Madeline gave me a tender kiss on the cheek and set her hand on my belly. She smiled at me with brimming eyes. “Have they told you? You’re baby’s just fine,” she said. “All this time you’ve been in a coma, your little baby has been growing along just perfectly inside you.”
My ears stopped working. Her mouth kept going but my mind froze.
No.
No baby.
I could not be pregnant. I could not be in some other girl’s body. This whole thing with the snow outside and the hospital and the strange hands attached to my arms had to be a nightmare. It had to be some new torture from Dean Berg, some dream seed or mining gone wrong.
Just then, my belly dipped again, only now I recognized that it wasn’t just gravity pulling at me. I had a creature in there. Nudging. Horror should have woken me from a nightmare, but it didn’t. It couldn’t.
This was real. This body was real, and it was mine.
3
THEA
BLINK TWICE
WHERE ARE YOU? I screamed silently.
But still there was no answer. My inner voice had vanished, and I’d jumped into my new hell alone.
I flailed my hand against the bedrail, desperate to jolt awake or jar myself back to my old body, but the sharp pain did nothing except start the heart monitor beeping again.
“Althea, stop. You’ll hurt yourself,” Diego said.
I didn’t care if I hurt myself. I had to get out and away from all of this. I struggled to move, but my scrawny arms had hardly any strength, and my body responded only by bumping awkwardly under my coverlet. Panic made me wild, and I reached frantically for the nurse. She caught me firmly.
“Calm down, now,” she said. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions, but thrashing about will not help anybody.”
You don’t understand, I thought. These are not your normal questions. What happened to me? Where’s my real body?
My tongue was as stupid as clay.
“Let me, Ida,” said Madeline, and she slipped forward to take my hands. “You’re all right, Althea. Look at me. You’re going to be just fine. We’re all here to help you.”
I looked back and forth between Madeline and Diego, who clearly thought they were my parents. But they were not.
“Are you in pain anywhere? Does anything hurt? Your head? Your joints?” Madeline asked.
I paused to take stock. My belly was a compact knoll in the landscape of my bed, and that turning I’d felt seemed ready to happen again. I pulled free from Madeline and pressed my hands to my belly, astounded by the dense curve. My normal waist was utterly gone. I touched my face. To my fingertips, my cheeks and jaw felt too wide and boney. On my head, I found a fine softness that was nothing like my old thick waves of hair. I needed to see myself.
I looked Madeline straight in the eye and willed her to understand me. Then I patted my cheek deliberately and held my hand up before my face, mimicking that I was gazing into a mirror.
“She wants to see herself,” Diego said. “Madeline, she’s asking for a mirror.” He laughed again in disbelief.
“One sec,” Madeline said. She rustled through her purse, opened up a compact, and handed it to me.
The sight in the little circle was bizarre. My hazel eyes, curly dark hair, and gap-toothed mouth were all gone. Instead, a girl with wide-set, sunken, gray eyes gazed back at me. Her tan-skinned cheeks were unnaturally wilted, and patches of acne marred her chin, nose, and forehead. Her lips were full, but dry and tender looking. When I turned my head slightly, I found a scar along her right temple that disappeared up into her hairline, and when I smoothed back my new soft hair, brown and silky limp, I saw the tip of her ear was missing, as if the road had taken a bite out of it. I touched it tenderly, hearing the faint tracing sound of my finger along the ridge. I peered at her eyes again, trying to see if any hint of Rosie would shine back out at me, but the mask was complete. My physical exterior was entirely new.
Whoa, I thought. It didn’t seem possible, but somehow my consciousness had arrived in another girl’s body. When I’d made my leap with my love for Dubbs, I’d never imagined that this could happen. I tilted the mirror slowly, trying different angles. I tugged at my skin, trying to absorb the truth. This sad-eyed, wasted girl in the mirror was me. I’d ended up in a Halloween mask I couldn’t take off.
What had happened to my old body?
“Don’t you worry,” Madeline said gently. “You might not look like your regular lovely self at the moment, but we know she’s in there. That’s all that matters.”
The irony was laughable. I didn’t look anything like myself, but at least Althea didn’t look like herself, either. I took a more critical look at Madeline, and the girl in the mirror, noting the resemblance of the wide-spaced eyes. Under the sickliness, my new face had a mix of features from both parents, with my chin and darker coloring closer to Diego’s. The way he spoke Spanish clicked. Althea had some Latina heritage, I thought.
“She seems so alert,” Diego said. “I can’t get over it. After all this time.”
“Remember the doctor who told us to unplug her?” Madeline said.
“Which one?”
“That first one,” she said. “That genius back in Houston. I wish he could see this now. Have you called your father yet?”
“I will. He’ll be over the moon. The whole family will.”
A tap came at the door, and a woman in a white coat walked in. “I hear someone’s awake,” she said, smiling.
At the sight of her, a shock of jangled memories ignited in me like a whole grid of power surging on at once: overheard calls between this doctor and Dean Berg, nights of sneaking around the Forge School, and the vault of dreamers I’d uncovered deep under the school. I’d endured the torture of being mined when I was still impossibly awake.
Linus! Panic hit me again. They had taken Linus, too!
The alarm sounded behind me once more, and the nurse reached for it again. The beeping changed to a regular, soft blip noise that matched the tempo of my heartbeat.
“She has been very excited,” the nurse said, shifting to make room for the doctor.
“I’m not at all surprised. This is a big day,” Dr. Fallon said. “We can mark down February twenty-fifth as her second birthday. Hello, Althea. I’m Dr. Fallon, your surgeon. How are you feeling? A little confused, maybe. Any pain?”
Try anger.
They raised the head of my bed more. Dr. Fallon shone a penlight to blind me in one of my eyes, and then the other. “Can you follow the tip of my finger?” She lifted a digit before my eyes and began to move it slowly left and right, up and down.
Try explaining how you stole months of my life and stuffed me in a different body.
I ignored her finger and studied her face instead, searching past the afterglow of the penlight for a hint of the monster inside her. Her pale skin, black hair, and red lipstick were as vivid as a model’s, and her eyes were frost blue. This was the doctor who had bought dream seeds from Dean Berg after he mined them from unwitting students at Forge. She’d collaborated with him. As far as I was concerned, she was as vile and evil as he was. My heart monitor audibly kicked into a faster rhythm.
The doctor lowered her finger. “Interesting,” she said.