Chapter 11: The man in 4B

By midnight, the apartment smelt like pizza, fresh paint and the particular silence of a house with a secret in it.

Anthony had fallen asleep on the new green couch halfway through a movie, an arm flung over his face, a slice of pepperoni in his hand. I took it, put a blanket over his shoulders and stood there feeling like a thief in a very kind house. Lucas had left an hour ago, after fixing a bookshelf that did not need fixing. He had said a flat, polite good luck to me, and I had spent the hour after pretending not to listen for his footsteps.

"Fourth floor," the system said, in my skull. "Door on the left."

"I know," I whispered, "stop nagging."

"I have not said anything for forty minutes."

"You were thinking it loudly."

I put on my sneakers and took the brass key out of my drawer for no reason I could explain, and slipped out the front door in the dark. The stairwell smelt of old carpet and somebody's burned toast. On the way down I tripped on my own shoelace and hung from the rail for ten seconds waiting for a door to open. None did. I felt like a burglar, if burglars were also somebody's boyfriend.

The door to 4B was painted a faded green. Before I could knock, it opened.

Theo stood in the doorway in a gray T-shirt and pajama pants, holding two mugs. He looked far less sunny than he had that afternoon. His glasses were pushed into his hair, and his eyes were tired and sharp and old.

"Oat milk, two sugars," he said, and hold out one. "Took you long enough."

I did not take it. I stood in the hallway with my heart pounding and the key biting into my palm. "You're him."

"I'm what's left of him." He turned and walked into the apartment, leaving the door open. "Come in. Close it. The walls are thin and I'd rather not wake Anthony with a ghost story."

I should have gone back upstairs. Instead I stepped inside and closed the door.

The apartment was small and bare, with a mattress on the floor and a house plant dying slowly on the windowsill. Theo sat on the mattress and set my mug on the floor between us like a peace offering. I sat across from him and did not touch it.

"How long have you been here?" I asked.

"Three months in this body, one in this building." He wrapped both hands around his mug. "I woke up the morning after the Tuesday, and a voice told me I'd been reassigned. That's the polite word. It's a very polite system."

"Reassigned from what?"

"Same thing as you." His smile was thin and bitter. "Conquer Lucas Hale. Ninety days. I did it in sixty-three."

I stared at him. The radiator knocked in the wall. "You succeeded."

"I did. It was awful and wonderful and I had no idea what I was doing." He laughed, a short, scraped-out sound, "He's very hard to love, you know. Then he's very easy. There's no middle. I broke into his heart like a burglar and found out I liked the furniture."

"And then what?"

"And then the system told me the truth." Theo looked at his hands. "Completed mission, target secured, congratulations. And then it told me I would be moved on. Not home. Moved. Into the next job, the next body, the next name. It doesn't send you home, because there is no home. It keeps the shell and swaps the driver."

The key bit into my palm. "That's why you left him a note."

"I had one night. One. I sat on his floor and wrote that I couldn't stay, because it was the only thing I could say that wasn't a lie." His voice cracked. "I wanted to tell him everything. I couldn't. The system doesn't let you. Every time I tried, my mouth just filled with static."

I thought of the balcony and the words stuck in my throat. "But Odette said you were cruel. That you mocked him in public, that you ghosted him."

"I did," said Theo. "On purpose. If he hated me, he'd get over me faster." He looked up, and his eyes were wet. "It didn't work. Obviously. He's been looking for me every single day."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you're about to do exactly what I did." He leaned forward. "You'll hit a hundred, and the system will say mission complete, and the next morning you'll be gone. And Lucas will wake up in an empty bed with a note on the pillow. Again."

My mouth had gone dry. "Is there a way out?"

"I haven't found one." He drank, set the mug down, and looked at the plant. "But there's something else, and that's the part I can't tell whether to be angry about. A new mission loaded this morning."

"What kind of mission?"

"The kind with a name on it." Theo looked back at me, and his face was pale and strange and almost kind. "Ninety days. A new target. And I'm so sorry but he lives right upstairs."

The room tilted. "No."

"Anthony Vale."

"You can't," I said. My voice shook. "He's mine. I mean he isn't. I mean he's not mine, I mean he's a good person, he's the best person I've ever met, and you can't."

"I don't want to." Theo's laugh broke in the middle. "I've seen how he looks at you. I'd rather swallow glass. But the system doesn't ask what I want. It gave me a face and a deadline and a name, and that's all it ever does."Then we stop it."How?"

I opened my mouth and had nothing. We sat in the silence of two people handed the same bad joke from opposite sides.

The door slam opened so hard it cracked against the wall.

Lucas Hale stood in the frame, breathing like he'd run down five flights, hair wild, eyes blazing. He must have followed me. His gaze swept the room, passed over me without stopping, and landed on Theo, who was still sitting cross-legged on his mattress with a mug in his hand and a face I had never seen him wear.

"Who the hell are you?" Lucas said, very quietly.

Theo smiles. It was a tired, tender, heartbreaking smile, and it was not the smile of a stranger.

"Hello, Dom," he said. "I've missed you."