Adrian took me down the back stairs to the parking garage.
I fought him the whole way. He had my elbow in a grip that was going to leave a print and his strength was wrong for an academic.
"Get in."
"Why would I trust you."
He pulled the passenger door open and finally lost it.
"Because right now I am the only person on this planet who wants you alive."
I stared at him.
"You watched me for three years."
"Yes."
"You made me fall for you."
"Yes."
"You signed my autopsy report."
He didn't answer right away.
"I didn't sign that report."
I went still.
He handed me his phone. A surveillance clip was already cued up. OCME corridor. Time stamp two nights ago, 11:47 p.m.
A figure in a Wexler white coat, mask on, swiped a badge at the records-room door and went in. The angle picked up the cuff embroidery as she reached for the door — A. Shaw, MD. When the figure turned to leave, the mask slipped enough to show half a face.
It was me.
It was my body. With Lindy in it. Wearing his coat.
She'd practiced his signature. The downstrokes were perfect.
Adrian said, "She wanted you to think I did it."
I kept staring at the screen.
"Where's my body now."
He pulled out of the garage.
"Still breathing."
It didn't loosen anything in my chest. It made everything colder.
"Then why does the report exist."
"Brannock manufactured it."
"Why."
The car climbed the ramp and the wipers came on hard. He didn't look at me.
"To remove Yvonne Tremaine from the legal system."
"As soon as you're dead, your body becomes a tissue-disposition entry. No next of kin on your HIPAA form. Within forty-eight hours of a city-issued death certificate, the policy lets the institute claim you as an ownerless sample."
The bottom of my skull went numb.
The Brannocks didn't just want my body.
They wanted the paper trail to say I had never existed in the first place.
My phone rang.
My own number.
I put it on speaker. Lindy laughed.
"Yvonne. He's got you in the car, doesn't he."
I didn't answer.
"You want to know why he's in such a hurry to save you?"
"Because if you die, his mother never wakes up again."
I turned to look at him.
The line of his jaw didn't change.
She said, soft, "Adrian's not saving you because he loves you. Your brain's a ninety-nine-point-seven percent match for hers. You're the perfect key for his mother's revival protocol."
My hand drifted down into my lap.
Adrian didn't deny any of it.
Outside, the nor'easter was hitting the windshield in sheets.
I had thought this car was a way out.
It was a different cage.
He stopped the car in front of a four-story brownstone in Brookline. No sign on the door. The kind of building you pass without seeing.
He took me up to the fourth floor.
The door swung in on a wall of chemical air — alcohol, IV drip, the particular smell of a long-term-care room. The front parlor had been gutted and outfitted as a small medical suite. A hospital bed, a ventilator, two infusion pumps, a vitals monitor cycling its quiet beep.
A woman was on the bed. She looked sixty and beautiful in the way that money keeps people beautiful. Her face was the color of typing paper. The ventilator did the breathing for her.
Adrian stood at the foot of the bed.
"This is my mother. Margaret Halloran-Shaw."
I looked at her. You could see what she'd been.
He said, "Twelve years ago she was a senior researcher on Brannock's longevity protocol. She figured out he was running consciousness-transfer trials on live human subjects. She started gathering proof to take to the FBI."
"Brannock had her car run off Storrow Drive. The driver was never found."
"I went into forensic pathology to get inside the institutional door he was using."
I didn't believe him on contact.
The story was too clean. Every villainy assigned to the Brannocks. Every ache assigned to him.
"And me," I said.
He looked at me.
"Your father, Daniel Tremaine. He was the only person who corroborated my mother's report. He went to the Bureau with her."
My ribs locked.
My father disappeared the year I was eleven. The official story was that he'd skipped town on debts. My mother repeated it. The state put warrants in two databases.
After that I was the girl no one came to pick up from school.
Adrian opened a small fire safe by the bed and took out a worn padded envelope with my name across the front in handwriting I didn't recognize and recognized.
Inside was a Sony micro-cassette recorder. The kind a journalist would have carried into a Springsteen show in 1996.
He pressed play.
A man's voice came out of the speaker. Rough. Older than I remembered.
If anything happens to me. Protect Vinnie.
Brannock has her genetic profile. He pulled her sample when she was a kid.
Don't let them find her.
That was my father's voice.
I put both hands on the edge of the side table.
Adrian's voice was low.
"The year you enrolled at Wexler, Brannock locked back onto you."
"I made contact with you to put my body between his project and yours."
I lifted my hand and slapped him.
It made a sharp clean sound.
His head went sideways. He didn't move with it.
"So you tricked me into being in love with you."
His throat worked.
"I'm sorry."
I felt the heat behind my eyes and I laughed.
"Your apology is worth something. Just not to me."
The intercom on the wall buzzed.
The little black-and-white camera screen on the wall snapped on.
My face came up on it.
Lindy was standing in the vestibule downstairs. She was wearing a white linen sheath dress I had almost gone up to her at orientation to ask where she'd bought.
She was smiling at the camera with my mouth.
"Adrian. Open the door."
"I brought Yvonne's body home."
Lindy wasn't alone.
The camera caught four men behind her in dark coats and a wheeled hospital gurney with a tarp folded back to the chest.
My body was on the gurney. My eyes were closed. My face was the color of cold milk.
I started for the door before I knew I was moving.
Adrian caught my upper arm.
"Don't."
Lindy sighed at the door.
"Yvonne. Don't you want to see yourself?"
Through the speaker her voice was sugar.
"Your body's about to give out, you know."
"I'm not comfortable in here. It's been trying to kick me out for two days."
"You deserve it," I said.
She laughed.
"Don't get tough. We have until midnight. After that the window closes."
Something moved in my chest.
Until midnight. Switch back.
That was what I had been begging the universe for.
Adrian's hand stayed on my shoulder.
"Don't believe her."
She heard him. Her voice came back through the speaker like she was leaning in.
"Of course Adrian doesn't want you to believe me."
"You go back into that body, his mother doesn't wake up. Ever."
I turned to look at him.
His mouth was a flat line.
He didn't deny it.
I smiled. It hurt.
"Adrian. You're always quiet at exactly the wrong moment."
Something tore across his face.
"Yvonne. I'm not trading you for her."
Lindy clapped softly at the door.
"Beautiful."
A second later one of the men behind her brought up a black handheld unit and set it against the deadbolt. The lock started keening — a high-pitched electronic whine I could feel in my teeth.
Adrian's color dropped.
"They're cutting the lock."
He yanked me down the short hallway into the bedroom. The closet was a small walk-in. He pushed the hanging clothes aside. There was a service door behind them, painted the same flat white as the closet wall.
He shoved it open.
I had one foot inside it when the front door of the apartment blew.
Lindy's voice came up the hall.
"Don't bother hiding."
"Yvonne. You spent three years wanting to be me, right?"
"Let me show you how disgusting it is to be me."
Adrian got me through the service door. He turned to pull it closed behind me.
I caught his sleeve.
"You're not coming."
He looked at me. There was something in his eyes I didn't have a name for.
"You go down the stairs. Cam will meet you at the bottom."
My fingers locked on the cuff.
"You arranged this too."
"This time it isn't a trick."
He pressed a small USB drive into my palm.
"Brannock's full trial data. Your father's death record. Names. Dates. Everything."
There was a thud from the apartment.
I made myself go.
Right before the door swung shut behind me, I saw Lindy walk into the bedroom with a small handgun raised in my hand.
She was smiling with my face.
"Adrian. If you love her, die with her."