Chapter 2
959 Words
The first thing I saw was a ceiling.
Cream colored. High. A single recessed light above me, dim, like someone had turned it down on purpose.
The second thing I noticed was my wrists.
I looked down. They were bound together in my lap with a black zip tie, tight enough that the skin around it had gone slightly pink. I was sitting in a chair. A good chair — cushioned, upholstered in grey, the kind of chair that belonged in a room with expensive things. I was in a room with expensive things. Dark carpet. Heavy curtains drawn across what had to be floor-to-ceiling windows. A low table to my left with a glass of water on it, untouched.
The third thing I noticed was my hands.
They were not my hands.
I stared at them for a very long time. Longer fingers than mine. Different knuckles. A small scar on the right thumb that I had no memory of getting. Slender, pale, the nails cut short and clean. I turned them over — still bound, moving together — and the palms were unfamiliar to me in a way that was so wrong and so complete that my brain simply refused to process it for several seconds.
These were not Elena maji Voss's hands.
Whose hands are these?
I lifted my eyes slowly.
There was a guard by the door.
He was big — broad-shouldered, dressed in black, standing with his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes pointed at the middle distance the way trained people stand when they're waiting for something. He hadn't noticed I was awake yet. Or he had and he was waiting for instructions.
My mouth was dry. My heart — someone's heart — was going too fast.
I tried to think.
Think, Elena. Think. You're in a room. You're tied to a chair. There's a guard. You just — you fell. You fell thirty-eight floors and you are sitting in a chair and breathing and your hands are the wrong hands and ......
Think.
I had memories.
That was the thing that hit me next, because the memories started arriving the way luggage arrives in an airport hall way, one at a time, slow, then all at once. They weren't mine. I knew they weren't mine the same way I knew these weren't my hands — not because they felt foreign exactly, but because I could see the edges of them. Like pages from a book that I hadn't lived but could read.
A kitchen. Smaller than ours. A man — older, tired, cigarette smell — sitting across a table explaining something in a voice that asked for forgiveness and expected none. An airport. A flight. A black car and men who did not make conversation. A door closing.
A name.
Aria.
Aria Chen.
The name arrived with weight behind it — like it had been someone's name for twenty-two years before it became mine in the last thirty seconds. And with the name came more: a father's debt. A family in Shanghai who did not know where she was. A document — a contract — printed on paper with a letterhead I recognized even through borrowed memory.
Harrington.
The whole room tilted.
I knew where I was.
I was in the Harrington building. A different floor than the penthouse — lower, interior, no view visible through the curtains. I was in Aria Chen's body. I had Aria Chen's memories like a second set of furniture in a house I'd just moved into — all of it present, none of it mine. And the Harrington contract meant —
The guard moved.
He walked to the door, opened it, leaned out, exchanged a few quiet words with someone in the hallway. Then he turned back into the room and looked at me and registered that my eyes were open.
"You're awake," he said. Not unkindly. Neutral. Professional.
I opened my mouth. My voice came out slightly wrong — lower than I expected, a faint accent underneath it that was Aria's and not mine. "Where—" I stopped. Tried again. "Where am I?"
He didn't answer that. He reached for a radio on his belt instead and said two words into it.
"She's up."
Then he looked back at me, and his expression shifted into something almost apologetic, the way people look when they're about to deliver news they weren't the ones to decide.
"Welcome back, Ms. Chen," he said. "Mr. Harrington will be with you shortly."
I stared at him with a bit of confusion
Ms. Chen.
He said it like it was my name. Like it had always been my name. Like there was nothing in the room but a woman called Aria Chen sitting calmly in a chair waiting for a man named Harrington.
I looked down at the wrong hands in my lap.
The zip tie pressed pink against unfamiliar skin.
And somewhere very deep, underneath the terror and the confusion and the impossible fact of everything that had just happened to me — underneath all of it — something went quiet and cold and awake in a way that had nothing to do with the body I was sitting in.
Mr. Harrington.
Dale.
He was here. In this building. Coming to this room. He thought I was Aria Chen and I was zip-tied to a chair and I did not have a single thing except two sets of memories, a secondhand dress I wasn't wearing anymore, and the very specific kind of rage that lives in a girl who has been underestimated her entire life.
I straightened my spine.
I lifted my chin.
Okay, I thought. Okay, then.
Let's see what you do next, Dale Harrington.
- Writer
