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  Annami lunged forward, over the corpse, toward a square archway with more of the apartment visible through it. She didn’t know where it led, just that it was away.

  A whipcrack noise. Not much of a sound at all. A hole appeared in the wall to the side of the archway as she passed through it. A small puff of vaporized plaster and paint and most likely some trace amounts of lead, given the building’s age—all expelled violently as the bullet entered.

  Silencer? Annami thought.

  That was good, or at least a small victory in the larger calculus of someone trying to shoot her. This new killer wanted to conduct a quiet murder. That probably, hopefully meant that this old apartment was located in some part of New York City with people around, possibly even police.

  Not that Annami was looking forward to dealing with police after participating in a darkshare that had resulted in the death of at least one person—two if her hunch was right and the dead Chinese man also had a runner inside him when he died. Still, better the cops than her own bullet in the head.

  The next room was just an empty rectangle, with a small, time-ravaged kitchen visible off to one side through an alcove, outlines against the peeling paint where appliances had once stood. Nothing that would help her. No exit, no back door.

  But a window.

  She sprinted to it, a filthy, double-hung, ancient thing in a warped metal frame, about three feet wide. A desperate tug on its bottom edge told her that nothing short of the jaws of life would get the thing open. It was too old and covered in too many layers of paint and city soot. It had fossilized.

  Annami glanced behind her to see if the killer had followed. Not yet—maybe he’d stopped to check on the status of the Chinese man before coming after her. But then there he was, looming in the archway, filling it, gun raised.

  Five more of those whipcracks, as Annami made a sort of flailing sideways lunge. Nothing elegant or planned, just a cringe born of pure survival instinct, like someone jerking their steering wheel after looking up to see the truck that’s crossed the dividing lane, far too late.

  But somehow, enough. The rounds hit the window and passed through it, creating a spidered pattern in the safety glass. They did not hit Annami.

  She and the killer looked at each other, each taking a moment to note the improbability of the fact that Annami was still alive. In another context, they would have smiled, maybe exchanged rueful, amazed headshakes. Crazy old world. You see that? Holy shit.

  Instead, the killer lifted his weapon and pressed some button or latch on the side that ejected a magazine from its grip so he could reload.

  Annami spun back toward the window, lifted her boot, and kicked, hard, the newly holed glass shattering outward under her heel.

  She dove through the empty frame, landing on the fire escape outside, feeling curls of rust scrape her palms. The structure vibrated, and for a moment she thought this was it. The whole thing would just crumble into a mist of old steel, and down she would go.

  But it held, and Annami got to her feet. She looked below and cursed. Her landing was about four stories off the ground, and the stairs leading down ended in sharp spikes of flaking metal before they reached the third. The lower portion of the stairway had collapsed at some earlier point in the elderly building’s history. The fire escape was not an escape, and she maybe would have laughed at that if it didn’t mean she was probably about to die.

  Annami ran the only direction she could. Up.

  The steps shuddered and jangled as she moved. She could see the fire escape pulling free of whatever ancient, dutiful bolts still moored it to the building’s facade. She moved faster, taking the stairs two at a time. A shout from below her in a familiar, sharply angled tongue. Through the grating of the steps, Annami could see the killer’s head poking through the window, his neck twisted as he looked up at her. He didn’t have a clean line of fire, not with the fire escape in the way.

  It was only two stories to the roof, and Annami lunged out onto the nasty, tar-paper-and-bird-shit-covered surface, falling onto her hands and knees. She spun, put her hands down to brace herself, and kicked out at the rungs of the ladder she had just climbed.

  She connected and kicked again, harder, feeling a sharp spike of pain in her ankle, the one she had possibly injured when her darkshare runner left her back in the apartment. The ladder was loosening, though; she could feel it. Annami kicked again, with everything she had, and the fire escape snapped free from the building, yawning out about four feet.

  That final indignity was as much as the old structure could take. Annami heard a loud screech of metal on stone, and then a tearing noise, followed finally by a snapping, crackling crunch from farther below.

  None of those sounds were precisely what she had been hoping to hear: a scream, suddenly cut short. If the killer had followed her out the window, he’d be dead now, entangled and entombed by the collapsed fire escape. The man was, apparently and unfortunately, too smart for that.

  Annami forced herself to her feet, drawing in big, gasping breaths, looking around, seeing what she had to work with. The roof was littered with trash, ducts and pumping systems for the building’s HVAC system, weathered lawn chairs for desperate, green-starved New Yorkers willing to resort to this distorted, meager version of outdoor space . . . and a small hut-type structure with a door built into it—access from the lower floors for maintenance.

  The HVAC ductwork meant the building had once been renovated decades before, probably at some point in the 2010s, when everyone in the world had been convinced that the seas were shortly to rise and engulf coastal regions, and buildings in those parts of New York most likely to be flooded were required by law to put their essential mechanical systems on the roof. That was before a company called NeOnet Global released the technology that allowed the transfer of human consciousness from one body to another. These days, most people called the company Anyone, and the tech it gave the world was the flash.

  Among other things, widespread adoption of the flash reduced overall energy consumption on the planet by a third, enough of an edge that alternative power sources and a concerted effort to reduce carbon output had, literally, saved the world.

  Annami took a single step toward the maintenance access door, her way out, feeling a twinge in her injured ankle. One step, and then the door was shoved open, exploding outward with that same violence she’d seen in the apartment two floors below. The killer stepped out, looking across the roof, looking for her.

  Of course. He was smart.

  Smart but unlucky. He’d missed her with his gun down below, and he missed her with his eyes here too, turning his head the wrong direction when he came out the door, scanning the side of the roof she was not on.

  This gave her an opportunity, a one-second head start, and Annami used it. Again, she ran.

  She was good at running. She had been good at running for a very long time.

  Annami pushed past the hurt in her ankle and sprinted toward the roof’s edge, keeping the doorway and the HVAC ducts and anything else she could between herself and the killer, hearing those little peppery whipcrack sounds again, seeing holes appear in things she passed. She reassessed this man again.

  He was smart, unlucky, and, thank god, a terrible shot.

  She reached the edge of the roof and leaped.

  Chapter 3

  A LABORATORY IN A BARN

  GABRIELLE SQUATTED DOWN NEXT TO THE BODY—HER OWN FAMILIAR body, which she was not currently occupying, lying on the barn floor, blood seeping from its head. Her own blood. The body looked so tiny. She never felt small when she was inside it, never let herself or let anyone make her feel that way, but now . . . she was just a little thing in a concert tee, all skinny legs and arms and frizz of hair wrestled into an untidy braid, speared in the bright overhead lights like a specimen on a slide.

  She felt Paul’s knees click in a strange, alarming way as they bent, a weird, crackling release of pressure, and she let that distract her, shift her mind f
rom the horror of staring at her corpse to the experience of being in her husband’s body. Were ratchet-wrench knees something to be alarmed about, or just normal functioning? Paul had never mentioned having bad knees—maybe they’d clicked for so long that he no longer noticed. Or maybe it was the other way around, and her knees—smooth-moving, easy, painless—were the exception, and every human being on earth had rickety-rack joints except her.

  An itch spiked behind one ear, and she reached up to scratch it in a way she realized she’d seen Paul do a thousand times. She’d thought it was just one of his tics, an odd thing he did, but no. It was a specific response to a physical stimulus wired into his system. Some little wonky nerve ending back there that itched from time to time.

  Gabby liked to think of herself as an empathetic person. She tried to look outside herself, consider the worldview and experiences of anyone she was dealing with, walk miles in strange moccasins. Now all of that, every single time she’d ever tried to understand another person’s perspective—it seemed clumsy, ludicrous.

  This experience, being literally inside another person’s body . . . this was understanding.

  She was a cognitive scientist. She had spent her entire professional career thinking about the way people’s behaviors were steered by their conscious and unconscious minds. But even after only ten minutes inside another physical self, it was obvious to her that a great deal of human experience had nothing to do with the brain. It was the body. Each parcel of flesh and its particular configuration of pluses and minuses created a unique reality.

  In other words, it wasn’t just the software—it was the hardware too.

  The squatting position Gabby had adopted, a posture she could have endured indefinitely in her own body, was beginning to ache. Those crackling knees she was borrowing didn’t like the pressure, and the small of Paul’s back wasn’t too happy either.

  She wanted to stand, but she couldn’t, not yet. Her own bundle of hardware, the body that, until very recently, was everything Gabrielle White had ever been, needed to tell her something. Until Gabby had that information, she couldn’t even begin to process her situation, or consider ways she might fix it.

  But she was very afraid, because what she did not know was this: whether her original body was now dead.

  “Man the hell up,” she said, trying to make herself laugh. It didn’t work.

  Gabrielle reached out, hesitated, then touched her body’s neck. It felt warm—reassuring, but not conclusive. Bodies didn’t cool all at once after death. Algor mortis was a slow process—hours—and it had only been what, ten minutes since the shift into Paul’s body? No. Not conclusive.

  She could feel panic beginning to rise and sought refuge in her scientist brain, asking it to build a wall around the fear, using bricks made of observation and analysis. She had already begun, almost by reflex, to catalog any differences she could note between experiences in her own body and Paul’s. There were plenty—just being about eight inches taller brought its own laundry list of new perspectives. Now, she considered the texture of her own skin under her husband’s fingertips. If his sensory system detected anything new in the feel of her skin, she couldn’t tell. She felt like she felt.

  Or perhaps whatever part of her consciousness was her—her essential Gabrielleness—interpreted the sensation at her fingertips as the one she was familiar with, overlaying her template for reality atop what was actually there. The brain was a liar. It lied all the time.

  Reality was what the brain decided it would be. It took in sensory input and swirled it all together into a picture of reality, filling in gaps and cutting out inconvenient contradictions. Every human being had a blind spot in their vision where the optic nerve attached to the back of the retina—the brain just plugged that up with what it figured should be there. Or if it decided sheidl was actually shield, then that’s what you read, unless you paid very close attention.

  So the reality Gabby was currently experiencing might be hers, or maybe some odd new version of it created by Paul’s brain. What would she notice or understand about her current situation that her original body wouldn’t, because the mind she was borrowing was a music professor’s instead of a cognitive scientist’s?

  She could feel herself spinning down a thought vortex, trying to find immediate answers to questions she knew she would be considering for the rest of her life.

  Gabrielle took in a quick breath, a snap of air.

  “It’s too big,” she said, talking to her body, convincing herself. “You need to science this. Break it down; turn the big questions into small questions. Answer those. Do that long enough, it’ll add up, and eventually you’ll understand. Science.”

  In front of her, lying on the floor: the first of those questions. A very small question, which was also the biggest question.

  Was she dead?

  Gabrielle moved her fingers on the warm, still body, putting pressure on its neck just to one side of the windpipe, feeling, waiting . . . and there. A slow, steady rhythm. A pulse.

  The relief was so strong that she fell backward, landing on her ass—her unpleasantly bony, masculine ass—on the wood floor of the barn.

  I’m alive, she thought, and felt her mind click over into a new mode. This was no longer a horror movie—it was a problem to be solved, and that, Gabby White knew how to do.

  Her first instinct was to call for an ambulance. She even reached into her back pocket for her phone, before realizing that it wasn’t there—Paul kept his phone in his front pocket, because that’s where men kept them, their clothing being engineered differently than women’s, with front pockets large enough to actually hold things. That generated a moment of annoyance, which lasted just long enough for a touch of rationality to sneak in.

  The settling of the alive-or-dead question, the escape from that basic panic, had freed Gabby’s mind to consider larger things.

  What she had here might not be an error. Not a lab accident. Not a tragic mistake.

  It might be an invention.

  And if it was, if it was, what might that mean for the world?

  Her eyes turned to the framed photo on her rig’s control station, of the Kitten, blueberry-smeared and happy. What might it mean for her?

  A little flare rose in Gabby’s soul. Of hope, of ownership . . . of pride.

  Maybe she shouldn’t call the hospital just yet. Maybe other people didn’t need to know what had happened here. Not yet.

  Maybe there was time to be a scientist first, to . . . well . . . to see what she was dealing with.

  Gabrielle pushed herself into a kneeling position, and Paul’s joints dutifully complained, clicking again. She reached out to what had until recently been her head and carefully examined it, looking for the source of the blood. Just a small scalp laceration, not even an inch long, just below her hairline on her forehead. She glanced up and noticed a tiny smudge of red on the edge of the lab table. So—the transition of her consciousness out of her body had been instantaneous, with no time to realize it was happening and take some action to break the fall. Instant bonelessness, and a collapse, and a smack on the edge of the table, and then . . . nothing.

  This suggested the movement from Gabrielle’s mind to Paul’s had not been reciprocated by a corresponding shift from Paul to Gabrielle. She had left her body, but he had not come to hers. Or possibly the transfer was too much for him in some physical or psychological way, and he had just shut down into unconsciousness. Impossible to say yet.

  But something in her gut, her analytical instincts, made her think it was a one-way trip. She was in Paul, but he was not in her.

  Which begged the question—where in god’s name was he? Had she . . . overwritten him? Was he lost forever?

  Or, to say it like it really was: had she murdered her husband?

  Gabrielle stood and walked to a storage cabinet across the barn, stepping over the thick power and data cables winding their way across the worn boards like blacksnakes. She paused to make sure the volume
was up on the baby monitor—it was—then retrieved a medical kit from a storage locker. She slapped it down on an aluminum lab table and pulled out a suture kit.

  Moving quickly, she returned to her body. She knelt again, cleaned the wound on her forehead, gave it two quick stitches, and placed a gauze pad over it. She halfway expected her eyes to pop open during the procedure—she purposely hadn’t used lidocaine, to see if the pain might wake her (Paul?) up. It did not. She made the stitches as neat and tight as possible. If she could avoid a significant scar, she wanted to try. After all, she’d be looking at it for the rest of her life.

  Assuming she ever got back to her own body.

  Gabrielle looked at her setup. The laser, the tube with . . . ah.

  “Oops,” she said, startling herself when she heard Paul’s voice. She still wasn’t used to that. It sounded different to her than it usually did, in some hard-to-define way, like trying to explain how one wave on a beach was not the same as any other wave but also was.

  Gabby stood and opened the end of the tube, to see Wilbur the rat—still strapped down, looking at her with what she read as reproach in his dulled eyes. She freed the rodent and placed him back in his enclosure, where he listlessly ambled across the cage, unsure of what to do with himself.

  “You and me both, pal,” she said.

  She looked up into the dark recesses of the barn ceiling and remembered the patterns generated by the apparatus just before the shift, spinning and whirling across her eyes and her mind.

  The lab included an EEG monitoring system, installed on a wheeled cart. Gabby had modified it to take readouts from the many small creatures she used in her experiments, but she still had its original human-sized attachment: a socklike net wired with electrodes, designed to fit over a patient’s head.

  Gabrielle wheeled the cart across the barn and powered up the system. While it booted, she bent next to her unconscious body and fitted the scanning net over her own head, attaching the electrodes one by one. Unlike when she performed this procedure on her rats, the subject here stayed perfectly still. No surprise there. If her body hadn’t awakened while she stitched it up without anesthetic, then getting fitted with a weird sort of hat wouldn’t do it.