When the brakes sighed and the doors opened onto the unfamiliar platform, they stepped off together. Two women travelling alone. Carrying different ghosts. Headed, for one night, in the same direction.

Jia turned from the window. For the first time in weeks, she looked another woman in the eyes without performing. Without choreographing her expression. “And what’s your story?”

Vixen smiled. It was a small, dangerous curve of the mouth. “The world doesn’t go backwards. Only we do. Trying to outrun a version of yourself you left in a different time zone?”

She’d told herself this trip was about “finding material.” A dancer’s sabbatical. But the truth was simpler and sharper: she needed to be a stranger. In Prague, in Budapest, in the tiny, unpronounceable town whose name she’d booked on a whim, no one knew her stage name. No one expected the arch of her back or the practiced softness of her gaze. Here, she was just a girl with a heavy suitcase and a passport full of empty pages.