SKYLER WOKE UP in someone else’s head.
His eyes opened to a white void that stretched to infinity.
His body was alone. He knew that without looking, not that he could. He felt … detached. Like a visitor. Physically he was alone, lying on his back on some invisible cushion of air and floating in an endless, abstract void. Mentally, though, something else was going on. Someone else was here with him, running the show.
And what a show.
It was like sitting in a sensory pod, a film of his life coursing through the emitters. Only the frames, the visuals, noises, smells, and touches were all jumbled, all far too fast. Comprehension of any single thing was impossible, yet taken as a whole he knew this was his life on display.
I must be dying. Or dead.
The thought brought immeasurable comfort. The first chip of stone off a prison wall. He thinks, therefore he is. Isn’t that what the philosopher said?
Good, I exist. That’s a start.
The erratic replay of his life ended, and real memory flooded in to fill the space left behind. Memory of pain, of a glancing gunshot wound to his neck and a deeply cut chin, among a thousand other smaller aches, crashed into his brain like snow through a brittle roof and … and, vanished. Just memory, he realized. He reached up and touched his chin. No pain. Just stubble and irregular patches of caked blood.
“You are suitable,” a voice said. It came from everywhere and nowhere, as if he’d said it himself. Only the voice had a feminine quality, and something else. Something artificial. Haunting and synthetic.
“Ana,” he said, voice hoarse. “Ana?”
“She rests,” the voice said, clear and yet ephemeral. A girl’s voice, young woman at best. Strangely accented. No one Skyler knew.
He looked around. A pointless effort and yet he found comfort in the fact that his head did not ache. White stretched off in every direction as if he were inside a vast …
Bubble.
Skyler stretched his hand out, felt a pressure, a bulging. This is familiar. This I know. He pressed harder and the void seemed suddenly very much finite. A cocoon or egg, centimeters from his body.
“What did you mean? Suitable for what?”
“You are suitable.”
“Can I leave?” he asked, unsure whom he was speaking to.
“If you’re ready.”
He swallowed, not expecting that. And, worse, realizing with a sudden crystalline clarity that the voice was the other entity in his head. The one who’d been watching his life. “What will I find out there? Bullets already in flight? More death?”
“A decision.”
“Is that all?”
“All that matters.”
He grunted. “Will you be out there?”
“Yes.”
“So you don’t matter?”
“I’m the decision,” she said simply.
A chill ran the length of Skyler’s body, bringing goose-flesh to his arms and legs. He shivered, and realized suddenly that he was alone in his own head again.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.” Yet detached now. Separate.
Skyler pushed his other hand against the milky white void. “What do I call you?”
A slight hesitation. “Eve.”
He waited, digesting the name. He didn’t know anyone named Eve, and yet somehow he’d known she would say that. As if no other name would match.
The void began to stretch around his hands, pushing outward.
A nervous energy began to build in him. “Aren’t you going to ask what to call me?”
“I know what to call you.”