The service stairs were narrow and unlit. I went down in Lindy's body, in Lindy's heels, half-falling, the USB drive locked in my fist.
I rolled my ankle on the second landing. Pain went up my shin and almost folded me.
Above me, somewhere through the wall, I heard the gunshot.
One.
Then a second.
My knees gave. My heart was being pulled out through my mouth.
I didn't go back.
Adrian had said the only people who get to ask for the truth are the people who stay alive long enough to want it.
I made the bottom of the stairwell. An iron service door. I shoved it open and the cold rain hit me in the face.
A man was standing in the alley under a black umbrella. Wool overcoat, dark hair, a face you could put in a courtroom photo and nobody would mind.
"Yvonne Tremaine?"
I didn't move.
"Reyes?"
He nodded once. "Cam. BPD Major Case. Adrian's old student."
I didn't take a step.
He saw it and flipped open a leather wallet so the badge faced me. Boston Police Department, gold shield, the bureau-detail card behind it.
"Believe me or don't. The Brannock people are going to be down those stairs in about ninety seconds."
The iron door behind me thudded.
He had my arm and we were moving. Crown Vic at the curb, parking lights on. He put me in the passenger seat and got the car going before he had his belt on.
The wipers came up. The city went watercolor through the windshield.
I held the USB in my lap.
"Will he die."
Cam was quiet for two beats.
"Adrian doesn't die easy."
It wasn't a comfort. It cleared my head.
I said, "How long have you been on the Brannocks."
"Seven years."
"Why no arrests."
He made a small humorless sound.
"Witnesses keep ending up in the morgue before they hit the stand."
He took a thumb-sized folder out from between the seats and dropped it on my knee.
"Brannock's protocol is called Chrysalis. On the IRB paperwork it's a longevity trial. In practice it's consciousness preservation for clients who can pay."
I opened the folder.
The first pages were missing-persons sheets. Nine of them. A second-year nursing student at Boston College. A licensed CNA from Roxbury. A foster-system runaway who had aged out at eighteen and gone off the grid three months later.
The last page was my father.
TREMAINE, DANIEL J. Born 1972. Last seen Brighton, MA, 2013. Status: trial subject, expired. Cause: trial failure, Protocol Chrysalis, July 2019.
The cold came in under my fingernails.
Cam said, low, "Your father didn't run. Brannock held him in the institute's sub-basement for six years. He died on the table."
The dark hit the windshield.
I had spent half my childhood hating him for not coming back. For not picking up. For not paying support. The year I was twelve I had dreamt about his car in the driveway and refused, in the dream, to open the door.
He'd been taking the bullet for me the whole time.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper.
Cam pulled the car around the back of BPD HQ at the loading dock.
"Get the drive to the task force inside. They can move on the institute tonight."
I had the door cracked when my phone buzzed.
It was a video file from Adrian's number.
Adrian was tied to a steel office chair. His white shirt was dark from collar to belt on the left side. Lindy was behind him, my face pale and lit by an overhead fluorescent, a stainless surgical scalpel braced flat against the side of his neck.
She smiled into the camera with my mouth.
"Yvonne. Bring me the drive."
"You've got one hour."
"After that I make him into an autopsy sample you can sign for yourself."
Cam watched the video over my shoulder and reached for my phone.
"Don't go."
I let him take it.
"Are you going to get him out."
His mouth flattened.
"We will. But not with the drive."
"Will he live long enough for you to deploy?"
Cam didn't say anything.
That was its own answer.
I had been on the other end of this calculation before. Everyone is willing to spend one person for the larger case. Adrian had spent me. I had spent three years on a man who had me on his lab schedule.
I didn't want to be them.
I held the drive out to him.
He took it on reflex and then looked at me.
"You're not going in?"
I said, "Copy it. Give me a copy."
Cam stared.
"You'd walk in with the real thing."
"Lindy will know if it's a dummy. She's been at her father's lab her whole life."
"What are you doing."
I met his eyes.
"I'm walking in with the real one."
Cam's voice dropped. "You're out of your mind."
"I'm not."
I set Lindy's phone face-up on the dash.
"She's running out of body. She has to swap tonight or she dies in mine. She isn't going to kill me on contact. She needs me breathing."
"She needs Yvonne Tremaine alive long enough to put her in."
Cam stared at me for a long moment. Then he leaned forward, opened the glove box, and pulled out a battered laptop. He worked in silence for forty seconds — drag, copy, ghost — and slid a second drive across the console at me. He'd written a locator into it. He pulled a small black disk the size of a shirt button out of a foam case.
"Buttonhole camera. Streams to my unit and to the FBI field office. Battery's good for an hour."
He clipped it to the strap of my bra, below the dress neckline.
"Twenty minutes inside. That's what we need."
I looked at him.
"And if I can't hold twenty."
His voice was even.
"Then you say everything you can out loud before they cut you off."
The address Lindy had sent was an abandoned satellite facility forty minutes out 95-South, one of the institute's discontinued in-patient wings, a long flat building with the windows boarded.
I walked in alone.
The fluorescent panels above the lobby were the kind that flicker before they die. Adrian was zip-tied to a folding chair under one of them. His face had gone white. There was blood through the shoulder of his shirt and down the inside of his sleeve.
He saw me and his face locked.
"Who told you to come."
I held up the USB.
"Shut up."
Lindy walked in from the corridor.
She had my body and she was wearing that white linen sheath again — the one I had almost asked her about at orientation. I had never hated a piece of fabric so much in my life.
"Good girl."
I made my voice as cold as I could make it.
"Untie him first."
She tilted her head.
"You really do love him."
"Get on with it."
I tossed the drive across the floor.
She caught it underhand and passed it back over her shoulder to the man behind her.
I saw Magnus Brannock for the first time in person.
He looked sixty in the way money makes you look sixty — better than that, really. He was older than the photos in his Lindgren bio, but his eyes were too bright for his face.
He plugged the drive into a laptop on a folding banquet table. The blue of the screen washed his cheek.
A few seconds in, he nodded.
"Authentic."
Lindy turned back to me.
"OR's ready."
I stepped back.
"You said you'd let him go."
She closed the distance in two steps and put her mouth at my ear.
"Yvonne. I never agreed to let you live."
Two of Brannock's men closed on me from behind.
I fought. They had me by the upper arms before I got two steps and they walked me through the doors into what had been the wing's surgical suite. The OR table was still there. The overhead surgical lamp was still mounted. Someone had run a generator and rigged a tower of newer machines along the wall.
My body was on the second table.
Lindy was upright on a stool by it, awake in my body, watching me come in. Her eyes — my eyes — were lit with something that was equal parts excitement and a thing I didn't recognize.
She smiled, and it twisted my mouth in a shape I didn't know my mouth could make.
"It's almost done."
I stared at my own face.
"Lindy. The thing you stole. Does it feel good to wear."
Her face went tight.
"Shut up."
I kept going.
"Adrian knew from day one that you weren't right."
"He was kind to you to keep you steady."
It landed.
She came at me from the stool and got both hands on my throat. I'd forgotten how much strength I had.
"You don't know anything."
"He used to only look at me."
The room narrowed. I made my mouth work.
"He would rather die right now than let you live."
She screamed and brought her open hand across my face.
Brannock said, sharp, "Enough. Don't damage the vessel."
She let go.
I dragged in a breath. My eyes slid past her shoulder to the analog clock on the wall above the door. White face. Black hands. The kind every ER in this country has.
Seventeen minutes past the start.
Three minutes to go.
Brannock came over himself with a prepared syringe of a milky anesthetic. He pinched the skin of my upper arm and put the needle in.
The first cold push had gone into the muscle when the door behind us blew.
Brannock froze.
"What was that."
The doors crashed open.
Cam came in first with his weapon up.
"Boston Police. Hands."
There were four of them in plates behind him.
Brannock's hand whipped up off the syringe and onto a scalpel from the tray. He had it under my jaw before anyone had finished breathing in.
"Back."
Cam's gun came up at him. His face went flat in the way only a cop's face goes flat.
In the half-second of standoff Lindy moved for the second table. Her hands went for the main switch on the transfer rig.
I used the last of what was in my body to drive my shoulder up into Brannock's solar plexus. The scalpel skidded off the line of my jaw and clattered. I went past him on the slip and got my hand on the main power on the side of the machine tower and yanked.
The room snapped into screaming alarm.
Lindy shrieked.
"No—"
She came across the floor at me with my body and put me on the floor.
She was crying with my eyes. Her voice cracked. It was strange — to be looked at from the inside of your own crying face by somebody who wasn't you.
"Yvonne. Why do you have to take my life."
I held her eyes.
"Because it was already mine."
She stopped, for a second.
Then Adrian was through the door behind her. He had blood down one whole side. He came up behind her and got her wrists.
She turned to look at him and her face came apart.
"Adrian. You really want me dead."
His face was the color of paper. His voice was steady.
"Lindy. You killed too many people."
She laughed, suddenly.
"What about you."
"Do you want to be the one who tells her who signed her father's consent form for the last trial."
The room rang.
Adrian's hand went still on her arm.
Lindy turned her head to me. She was smiling with my mouth.
"Yvonne. It was him."