I stayed in the bed, didn't move.
Through the crack in the bedroom door I could see the front hall. He hadn't turned on a light.
He walked like he was trying not to wake me. Down the hall, into the guest bathroom. Pipes clanked. The shower started.
I pushed the duvet back and went barefoot across the cold parlor floor.
His Barbour jacket was over the arm of the wingback chair by the door. The right pocket sagged. The corner of a nitrile glove was sticking out.
I held my breath and pulled it out.
Medical-grade nitrile. The fingertips were dark.
The phone in my hand lit up.
A message from my own number.
Like it?
My hand jerked. I almost dropped it.
Another image came in.
It was me. My body, sitting up in a hospital bed in a thin gown. My face — but the eyes weren't mine. They were Lindy's.
She was smiling, with my mouth.
He's nice to you, isn't he?
Don't get too into it.
I typed back through clenched teeth.
What did you do.
She answered fast.
You wanted him. I'm giving him to you.
Use my body. Love him properly this time.
As for yours. I'll take care of it.
The shower cut off.
I shoved the glove back into his pocket and got back to the doorway just as he came out, hair still wet, in a black silk robe.
He saw me standing barefoot in the dark hall. His brow tightened.
"You should have slippers on."
I was looking at his sleeves. Both cuffs were clean. Spotless. As if he'd never come in carrying the other thing at all.
"Where did you go."
He picked up a hand towel from the back of the sofa and worked it through his hair. His voice was perfectly even.
"OCME called. Off-hours intake."
"Dead people bleed that much?"
It came out before I could catch it.
He stopped.
The apartment went very still.
He looked at me, and something settled behind his eyes.
"Lindy. You never used to ask things like that."
I locked my knees.
He took a step closer.
"You've been different since the accident."
My back found the wall.
He reached up. His thumb brushed the corner of my mouth. The gesture was tender. His voice was low.
"Did it knock something loose. Or did it bring something back."
I drove my nails into my palm and forced a smile.
"I'm just scared."
He looked at me for a long time. Then he gathered me against his chest.
"Don't be."
His chin rested on top of my head.
"I'm not going to let anyone touch you."
It was the most frightening sentence anyone had ever said to me.
Because over his shoulder I could see the door to his study. It wasn't quite shut.
Inside, the stainless evidence locker on the back wall was open a few inches.
There was a small label on the side of it, printed on white pathology stock.
YT-0719 / DOB 07-19-01 / PROT-CHRYSALIS-B.
My initials. My birthday. My number.
The next morning Adrian went into the OCME like nothing had happened.
Before he left he warmed a mug of milk for me on the stovetop and set it on the counter. The pad of his thumb grazed my cheekbone.
"Stay in. Reporters are still parked on the corner."
I nodded into his palm.
The door clicked. The deadbolt turned.
I waited a full minute, then went into the study.
The locker had a keypad. Six digits.
I tried Lindy's birthday. INCORRECT.
Adrian's. INCORRECT.
I held my breath and typed mine. 07-19-01.
The bolt slid back with a small mechanical thunk.
The cold came up the back of my neck before I'd even opened the door all the way.
No body parts. No weapon. No syringes.
Just paper. A brown accordion file, the kind a litigator keeps for one client across a decade. The tab read:
PROT-CHRYSALIS / B-CANDIDATE LONGITUDINAL / SHAW, A.
I lifted it out with both hands.
The cover sheet was a typed protocol. Consciousness-Transfer Pilot — Subject Pair Protocol. Subject A: BRANNOCK, L. M. Subject B: TREMAINE, Y. M. Operator of Record: SHAW, A., MD.
I started turning pages and couldn't make my fingers stop shaking.
Start date: three years ago.
Three years ago I hadn't met him. Three years ago he was a name on a Wexler faculty page.
He had started watching me before I started watching him.
The next page was a photograph stapled to a data sheet. Erie East High School senior portrait, 2019. The next page: my white-coat ceremony at Wexler. The next: a candid of me in the back of his lecture hall on the first day of M1, taken from the AV booth.
Three years of rotation schedules. My name circled in fine-point blue ink.
Margin note in his handwriting, the small careful slant I'd watched fill autopsy reports:
Subject B has formed strong affective attachment to operator; suggestible state may reduce resistance.
My stomach folded in on itself.
The crush I'd been laughed at for. The thing the cohort had been betting on. Suggestible state may reduce resistance.
He hadn't been the one I was chasing. I'd been the lab mouse running into the maze on cue.
Further in, a printed clinical photo. Adrian, younger by some years, in a white coat standing beside an older man at what looked like a fundraiser podium. The older man had silver hair and the kind of smile they put on the back of philanthropy brochures.
The badge clipped to his lapel said M. BRANNOCK, PI — LINDGREN INSTITUTE.
Lindy's father.
I kept turning.
Subject A — autoimmune cascade accelerating; native body projected nonviable within 9–14 months. Initiating compatible-vessel search.
Subject B — bloodwork within ideal parameters across all panels; psychiatric scoring at 2nd percentile for emotional regulation; suitable as candidate vessel.
I couldn't keep my hands flat against the page.
It wasn't an accident.
They had been planning to move Lindy into me.
I was the chassis she'd been picked out for.
My phone went off.
This time it was my own number.
I picked up. Didn't say anything.
She laughed in my voice.
"You found it."
I closed my fist on the page.
"Lindy. What do you actually want."
"I want to live."
She said it the way a kid asks for the second cookie.
"My kidneys are done. My heart's six months off arrhythmia management. Adrian says you're a clean machine."
I made my voice cold. "So you steal me."
She was quiet for two seconds. Then her voice dropped.
"Yvonne. You think Adrian's the one who wanted me?"
"He's been watching you the whole time."
The line went dead.
The deadbolt clicked.
I shoved the file back in the locker and turned, and Adrian was already in the study doorway.
He looked at the file in my hand. The temperature in his face changed by degrees.
"Who let you in here."
I made my face go blank.
"I was looking for a Tylenol."
Adrian walked in. His eyes were on the open locker.
"Tylenol's in the kitchen."
I stepped back. The edge of his desk hit me at the kidneys.
He didn't raise his voice. He didn't ask anything else. He took the file out of my hand, gentle, almost courteous, and slid it back into the accordion sleeve, squared the edges, set it inside.
The calm was the worst part.
I made myself say it.
"The wreck wasn't an accident. Was it."
He looked up.
"What answer do you want."
"The real one."
Something pulled at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile.
"Lindy. Since when do you want the real one."
The way he said Lindy punched the wind out of me.
I locked my eyes on him.
"What if I'm not Lindy."
The air in the room stopped moving.
His hand went still on the edge of the file.
I kept going.
"What if I'm Yvonne."
He looked at me. There was no shock in his face.
There was something that was almost relief.
"Finally."
My stomach went down a flight of stairs.
He had known. He had known the whole time.
He crossed the rest of the distance and closed his fingers around my wrist.
"I knew the second you opened your eyes in that room that you weren't her."
"Then why didn't you say."
"Because as long as you were in her body, no one could touch you."
I tried to pull away.
"You killed me, Adrian."
His grip tightened.
"I didn't."
"There's a finalized autopsy report with my name on it. You're going to lie to me about this too?"
His face moved for the first time.
"You saw the autopsy report."
I stopped.
"What autopsy report."
He didn't answer. He took my wrist and started pulling me toward the front door.
I fought him.
"Let go of me—"
The front door blew open.
Two men in black, faces covered, came through the frame in one fluid motion the way people do when they've practiced it.
One of them came at my neck with a syringe.
Adrian yanked me behind him and dropped low and put his foot through the first man's knee.
The syringe hit the hardwood. Clear liquid spread across the boards.
The second man came up with a folding knife.
Adrian's hand closed on the brass paperweight on the side table and threw it underhand. It caught the second man across the temple. He went down.
I couldn't move.
That hadn't been a pathologist.
That had been someone who knew how to keep his weight low and his elbows in.
Adrian crouched, picked up the syringe, brought it close to his face, and the last of the color went out of his cheeks.
"They're earlier than I thought."
I stared at the men on the floor.
"Who are they."
He looked at me. He kept his voice down.
"Brannock's people."
"They want to take you out of Lindy's body now. Tonight."
I hadn't even gotten my mouth open when the man on the floor coughed and laughed up at us.
"Dr. Shaw. You can't keep her."
"Ms. Brannock's already waiting at the OCME."