlled by the Port Authority. Accessing them would take credentials — or someone inside.
She closed her eyes. Faces flashed in her memory: old colleagues, contacts, editors. People who owed her favours — or grudges.
There was one name she didn't want to think about. David Kaur.
Her editor still had press-level clearance from his time covering defence. He'd told her to stay away from DUSK once before. Maybe he knew why.
Rahma lay back on the bed, shoes still on, staring at the ceiling stains. The sound of water dripped through the pipes, steady as a heartbeat.
She didn't sleep, not really. Just drifted in and out, replaying the same thought until dawn bruised the edge of the curtains.
Someone had killed a man at Waterloo. Someone had fried her computer. Someone knew her father's name.
And she'd already promised herself she wasn't chasing ghosts.
By 6:14 a.m., Rahma gave up pretending to rest. The city outside was still grey, the kind of London morning where the horizon looked bruised. She splashed cold water on her face in the tiny sink, tightened her hijab, and pulled her coat back on.
Her phone had barely 4% battery left — one more reason not to stay here. She switched it off entirely and pocketed it.
As she stepped out, the receptionist barely looked up from his newspaper. The smell of yesterday's fried food clung to the hallway. Outside, the air was sharp, almost metallic, and traffic was starting to swell on the main road.
Rahma headed north on foot. The city was shifting awake: cyclists weaving between buses, commuters with coffee cups, schoolchildren dragging backpacks twice their size. Ordinary life. She felt like a ghost drifting through it.
Her mind kept circling back to the scrap of paper: look for the river cameras.
If Specter had known he might die, he'd chosen those words deliberately. That meant the killer had come from the river side of the station. Rahma replayed the moment he fell — or was pushed. The timing had been too perfect. Too quiet.
She needed access to the feed.
She needed David.
His office sat on the sixth floor of a converted warehouse near Shoreditch — glass walls, steel beams, and a coffee machine more expensive than her flat. By the time she reached the building, she'd mapped every possible way the conversation could go.
Most ended badly.
The security guard recognised her, buzzed her through, and she rode the lift up, her heartbeat ticking faster with each floor.
When the doors slid open, she saw David through the glass wall of his office — in shirtsleeves, hair messy, pacing as he spoke to someone on the phone. He turned at the sound of her knock. His expression flickered — surprise, then concern, then the steely editor she knew too well.
He hung up. "You look like hell."
"Thanks," she said, stepping inside.
"Sit."
"I'm fine standing."
He frowned. "What happened?"
She told him everything. Not the fear. Not the room that smelled like bleach and rust. Just the facts — the email, the man on the platform, the encrypted file, the warnings, the destroyed laptop.
The more she spoke, the deeper the lines carved across David's forehead. When she finished, he rubbed his jaw slowly.
"You should walk away."
Rahma expected anger. Pushback. Not this. "You know I won't."
"I'm not asking," he said. "I'm telling you. Whatever Specter was into… it wasn't journalism anymore. It was suicide."
"And you know something," she said quietly.
His eyes froze on hers.
"You knew DUSK was real."
David shut the door before answering. "Rahma… listen to me carefully. DUSK was a prototype program — conceptual, not operational. Years ago. It never left committee stage."
She shook her head. "Then why did someone kill a man for it last night?"
He hesitated. It was small, but it was enough.
Rahma stepped closer. "I need access to river CCTV."
He let out a sharp breath. "Do you have any idea what you're asking? That's Port Authority data. You can't just—"
"I need it," she cut in. "A man is dead. Someone tried to fry my system. And Specter left me a message pointing straight to the Thames."
David dragged a hand through his hair. "If I request access, it creates a footprint. If someone is watching this case — and clearly someone is — they'll see it."
"They probably already know I'm here," she said.
"Exactly."
Rahma's pulse thudded. "So help me before they get ahead."
He stared at her for a long moment. Then he walked to his desk, opened his laptop, and typed something. The screen glowed pale against his tired face.
"I can get you a thirty-minute window," he said finally. "Read-only. No downloads. You view it, that's it."
Relief washed through her, but she didn't let it show. "When?"
"In ten minutes. Room B." He nodded to a small glass editing bay down the hall. "Use the machine inside. It's secure."
She turned to go, but his voice stopped her.
"Rahma?"
"Yes?"
"Whatever you find… don't come back here with it."
She didn't answer.
Room B was cold enough to see her breath. A single monitor. No external ports. No personal devices allowed. David entered a code on the panel beside the door, then left without another word.
The screen flickered, then a login window appeared. Rahma typed the temporary credentials he'd scribbled on a sticky note.
Timestamps. Camera grids. Thames-side feeds, most pointed at the water or the pedestrian walkways.
She located the one closest to Waterloo Station. At first, all she saw was dark water and the blur of distant headlights. She dragged the timeline back to last night — 21:07. The moment before Specter fell.
A grainy view loaded: commuters moving across the bridge, raindrops streaking the lens.
She scrubbed forward.
21:09:42 — A figure stepped into frame.
Rahma leaned closer. The hood obscured the face, but the build was unmistakable — tall, broad, deliberate. The figure wasn't walking like a commuter. He was tracking something.
Tracking Specter.
The hooded figure paused at the rail, looking down the steps that led to the platform entrance. A second figure passed behind him — thin, nervous, glancing over their shoulder.
She recognised the second one instantly — Specter.
Her breath caught.
The hooded man waited until Specter was nearly out of sight. Then he reached into his coat.
Rahma's stomach knotted.
21:10:03 — a spark of light reflected briefly off something metallic in his hand.
A device? A phone? A detonator?
Then the feed glitched — just for half a second — and the man was gone from the frame.
Rahma rewound it, slower.
The glitch happened at the exact moment Specter reached the bottom of the steps.
Exactly when he fell.
She pressed closer to the screen, heart going hard in her chest. "Come on," she whispered. "Give me something. Give me a face."
She advanced one frame at a time.
The glitch broke into pixelated blocks — green, black, grey. Data corruption. No, not corruption. Interference. Forced.
Someone had deliberately scrambled the feed at the most critical moment.
Her palms grew cold. She checked for parallel camera angles — another feed that might have captured the same moment. She pulled up a cross-angle near the pier.
A single frame showed the hooded figure turning away, heading west along the river.
For that fraction of a second, his profile was visible. Sharp jawline. Beard. A thin scar across his cheek.
Rahma froze the frame. Her breath left her.
She knew that face. She'd seen it before — not in person, but in a photograph buried deep in her father's old files. Her chest tightened. The image was warped, low-resolution, but the resemblance was there.
Impossible.
Her father had worked with a man who looked exactly like this — years ago, before his accident.
Her throat went dry.
Suddenly the door to Room B clicked.
Rahma spun around.
The handle turned slowly — not the hurried twist of someone barging in, but the cautious, deliberate movement of someone who didn't want to be heard.
Rahma's pulse thudded in her ears. She dropped into a half-crouch beside the desk, eyes fixed on the door. The room had no other exits. No windows wide enough to climb through. If someone wanted her cornered, they had chosen the perfect trap.
The door opened an inch. No voice. No silhouette. Just the soft creak of hinges.
Rahma scanned the room for anything she could use as a weapon. A metal chair. A heavy stapler. A power cable. Her fingers curled around the cable — not ideal, but it was something.
The door inched open another few centimetres.
"Rahma?" a voice whispered.
She exhaled shakily. David.
He slipped inside and locked the door behind him. His face was tight, his breath quick. "We need to go. Now."
"What happened?" she demanded.
"You weren't the only one watching that feed," he said in a low voice. "Someone pinged the system a minute in. They know a foreign login accessed Port Authority data. They're tracing it back."
"To this building?"
"To this room."
Her heart punched once, hard. "Did you wipe the access trail?"
"I tried," he said. "But whoever's on the other side… they're faster."
He crossed the room and glanced at the frozen frame on the monitor — the hooded figure with the scar. His jaw twitched.
"Where did you get this?"
"Specter," she said. "He sent me—"
"I don't want to know," David cut in. "Whatever this is, it's already bigger than you. Bigger than both of us."
"It connects to my father," she said. "This man — I've seen him in my dad's old files."
David's head snapped toward her. "Yusuf? Rahma, don't—"
But before he could finish, the building lights flickered. Once. Twice.
Then the hallway outside went dark.
Emergency generators hummed to life seconds later, but the corridor lights didn't return. Only a faint red glow lit the bottom of the door — the emergency strip.
The power outage wasn't citywide. It was targeted.
Someone was cutting their escape routes.
David swore under his breath. "We're leaving. Now."
He grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the door — then stopped abruptly.
Footsteps echoed from the stairwell. Heavy. Purposeful. Not staff.
Rahma's mouth dried. "Is there another exit?"
"Service lift," he whispered. "But we'll have to cross the hall."
"Then let's go."
He unlocked the door silently. The hallway beyond was a tunnel of shadow, lit only by the red strips along the floor edges. The footsteps were getting closer — coming from the main stairwell, two floors down.
David pointed left. "Service lift is that way."
They slipped out. Rahma kept low, moving fast but silent. Every sound amplified in the stillness — her breath, the faint buzz of the emergency lights, the distant thud of the stairwell door opening.
She and David reached the service lift alcove. David jammed his thumb on the button.
Nothing.
"It's disabled," he whispered. "They've locked the building down."
Of course they had. Whoever tracked the feed was close — too close.
A metallic click echoed from the hallway behind them.
Rahma spun. A silhouette stood at the far end — tall, broad-shouldered, motionless.
Her breath skipped. For a moment, the red corridor lighting cast a faint line across his cheek, exactly where the scar would be.
But when he stepped forward, she saw the face clearly.
Not the man from the CCTV.
Someone younger. Cleaner. Dressed in all black, wearing an earpiece.
Corporate security — but not from this building.
David whispered, "They sent a field team."
The man lifted a hand, palm outward. He wasn't carrying a visible weapon, but he didn't need one. His stance said everything: comply or you won't leave this hallway standing.
Rahma backed up until her shoulder brushed the metal lift door.
"Miss Noor," the man called, voice calm, clipped. British but trained to be neutral. "We need you to come with us."
David moved subtly in front of her. "She's not going anywhere."
The man's gaze didn't shift. "This doesn't concern you, Mr Kaur."
"It concerns me the moment someone tries to drag a member of my staff out of my building."
A pause. The man tilted his head slightly — as if listening to someone in his earpiece.
Then he said, "We're authorised to use force."
Rahma's fingers tightened on the cable in her hand. Her brain raced. Think. Think.
The lift was dead. The stairs were blocked. The corridor offered no cover.
Unless—
She looked up. A ceiling vent. Narrow, but maybe just wide enough for her, not David.
She whispered, "Follow my lead. When I move, stall him."
Before he could argue, she stepped forward into the corridor, hands raised slightly — not in surrender, but in calculated distraction.
The man focused on her. "Good. Don't make this harder—"
She hurled the coiled cable at his face. It wasn't meant to hit him — it was meant to startle.
And it did. His hand rose instinctively to block it.
David lunged forward and shoved a metal cleaning trolley from the alcove straight into the man's legs. The impact was brutal — metal crashing against bone. The man stumbled, slamming into the wall.
Rahma jumped, grabbed the rim of the ceiling vent, and hauled herself up. Pain shot through her arms, but adrenaline carried her. She kicked the vent cover aside and wriggled into the dark shaft.
Below, the man recovered fast. Too fast. He grabbed David by the collar and slammed him against the wall.
Rahma froze, half inside the duct. "David!"
"Go!" he gasped.
"I'm not leaving you—"
"Yes, you bloody are!"
The man drew something from his waistband — a slim black device, not a gun. Stun baton. One hit and David would drop.
Rahma's breath caught.
She twisted fully into the chute, heart hammering, and crawled fast through the narrow metal tunnel as the first electric crackle echoed behind her. David shouted — whether in pain or warning, she couldn't tell.
She kept moving. Metal screeched beneath her palms. The duct narrowed, then split. She chose the left path, crawling blindly.
She didn't stop until light filtered through another vent ahead — the loading bay on the ground floor.
She kicked the panel out, dropped three metres onto stacked cardboard crates, rolled, hit the floor hard, and ran.
Out the loading doors. Into the cold morning air.
Rahma didn't look back.
She didn't have to.
Whoever they were — whatever DUSK truly meant — they had come for her already.
And she had just become a target.