Anyone Read online

  She let go of her daughter, and her daughter fell. Not far, a foot or eighteen inches, and she landed on the double padding of her diaper and the crib’s bedding, barely an impact at all—but still—Gabrielle had dropped her child.

  A moment of stunned surprise as they looked at each other—and even though Kat wasn’t hurt, couldn’t possibly be hurt, she was definitely shocked, and then, justifiably, outraged.

  A lusty, wounded wail poured up from the crib, and Gabby gripped its railing, curling her too-thick, too-big fingers between the slats, specifically designed to prevent even the most curious infants from slipping their vulnerable necks between them.

  She turned away from the crib, slowly, hearing her daughter’s crying kick into a higher gear. She could feel the thickness, the bigness across her entire body.

  On the dresser, her latest knitting project, a thickly woven blue-and-red tassel hat she would put up on her Etsy store once it was done, part of an ongoing effort to bring in extra cash. Next to it, the big navy-blue mug with a bright yellow M on it, a University of Michigan logo item. But she didn’t remember bringing it up here, and whatever was in it was still hot. She could see the steam.

  Gabrielle completed her rotation and saw her husband looking at her, wide-eyed. He looked stunned, like when she’d told him she was pregnant.

  “Paul?” she said, and heard his voice say the word, and saw her husband open his mouth and say the word, but it wasn’t coming from him. It was coming from her, but she wasn’t herself.

  Gabby lifted her hand to her face. Paul, staring at her, did the same thing. She touched her cheek, felt the little scratch of stubble there, completely alien, repulsive, but also not—a sensation familiar from weekends when he wouldn’t bother to shave unless they were planning to go out, or it seemed more likely than not that they’d be having sex that night. She watched Paul mirror this movement too.

  This made sense, she realized, because she was looking in a mirror, the mirror mounted above the dresser in her daughter’s room, decorated with little blue musical notes painted on its frame by the hand she now somehow possessed but had no real right to.

  She wasn’t looking at Paul. She was looking at herself.

  And she was him.

  “What the shit?” she said. Her thought, her words, his voice.

  A moan escaped Gabrielle’s throat, a low note mixing with the higher-pitched cries still coming from the baby, now tinged with desperate, outraged intensity because her mother had not yet picked her up to comfort her.

  Her father. Her mother. Her . . .

  Gabrielle became aware of a taste—rancid, scummy. Decay, old food, old coffee. She recognized it—the taste of a mouth that hadn’t yet brushed its teeth after breakfast, or before bed after a day of ordinary life. Not unfamiliar, she’d even tasted this particular flavor when they kissed, but it wasn’t her mouth. It was his. She was tasting the remnants of his day, his decisions.

  Her head swam, her gorge rose. Gabrielle’s hand instinctively moved up to push back her hair, keep it out of harm’s way. She grasped nothing but the short dark hair on Paul’s head.

  She threw up all over the floor, a good portion of the puke hitting the panda-shaped rug with a wet smack. The taste in her mouth took a significant downturn, stomach acids boiling up into her sinuses.

  A glass of water stood on the dresser below the mirror. She hadn’t put it there—maybe Paul had, before . . . before all of this.

  Gabby took a step toward it, but the effort of lifting her foot was so different, so strange, the thud of its impact landing on the floor so new, the way she was used to walking not the way this odd body walked . . . that she stumbled. She took a second quick step to correct, and her heel slipped in the puddle she had just created.

  She fell, hard, unable to figure out how to protect herself in the moment between slip and impact. Her head cracked against the hard boards of the floor, and with the pain came a quick snap into focus.

  Gabrielle lay on the floor, feeling the remains of Paul’s last meal soaking into Paul’s pants.

  She didn’t understand what was happening to her, but understanding would have to wait. Her daughter was crying, and that had to be addressed.

  Levering herself painfully to her feet, she took a cautious step toward the crib. A throbbing pain in her head from the fall warned strongly against moving too quickly before she understood how to walk in this body.

  Gabrielle picked up a pacifier from the little table next to the crib. She and Paul had agreed to use the thing in moderation, a conclusion reached after reading mommy blogs and the like warning against stunted emotional development, dental problems, and, of course, all the perils associated with plastics. But this seemed like an occasion that warranted a little pacification. She gave the baby the little nub of silicone, and she immediately calmed, looking at her father with her big, wide eyes, full of life and curiosity, as always.

  “It’s all right, kiddo,” Gabby said, using the term Paul used, not knowing if it would matter or if the baby recognized words at all—one of the biggest mysteries of human development was what infants actually gleaned from the world around them—but not wanting to give her any additional clues that anything was amiss.

  “I’ll be back in a minute, okay? Just enjoy that pacifier, and I’ll be right back.”

  Gabrielle reached out to touch her baby’s head, then realized her hand was covered in sick and pulled it back.

  “Everything’s okay,” she said.

  Gabby turned and left the room, getting better at using Paul’s body with every step.

  It felt like a video game, like a first-person video game, like Skyrim. That was her only basis for comparison. She was looking out through Paul’s eyes, but she wasn’t Paul. She was still Gabrielle. She hoped.

  She made her way to the bathroom and stripped off Paul’s vomit-soaked shirt. She rinsed out her mouth, avoiding looking at herself/him in the mirror, then brushed her teeth after a moment of indecision about whose toothbrush to use.

  She chose his.

  Gabby threw on clean clothes, then returned to the baby’s room and saw that she was already asleep, contented, the pacifier moving gently in a slow, smooth rhythm. She put her hand on her daughter’s cheek, letting it rest there for a moment, feeling the softness against Paul’s palm.

  Gabrielle flipped on the baby monitor, then went downstairs, out the back door, and across the lawn toward the barn.

  If she was in Paul, where was he? And what had happened to her? The real, actual her?

  She began to run, still not completely comfortable with the jarring weight of Paul’s feet as they hammered the ground.

  What had happened to her?

  The barn door yawned open ahead, darkness inside, just shadows. Yes. She had turned off the lights so she could watch the plaque-inhibition sequence play out across the inside of the barn. Like a laser show.

  The memory of the lights danced through her head again, and Gabrielle’s vision momentarily doubled. She slowed to a walk, both to pull herself together and because she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to see what was waiting inside the barn.

  But there was nowhere else to go, and she had to know.

  Gabby stepped inside and immediately saw herself lying on the plank floor of the barn, exactly where she had been standing when she activated the sequence. A bit of blood was pooling below her head—possibly she had fallen and knocked her head against the lab table when the shift happened.

  Her mind seized.

  Paul had become Gabrielle, but as far as she could tell, Gabrielle had not become Paul.

  As far as she could tell, Gabrielle was dead.

  Chapter 2

  CHINATOWN, NEW YORK

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS FROM NOW

  THIS IS THE THING YOU DO NOT DO, ANNAMI THOUGHT.

  This is shooting up heroin. This is hooking up with your sister’s husband. This is cutting your wrists and swimming with sharks.

  She was lying on a flash
couch in a darkshare den, about to let a stranger occupy her mind. This would last for two hours. During that time, Annami would be unaware, and her rider could use her body for whatever he or she wanted, anything at all. Drugs, sex, crime . . . anything. Traffic on the darkshare was unregistered, so no one would know Annami was not in her prime while these things occurred. If her rider murdered someone during the share, that landed on her. She would never know who the client was, and the client would never know anything about her.

  That was the darkshare.

  Annami was young, healthy, strong, beautiful. This was her first run, and her rate was $5,000 per hour. Over time, perhaps that number would go down, depending on what darksharing did to her.

  She glanced at Mama Run, the darkshare den’s proprietor, standing next to the couch.

  “You ready?” Mama said. “Client is good to go.”

  Annami thought about the life she had created for herself. She had an apartment on Staten Island; she had a good job; she had friends. She had an uncracked pint of lemon gelato in her freezer. Or, hell, it was Saturday night. She could stand up from the flash couch, leave, message Bea or Gilbert or anyone, really, and meet up and let tonight just drift away, a near miss.

  But created really was the word for what she had. The apartment, the job, the friends—all fiction; a careful, layered composition Annami had constructed over many years. It was both a smokescreen—to hide from Hauser, Bleeder, and anyone else who might be hunting her—and a means to gather intelligence on her enemies. She was a spy, a saboteur, a deep-cover agent alone behind enemy lines.

  Her whole life was a story. It was time to write the ending.

  But to do that, she needed to make half a million dollars—at least—in a little over a month. The darkshare was the only way.

  Mama Run’s smile faded just a bit—the woman was getting impatient. She knew it was Annami’s first darkshare and was considerate of that fact, to a point, but she was, after all, running a business.

  Annami set aside the costume of her life, the happy, smart woman in her twenties who worked hard and fit into the world around her. She let her actual self rise to the surface: one of the few people who knew the truth behind the lie of the world, and the only one who seemed to want to make it right.

  She could do anything. Whatever it took. From this moment on, she was steel. She was tough as hell.

  “I’m ready,” Annami said. “Go ahead.”

  Mama Run nodded, her smile resurfacing. She lowered the hood over Annami’s head.

  “Okay,” she said. “Client’s in the queue. Just be a minute. Remember: three purple peacocks—”

  “In a pinnace,” Annami said. “I remember.”

  “Only just in case,” Mama’s voice said. “You won’t need it. Everything will be fine.”

  Annami stared at the interior of the flash hood, its holo-panels glowing with the dull green of standby mode. The darkshare ran on its own closed-loop networks—necessary to guarantee anonymity on both sides. Not like the lightshare, which registered everything, from flash patterns to transfer duration to names of traveler and vessel. That’s why it was safe. Why it made the world go ’round.

  She took a breath, held it. When she was little, she’d gone to an amusement park in Ohio called Cedar Point. They had a roller coaster called the Magnum, the tallest in that part of the country. It began with a steep, slow climb, what seemed like a mile in the air, before a fall so intense, so fast . . . she’d held her father’s hand the whole time, clutching so hard it hurt her, never mind what it must have done to her poor dad.

  She had no one’s hand to hold now, so she held her own.

  For you, she thought. I’m doing this for/

  Annami opened her eyes. She saw a wall about eight feet away, mottled and stained, with a spherical light fixture sticking straight out from it, pointing directly at her. It was swaying a bit, just the tiniest bit, like a long-stemmed flower moving in a faint breeze. The light was . . .

  No. She was not looking at a wall. A ceiling.

  Annami was lying on her back, on something hard. Which, if she was looking at a ceiling, was most likely a floor. She tried to breathe, to move, to begin the physical inventory that would tell her if she was still herself.

  But she was afraid, because if things had gone as planned, she wouldn’t be lying on a floor. She’d be resting on a returner couch at Mama Run’s, with soft, calming music playing in her ears, a mug of steaming tea on the little tray to the left of the couch, and $10,000 waiting to be deposited in a hidden e-count of her choice. Mama Run didn’t have to do these things for her runners, but she did, and little touches like that were why Annami had selected Mama’s establishment for this idiotic fucking idea in the first place.

  You are you, she thought, she reminded.

  Lack of oxygen tightened her chest, basic biology competing with Annami’s desire to remain suspended in a Schrödinger’s cat–style cocoon of unobserved self, and she took a breath. Her body returned to her.

  Some pain—a touch at the back of her head, and some in her ankle—perhaps she had fallen badly when her runner left her body. Her legs, present and accounted for. Her feet, also present, at the end of her legs, which seemed like the right place for them. Her arms and hands and fingers, all there . . . but wet.

  Annami lifted her hand. It was red, as if she were wearing a slick, crimson glove. Blood.

  Scenarios ran through her head, all the warnings she’d heard about the way darksharing could end—bodies harvested for organs, people being used as proxies by masochists who wanted to experience pain but didn’t want to use up their own flesh, so many other nightmares large and small.

  Annami had blood on her hands, and her continuing personal inventory had informed her that her back was wet from scapula to sacrum, which suggested that she was also lying in a pool of the stuff. So, yes, she had awoken from her very first darkshare in a nightmare. The size remained to be seen.

  She thought about the blood. It didn’t seem like it was hers, because her head was clear—relatively speaking—and she didn’t feel weak. If she had lost as much as the puddle beneath her suggested, she probably wouldn’t have woken up at all.

  So . . . perhaps this particular nightmare was small. Maybe.

  This was the uncertainty of the darkshare; this was the price you paid in order to get paid. Before Annami had pulled the trigger on actually going through with it, she’d made a little list of resulting scenarios in order of horror. The possibilities were endless.

  Endless, and waking up in a pool of someone else’s blood was definitely on the list. Far from the worst, though. It was, like . . . eleventh, she decided.

  She was not: (1) dead; (2) missing any parts of her body (as far as she could tell); (3) in the middle of having sex with someone she hadn’t chosen; (4) aware that she had recently had sex with someone she hadn’t chosen; (5) chained or otherwise restrained; (6) sick/poisoned (as far as she could tell); (7) falling from a great height; (8) underwater; (9) buried; or (10) lying in a pool of her own blood.

  Annami pushed herself up on one elbow and continued to take stock. Still no real pain other than the barely noticeable twinge in her ankle. That was good. The change in perspective also gave her the source of the blood on the floor: a dead man lying about six feet away.

  They were in a small, barely furnished apartment, constructed in a style that was still called prewar despite the century that had passed since the end of the Second World War. Crown moldings, hardwood floors with a pronounced warp that wouldn’t be helped by the blood soaking into them, a steam radiator for heat she couldn’t imagine still worked. The room was neglected, dirty. Little piles of discarded paper, wrappers, and vials washed up in the corners.

  Another detail worth noting—a gun on the floor between Annami and the dead man, a little closer to her than him, presumably the source of the hole in the man’s head.

  Annami got to her feet, wiping her hands on her pants, front and back, trying to s
crape off the sheen of blood. She stepped toward the corpse, looking for explanations of what had happened here, how her darkshare runner had used her body, why the dead man was dead.

  He was Asian, possibly Chinese, although she wouldn’t put money on it, given the warping of his features by the hole in his forehead. Olive pants, dark hoodie, boots with deeply worn, thick rubber soles. On the young side, about twenty-five. Shaved head covered with stubble. Skinny. If he were alive, she’d have said he seemed desperate. He looked like, on balance, the kind of person who made their money by renting themselves out for darkshares, no questions asked and no explanations given.

  Don’t judge, she thought. As of today, lady, you’re that kind of person too.

  So—no answers from the corpse. Corpses, really. Two people had died here today, at exactly the same moment—the Asian man she was looking at and whoever had been using him as a vessel for his darkshare. That was how it worked.

  If one died, both died. The most fundamental rule of flash technology, whether dark or light.

  Annami knew she should leave. Right away, right then. But she wanted to know. She’d always wanted to know, anything and everything she could, despite all the things it had cost her.

  She squatted next to the corpse and steeled herself to search it for ID or any other clues she knew would almost certainly not be there. Not for someone who died during a darkshare. The whole point was anonymity, on both sides. You didn’t know who you were renting, they didn’t know who you were—you just paid, did what you wanted or needed while using someone else’s flesh, and then it was over.

  The apartment door burst open: a crack of splintering wood followed by a hammer blow as the door whipped around and slammed into the wall.

  A man half fell into the room, the momentum of the kick that had shattered the door pulling him forward. He had a gun in his hand, a small, dark pistol. He stumbled a little, regaining his balance, then saw Annami, crouched next to the corpse, her bloody hand still outstretched. This new person looked architectural, like he’d been designed to withstand enormous physical forces. A load-bearing man. He snarled something in an angular language.