Well, that secret hasn’t been one for a while, she thought. “What are you saying?” She said, aloud. “You know his name?” his true name?

  “Of-fucking-course I do,” Mattias said, his voice uncharacteristically harsh for such a soft spoken man. “He’s Alex West, and you’re Dr. West, and I have no fucking idea where I am or how I got here. What’s going on, Hawk?”

  Her gut was in freefall. She liked Mattias, the way she liked Henry Dyson. Something was off with him in ways that profoundly undermined even her concept of the man. He was moving wrong, for god’s sake. Moving like…like…

  “Do you know where you are?” She said.

  Mattias rolled his eyes, a very un-Mattias look. “I’m in an Army tent. Somewhere. I’m not too sure where. Probably somewhere in Boston though, right? What happened, Hawk? Did I get hit in the head?”

  She looked at the Shadow, who looked confused and murderously furious, and she had to hope that boiling rage wasn’t about to be turned against her. She didn’t think it was. Mattias’s condition was very much not her fault. But she’d lied to him, deceived him, and now he knew about it. He wasn’t going to be too pleased with her right now.

  “Tell me,” she said, choosing her words very carefully, “Who you think you are.”

  There was a long silence, and then the man that looked like Mattias turned a truly vomitous shade of green. “Oh God,” he said. “Tell me I’m not.”

  “Tell me you’re not who?”

  “Not dead. Hawk, please God tell me I’m not dead.”

  Heart now somewhere beneath the crust of the Earth, Hawk said, “Who are you?”

  And with world-shattering panic, the man in front of her said, “I hope to God you’re fucking with me Hawk. I’m Henry Dyson.”

  ***

  “It’s a protocol Kaiser Willheim invented,” the man who claimed to be both Archon Mattias and Henry Dyson said this miserably. He’d been hysterical for several minutes while people brought him water and a nurse in fatigues threatened to give him a strong sedative. But he’d steadied, largely under his own willpower. Hawk didn’t know what to say or do, and the Shadow…well, he was just watching with amusement and wrath in equal measures. A sort of what will they do today that threatened murder if he didn’t like the answer. And now they were back to where Mattias—or Henry, or whoever—could actually explain what was going on. “Well, ‘invented’ the way the man always invents things.”

  “Somebody else does it and he buys the patent?” Hawk said, drily.

  “Yep,” said the miserable man. “And anyone who works for him at a certain level has to use it. It’s in the contract. You can’t say no.”

  “Or else you’re fired?” Hawk said.

  A nod.

  “So…what is it?” She said.

  “It’s an injection. You make it out of the stem cells of your target. From there, we’re able to isolate and propagate the cells that connect to memory. It’s way beyond my field. I can’t pretend to understand it. But you can essentially copy someone’s entire mind into a serum. You then inject that serum into someone—”

  “And the injected mind takes over.” Hawk said, feeling stark cold. “Holy shit.”

  “It’s complicated. It’s expensive. And you have to have a spinal tap. So either willing, or someone has to be restrained. It only copies the memories up to the sample of spinal fluid, so we have it done regularly. Every six months, or immediately after a big breakthrough, or we ask for it. He called it our save files. I almost thought it was cool.” He looked down at his hands. “These aren’t my hands. This isn’t my voice, this isn’t my face…oh god, oh god, oh, god.”

  Hawk whispered soothing nonsense for a minute, a flood of stop, and slow down, and it will be okay. Then, when he’d calmed a bit, she said, “How does it work with the hosts?”

  “I don’t know. This is the first time I’ve seen it work. Oh, god, this isn’t my body…where is my body? Where am I? Am I dead? Like, really, really dead?”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Kaiser stabbed you in the heart.” Hawk said. “You died in Emile Yong’s arms.”

  “Oh,” he said, and began to sob a little. Then he managed, “Well, not the way I wanted our romance to end.”

  “Well, I’m sure they’re not enamored of Mattias, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call him undesirable,” The Shadow said, exposing his wrath with petulance. “You and he and Emile could all form a charming little family. You’d just have to take turns.”

  “Take…no, no, no, you don’t understand. The serum isn’t permanent. It’s there so that you can exist long enough to be debriefed. Who is Mattias?”

  A further bristling of the Shadow. Hawk spoke quickly to interrupt whatever angry screed he was about to lay down. “He’s the man whose body you’re inhabiting. And he’s a friend of yours. You don’t remember him?”

  “I wouldn’t. Last thing I remember is the needle going in for a spinal tap, right before we all left for Boston. I told Kaiser it wasn’t necessary—”

  “But the fucker had plans otherwise,” Hawk whispered, and then whirled around and struck a tent pole, hard. It made an impotent ringing sound, the whole tent shook, and it made her hand hurt quite a bit. She shook the tingles out and said, “Sorry,” to her audience.

  “You said Kaiser stabbed me?” He said.

  “Yes,” Hawk said. “He was being arrested.”

  Musing silence. “I would have killed to watch that.”

  “You were killed, watching that.” Hawk said.

  “So,” The Shadow interrupted. “This inhabitation is temporary? Mattias will recover from this?”

  “Yeah. In like, a week. It’s tough on the host body, though. Seizures, sometimes a struggle for control, which can exacerbate the seizures. There’s a real risk of death as long as the serum is still…” and with that last word, Mattias’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and he collapsed onto the bed.

  Instantly medics were upon him, shoving both Hawk and the Shadow out of the medical tent. Shouts for injectables, for IVs, for oxygen, echoed through the khaki walls of the pedestrian army tent. It wasn’t fair, Hawk thought. This is where the gold and the riches and the beauty should have been. It should surround the bedside of a good man, not Nasheth’s megalomania. She had to trust instead the richness of humanity around him, the clever hands and fingers, the minds trained to master medicine, and the hearts that daily broke themselves in care of others. Yes. That was what she had to hope in, believe in. And still she found herself curling bits of her filthy chemise against her body, as if that could somehow make Mattias and the remnants of Henry survive.

  “Did you know this was possible?” The Shadow said, his voice soft as panther paws in darkness…and as lethal. “Did you allow Kaiser to carry this weapon into my world? And damage my friend?”

  “No. No!” she said, a new panic rising in her throat. “I didn’t know any of it could be done.” She paused, and her mind jumped from one track to another. “Oh God. Em. I need to go check on them.”

  “Good. Go. Get out of my sight.” His contempt was palatable. All you had to do was breathe the same air, and you could taste it.

  Good, she thought.

  It took every part of her not to cry.

  ***

  Em was at the action station, where a handful of fellow scientists were trying and failing to get a handle on what was going on here. They looked bad, which was saying a lot for them. They usually dressed in a combination of thrift store, anarchist, and dominatrix. Now they were trapped in khaki, and the riotous shades of their hair—purple and orange figured predominantly—seemed to have brightened in compensation. But the heaviness of their attitude dampened even the blazing neon in their curls.

  “Hi,” Hawk said. “You okay?”

  They didn’t look up from the papers they were pouring over. “Is that like ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?’ sort of question? Because otherwise you can go fuck off comprehensively.”

  Yeah. They were not okay. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t.” They said, very softly. Silence reigned for a few heartbeats, and then they added, “Don’t play that game, that ‘there, there’ shit. It’s not okay. It’s not going to be okay for a while. I’ll cry, and I’ll hate it, and then maybe I’ll be able to talk. But right now I just want the whole world to fuck off. So can you? Kindly? Just fuck off?”

  Hawk thought for a second. “No,” she said, cautiously, “but I can sit near and be quiet.”

  “No,” Em said. “Quiet is bad. Quiet is when I think—” They stopped. Shuddered. Dropped their head and muttered “Don’t think about it, don’t think about it,” rapid-fire, while they turned back to their reading. “I need to be busy. I need to work. I need to not feel. You’re making me feel, Hawk. I need you to stop it.”

  Hawk, who had handled her own grief by going down a hole after her husband and who had to admit, that really had only made it worse, sighed and backed down. “If you need me—”

  “I will sit on your chest and force the help out of you with bamboo skewers. Right now, I just need you to go away.”

  There was, Hawk thought as she walked away, a hierarchy of grief. The people closest to the dead get helped by those who were less near, with each ring being supported by the people who knew less, whose grief was, perhaps, not quite so full. Hawk had known Henry Dyson as a colleague. Emile had loved him. It had been a sharp love, the sort forged of rivalry, tempered, perhaps, by the conflicts and failures that had lain between the two scientists. A little clique of entomologists, the three of them. Emile had kept Henry at arm’s length out of fear—fear of pain, fear of loss, fear of rejection, or just all of the above. And he had loved them back, with apologies and shame because he had stolen their research once. Hawk had seen them fall in love with joy; now that was ashes too. She wanted to force her way in on Emile. Force them to accept her comfort, her performative sorrow. But that wasn’t what they needed. They’d said what they needed and while it was too simple to satisfy her own grieving heart, Hawk had to do what Em needed, and not what she wanted at all.