Chapter Two: The Wrong Ceiling

The ceiling was wrong.

It was white and very high, with a chandelier hanging from the middle of it like an expensive icicle, and Flora lay under it for a full ten seconds before she worked out the problem. She was not underwater. She was not cold. Nothing in the air smelled of river.

She was on her back on a marble floor, and something hard was pressing into her spine. The something was the edge of a stair.

She had been trained to wake slowly and take stock before moving, so she took stock. Tailbone, bruised. Left wrist, sprained but not broken. A dull ache over the right ear that would be a lump by evening. Her left arm, which had stopped answering in the river, bent when she asked it to.

Someone was screaming.

It was a thin, high scream, the kind a person produces out of habit rather than panic. It came from a woman in a gray uniform at the end of the hall, holding a feather duster like a flag. “Miss Eliza! Madam, come quickly, Miss Eliza has fallen!”

Flora looked behind her for Miss Eliza.

There was no one there.

“Stop,” she said, meaning to tell the woman to stop shouting. The voice that came out was lighter than hers, younger, with a rasp in it. She stopped. She lifted her hand in front of her face. Slim fingers. Chipped pink polish. A small callus on the middle finger, where someone had held a pen for years.

Not her hand. Hers had a scar across the knuckles from a window she did not intend to discuss.

“Host is awake!” said a voice inside her head, bright and squeaky and delighted. “Oh, thank goodness. I was starting to think the revival had failed. Pulse normal, brain function present, personality intact. Welcome to your fresh start!”

“No,” said Flora.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m dead. This is a concussion. I’m hearing things.”

“You were dead,” the voice agreed. “And you do have a mild concussion. We can be both.”

Something small and gold had appeared on her breastbone. A rabbit, about the size of a teacup, sitting there as if it paid rent. It had no weight at all. It looked at her with enormous satisfaction.

Flora had once talked a man out of detonating a building. She did not scream. She asked a practical question. “What are you?”

“Aurex. The Supreme Treasure System. Rex, if you’re nice.”

“I’m not nice.”

“I’m getting that.”

Heels struck the marble, fast and sharp, and the maid’s shouting got a reply. A woman swept into the hall in a cream silk blouse and pearls, with a phone in one hand and the expression of someone who had been interrupted during something important. She stopped three feet from Flora and looked her over, not for injuries but for damage.

“Is she bleeding?” the woman asked the maid. “Not on the rug. That rug came from Istanbul.”

“No, Madam, I don’t think so.”

“Then get up, Eliza.” The woman’s eyes had already gone back to her phone. “You’ve been dramatic since you were six, and I will not have the neighbors hear about this.”

Flora sat up slowly. Her head swam and settled. She noted the grip on the phone, tight enough to whiten the knuckles, and the way the woman’s gaze skipped past her face and then, very briefly, went back. Mother, then. Or something that wore the title. Whatever she felt, she had filed it somewhere she wouldn’t have to look at it.

“I fell down the stairs,” Flora said.

“Obviously you fell down the stairs. The question is why you were on them.”

“Which stairs?”

The woman stared. “Did you hit your head? Please don’t tell me you hit your head. The doctor charges double on weekends.”

“Only a little.”

“Then you’re fine.”

A shadow moved on the landing above them. Flora tipped her head back and found a girl in a cream sweater gripping the banister, her face the color of milk. She looked about Flora’s age, pretty in a careful, well-practiced way. Her right hand was shut tight inside her sleeve, tight enough that the cuff had bunched.

“I only just got here,” the girl said, to nobody who had asked. “I heard her scream.”

“Nobody screamed,” said Flora. “I was unconscious.”

The maid stopped mid-gasp. The girl’s mouth opened and closed. Her eyes dropped to Flora’s throat, stayed there for a second too long, then jumped away as if the skin was hot.

Interesting, Flora thought.

“Don’t stare,” Rex murmured, somewhere behind her ear. “Background later. Bedroom first. There’s something you need to see.”

The bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor that smelled of floor polish and disapproval. The maid helped her as far as the door, then retreated with the speed of a woman who had been told not to hover. Flora shut it, leaned on it, and took in what the girl had left behind.

A single bed with a pale blue cover. A desk piled with paper. And on every wall, taped, pinned and layered like wallpaper, film posters. Fight scenes, mostly. A woman mid-kick over a burning car. A woman dangling from a helicopter ladder, grinning. Under the desk sat a shoebox of ticket stubs, and on top of the paper pile was a script with a cracked spine and so many margin notes the original text was barely visible.

Please let me do my own stunts, said the handwriting on the cover page, underlined twice.

Flora looked at it for longer than she meant to.

Then she went to the mirror.

The face in it was round-cheeked and wide-eyed, with a small stubborn chin that had probably never been allowed to win an argument. Twenty-two, perhaps. Pale from the fall. A stranger, entirely, until she looked at the neck.

A raw red line circled it, thin as a wire. At the back, below the hairline, the skin was scraped in a short, angry streak.

“Chain,” Flora said.

“Someone tore it off,” said Rex, quieter than before. “Hard. The previous host wore something here for most of her life. It isn’t on this body. It isn’t in this room.”

“Who was she?”

“Eliza Sinclair. Twenty-two. Died forty minutes ago, at the bottom of those stairs.” The rabbit sat down on the dresser. “Your soul landed in what was left. Congratulations, you’re her now. There’s a memory vault with her whole life in it. It’s locked, except for one percent.”

“Which one percent?”

Rex didn’t answer. Flora pressed her fingers against the mark on her neck and the room slid sideways.

A hand. A small one, grubby at the nails, pushing something cold and thin into her palm. A child’s voice, too young to sound bossy and trying anyway. Hold on to it. Don’t lose it.

Then gone, and the mirror back, and her own breath loud in the quiet.

Flora stood very still. Somewhere out there, a family had set a table for a daughter who wasn’t coming. Four men were about to get a phone call she was never going to make. She thought of Andrea clearing his throat. Of Liam saying call and meaning it. Of Eric’s tea, going cold on the rail.

She let herself have exactly one breath for it. Then she put it away, because she had work.

“Whoever took it,” she said, “is still in the house.”

“Very likely.”

“The girl on the landing. The one who couldn’t stop looking at my neck.”

“Also very likely,” Rex said, pleased. “First mission is already loaded. Find the necklace. Reward to be determined.”

Eliza Sinclair, Flora thought, testing the name like a step that might not hold. It held.

Someone in this house had robbed a dead girl. She intended to ask them about it politely, exactly once.