My name is Silhouette Cacciatrice. Yes, that is my actual first name. No, I do not care what you think about it.

I am twenty-two years old, I am a college dropout with a library education, and I have a gene in my DNA that lets me travel through time when I fall asleep. We call it the Breach. We call ourselves Wraiths. There are not many of us, we mostly don't know each other, and none of us asked for this.

The Breach sent me to Whitechapel, London. August 1888.

You know why.

What the history books don't tell you — what they couldn't tell you, because no one who knew was ever going to write it down in a way anyone would believe — is that Jack the Ripper was a shapeshifter. Face like wax approaching a flame. Could be anyone. Man, woman, gentleman, street worker. Anyone. And he had been making theological arguments in women's bodies for months before I arrived, and I knew exactly what he was going to do, and the rules said I had to let him do most of it, and I had to stand in the dark and watch and keep my mouth shut and wait for my moment.

The rules are the worst part of this job.

What the history books also don't tell you is that I wasn't alone. Her name was Jade. Twenty-one years old, blonde hair that wasn't entirely blonde, a small e-reader full of historical databases, and a mission that put her directly across from mine. She came from 1985. I come from further ahead than that. Forty years between our home eras and we found each other in 1888 Whitechapel and I want you to understand that when I tell you this story I am telling you her story too. It belongs to both of us.

This dossier is the record of what actually happened. Not the sanitized version. Not the version that leaves out the parts that are hard to read or hard to explain or hard to fit inside the frameworks people have already decided are the only acceptable ones. The real version. Every name. Every wound. Every data point I assembled over four months in one of the most dangerous places in the history of the English-speaking world, hunting a man who had decided that two women like us represented a theological problem worth solving.

His framework. Our existence. One of them had to go.

I am recording this for you — for the Cacciatrice women who come after me, who will find these files the way I found the ones that came before, who will need to know what Whitechapel actually was before they go there, what Jack actually was before they face him, and what it actually costs to do this work and keep doing it and not lose yourself inside it entirely.

I call you Futures. No apostrophe. It is not a typo.

There are seven canonical victims. Emma. Martha. Polly. Annie. Elizabeth. Catherine. Mary Jane. I knew their names before I arrived and I learned who they were when I got there and those are not the same thing and I need you to understand that before you read another word. They were not a body count. They were not a mystery to be solved. They were people — full, complicated, specific human people — who deserved more than the world they were born into gave them, and they got considerably less than that, and someone has to say so.

I am saying so.

Jack the Ripper was a shapeshifter with a theological framework and a knife and four months of history to complete before I was allowed to stop him. I had a Heckler and Koch CC9, a analog tape recorder with a hidden camera lens, a woman from 1985 who called me sweetness, and a Bible I read cover to cover in a hotel room in Whitechapel trying to understand what kind of mind produces thirty-nine wounds on a woman in a dark stairwell.

I figured it out.

This is what happened.