Passport to Nowhere

The driver hammered the bus horn like it owed him money, and the rain hammered Belgrade back with equal spite. Emma hustled across the platform, breath fogging, the straps of her backpack chewing her shoulders. She’d slept through two alarms at the hostel and nearly missed the night bus south. People say traveling solo makes you alert. It also makes you tired.

She collapsed into seat 17, slid her pack under her knees, and watched the neon station recede into a smear. The bus settled into its nocturne: a symphony of snores, squeaks, and the rhythmic hum of tires. Streetlights stitched a golden quilt across the windows. She closed her eyes.

A thump. A weight at her ankles. She blinked. A duffel she didn’t recognize had taken the place of her backpack.

“Excuse me?” she whispered. The aisle was a ribbon of silhouettes, motionless. She pulled the duffel up. The zipper was warm as a pulse.

Inside: a gray hoodie, a phone with the SIM tray ejected, a tiny velvet pouch, and a passport.

Emma’s face stared back from the passport photo. Same smile, same stray hair she never noticed until photographs immortalized it. But the name under it wasn’t hers.

ALINA PETROV. Born in Varna, Bulgaria.

Her real passport—bright blue, scuffed corners—was not in the duffel. Nausea climbed her throat.

She pressed the call button. The steward lumbered over, eyes glazed with the apathy of midnight shifts. “Problem?”

“My bag was switched. At the station maybe. I need to check the luggage hold.”

He shrugged. “Border in one hour. Sit. After border.”

“Border?” She swallowed. “Which one?”

“North Macedonia. They check everything.”

Her heart pounded: a border with a passport that was and wasn’t hers. She turned the passport in her hands. The watermark shimmered. It felt…real.

She opened the velvet pouch. A tiny silver key gleamed like an omen.

The bus lights flickered. Someone coughed behind her. She slipped the passport into her jacket and the key into the coin pocket of her jeans. The phone in the duffel vibrated once, like a hiccup. The screen lit with a single notification, a message preview in Cyrillic she couldn’t read. She turned it face down.

When the bus shuddered to a stop beneath floodlights, everyone woke at once, the way a colony of birds explodes into flight. Officers climbed aboard in navy jackets, shoulders wet with rain. “Passports ready,” one announced in English.

Emma’s lane crept forward. Sleep-squinted faces, stamps thudding like drums. Her turn.

She presented Alina.

The officer scanned the chip, watched his screen, then watched her. “Purpose of travel?”

“Tourism,” she said, voice steady. “Two days.”

His eyes kissed the photo again. “Welcome.”

Her knees softened when he handed it back. On the far side of the checkpoint, the bus inhaled everyone and exhaled relief. They rolled into black countryside where villages were constellations and the road a seam between worlds.

She pulled the phone from the duffel. No passcode. In its photo roll: a selfie at the Belgrade station taken twenty minutes before boarding—her own face, hood up, the same jacket, but the eyes were not hers. They were colder. Calculated.

Another message appeared, in English this time: YOU MADE IT?

She typed: Who is this?

The reply came immediately: YOU’RE FUNNY. LOCKER 52. SKOPJE CENTRAL. KEY AROUND YOUR NECK—OH WAIT. CHECK POCKET.

Emma touched the coin pocket. The silver key.

She typed: What’s in the locker?

Three dots bubbled, then stopped. No reply.

The steward drifted down the aisle offering bottled water. Emma took one with shaking hands. The duffel felt heavier. Locker 52—Skopje—key. She imagined heroin. Cash. A pick-up gone wrong. And the woman who wore her face—why?

She looked up and saw him: a man in a green parka three rows ahead, craned across the aisle to look back at her. Not obvious. Not friendly either. When their eyes met, he straightened and stared at his phone.

Her mind tried to untangle the plot and only knit tighter: someone had switched bags, inserted her into their chain, given her a passport to slip through a border. Why her? Because they’d watched the hostel? Because she was alone? Because she looked like Alina?

The bus slid into Skopje just before dawn, the station a grid of concrete and vending machines. Yellow light made everyone look sick. Passengers trundled off into yawns and cigarettes.

Emma stood. So did the man in the green parka.

She walked. So did he. She turned past a kiosk, then another, found the lockers: a pewter wall of squares, scabbed with stickers. She tried to breathe like a person who did this every day.

Locker 52 was waist-high, its paint scratched by keys and hurry. The silver key slid in as if it had always belonged. The lock turned.

Inside: her own backpack. On top of it, a second velvet pouch and a note.

TAKE YOUR BAG. LEAVE THE PASSPORT. WALK AWAY.

She could feel the man in the parka behind her, hovering. In the polished metal, she saw his reflection: tall, forgettable, eyes that remembered everything.

“Problem?” he asked, in English dipped in another accent.

Emma lifted her own backpack out, heartbeat thrashing. Beneath it lay another passport—hers—and a plane ticket stub. The destination made her vision sharpen: Varna.

“I think this is yours,” she said, and held up the fake passport.

He smiled without teeth. “It’s yours if you want it to be.”

“Why me?” she asked.

He nodded toward the station doors, where dawn socked the city in pale wool. “Because you like to disappear. You book one-night stays. You pay cash for buses. You walk fast through crowds.” He paused. “And because you need a way out.”

Emma thought of the boyfriend whose messages she hadn’t opened, the job she’d left by ghosting, the three cities she’d only skimmed like stones across a river. Maybe she’d been practicing erasure.

She put the passport back in the locker and shut it. The key clicked in her palm.

“Wrong girl,” she said.

The man’s expression didn’t change. “For now.”

She slung on her real backpack, heavy and comforting. The parka man stayed. She walked toward the doors, toward buses and trains and a sky that didn’t care who she was. Halfway there, she stopped, turned, and tossed the silver key into a trash can.

The sound it made was terribly small.