They Auctioned the Wrong Man

Chapter 1

My throat felt like I had swallowed a handful of dry gravel and washed it down with freezer burn.

When the frosted glass lid above me hissed and slid back, the first thing that hit me was the smell of recycled air and lemon disinfectant. The second was a very bright ceiling strip that made my eyes water.

I tried to sit up. My elbows bumped against padded composite walls. I was lying in a narrow metal trough, wearing a pale, collarless jumpsuit that definitely did not belong to me. The last thing I remembered was a clinic in Chicago, a cardiologist with bad news, a consent form for experimental cryo-preservation, and my sister Hannah squeezing my hand until my knuckles turned white.

"Heart rate eighty-four and climbing," a woman's voice said to my left. "Clear the condensation from the chest leads. Check the specimen's pupils."

Specimen. That was a new one. Usually, nurses at least called me "hon" or "Mr. Ashby" before they shone a penlight into my skull.

A face leaned over the rim of the pod. She wore a white surgical mask and a slate-grey cap, her dark eyes entirely uninterested in my personal wellbeing. She pulled my right eyelid up with a gloved thumb, flashed a tiny blue beam across my cornea, and let go.

"Pupils equal and reactive," she said. "Motor response returning. Get him on the scale before the transfer guard arrives."

"Hey," I croaked. It came out sounding like a rusted hinge. I cleared my throat and tried again, dropping into the calm, steady cadence I had used for seven years behind a 911 dispatch console. "Excuse me. My name is Dean Ashby. What hospital is this?"

Nobody answered. The woman in the mask didn't even blink. She stepped back and tapped a clipboard that was just a thin sheet of glowing glass.

Two other women in grey uniforms reached into the trough, hooked their hands under my armpits, and hauled me upright. My knees buckled the second my bare feet touched the cold floor. Seven years of working nights and volunteer EMT shifts had taught me how to catch dead weight, and right now, I was the dead weight. My muscles felt like half-set gelatin.

They didn't ask if I was dizzy. They walked me three paces forward and planted me on a square steel plate set flush into the floor.

"Hands at your sides," the taller guard said.

A red line of light swept down from an overhead arch, painting my face, chest, and legs in a warm tingle that raised the hairs on my forearms. On the wall in front of me, a display panel blinked to life.

Mass: 78.4 kg.

Height: 181 cm.

Cardiopulmonary: Mild residual irregularity.

Status: Intact.

"Wait a second," I said, squinting at the board. "Intact? Are you checking my organs or shipping me via freight?"

The woman in the surgical mask stepped up beside the scale holding a heavy curved band of matte grey metal. Before I could pull my arm back, one of the guards pinned my left wrist against her hip. The medic snapped the cuff around my skin.

There was no keyhole and no clasp. The seam simply fused with a faint click, and a thin ring around the center of the band lit up with a steady, cold blue glow. A tiny needle pricked the underside of my wrist, drawing a bead of blood into the metal housing.

"Hey, easy," I said, tugging my arm back once they released it. I ran my right thumb around the band. There was no catch, no hinge, and not enough gap to slide a fingernail underneath. "I didn't sign a billing release for jewelry."

The masked woman looked down at her glass tablet, where a matching blue icon had just begun to pulse in time with my heartbeat. She tapped a comm button pinned to her collar.

"Intake to Registry," she said into the mic. "Unit 7 is conscious."

Unit 7. Not Dean. Not Mr. Ashby. First I was a specimen, now I was office furniture.

"Look, ma'am," I said, keeping my hands open and visible at chest height—standard de-escalation posture for dealing with people who had badges and zero sense of humor. "My name is Dean Ashby. I went into cryo-stasis in 2026 for a ventricular defect. Did the procedure work? How long was I under?"

The masked woman turned her back on me and stripped off her gloves, dropping them into a disposal chute. The two guards moved to flank my shoulders, waiting for a heavy steel door at the end of the bay to cycle open.

Beside the instrument cart stood a younger nurse who had been coiling sensor leads. She looked about twenty-two, with freckles across the bridge of her nose and her cap tucked slightly crooked over red hair. When I looked directly at her, she glanced toward the masked medic's back, then down at the floor near my toes.

"Year 291," she whispered.

I stared at her. "Two-ninety-one what? Days?"

She didn't look up again. She grabbed her tray of leads and hurried through a side door, letting it hiss shut behind her.

Two hundred and ninety-one didn't make sense in days, and it definitely didn't make sense in years if we were still using the calendar I grew up with. Even my worst math couldn't turn 2026 into 291 unless someone had hit the reset button on the whole world.

"Move," the taller guard said, pressing two fingers between my shoulder blades.

She steered me out of the recovery bay and into a long, curving corridor. The air smelled less like antiseptic out here and more like damp concrete and boiled cabbage. My legs were starting to remember their job, though my heart gave an odd, fluttering skip against my ribs every ten steps. Every time it did, the blue ring on my left wrist flickered twice before settling back into a solid glow.

Look for the exits. Read the signage. Count the doors. It was an old habit from walking into chaotic apartment buildings on night calls, and right now it was the only thing keeping me from panicking.

The corridor didn't have exit signs. It had a palm-scan pad beside every hatch, and none of the guards carried weapons I recognized—just short black batons clipped to their belts alongside silver rank bars.

Halfway down the hall, the concrete wall gave way to a floor-to-ceiling sheet of reinforced glass overlooking a sunken common hall below us.

I slowed my steps. The guard behind me didn't shove me right away; she was waiting for the palm-scanner at the next checkpoint to clear her print.

Down in the hall beneath the glass, thirty or forty men were sitting in neat, straight rows on backless benches. Every single one of them wore the exact same pale, collarless jumpsuit I had on. None of them were reading. None of them were talking. Most of them looked between twenty-two and forty, their shoulders rounded, their hands resting palm-up on their knees as if waiting for an inspection.

And on every left wrist in the hall, a thin ring of blue light pulsed in the dim air.

A man sitting on the end of the nearest row—a kid, really, no older than twenty-two, with sandy hair and round shoulders—glanced up toward the walkway glass. His eyes caught mine. He saw the intake guards at my elbows, and my mouth opening as I started to ask the guard what kind of prison this was.

The kid on the bench raised one finger a fraction of an inch off his knee and gave the smallest possible shake of his head.

Looking straight up at me through the glass, he shaped two words with his lips:

"Don't talk."