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  ‘I should think so too!’ ‘O’Donnell’ says.

  ‘Oh,’ Fletcher replies, ‘one more thing, Mr Spencer.’ This time he’s put real emphasis on the name, there’s no way the man could have missed it.

  ‘Yes?’ the pretend O’Donnell says, turning to face him.

  ‘Your name. It’s not Mr Spencer.’ Fletcher decks him one.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Steve is really panicking now.

  ‘Just help me,’ Fletcher says, grabbing the false O’Donnell and putting him in a neck hold. ‘This isn’t our client.’

  ‘What do you mean it’s not our client?’ asks Steve, still panicking, hopping from one foot to the other. Then the penny seems to drop. ‘Oh!’

  ‘Help me with him!’ Fletcher says, and as he’s squeezing the man’s neck tightly, he can feel the strength slipping from him. He’s got to be careful here; he doesn’t want to kill O’Donnell, that wouldn’t help anyone in the long run. He needs to look after this body so O’Donnell has got somewhere to return to, that way he can keep him on as a client and they still have a chance to make this mess go away.

  He lets go of the man’s neck. He’s not a brilliant fighter but he knows a trick or two. One of his mum’s first boyfriends had been a squaddie, and he’d shown Fletcher stuff when the two of them were on their own. He knows you have to be careful with a choke hold—you’re much more likely to kill someone than knock them out, whatever you see in the movies. Still, he thinks he’s got away with it, as the big man is slumping to the floor.

  ‘Grab his legs!’ he tells Steve and, between them, they drag the body back to the transfer room.

  They drop him on his couch and Steve starts fiddling with the transfer headset while Fletcher moves to the pyramid at the centre.

  He glances over at Mrs Cummings. Bless her, he thinks, she does enjoy her Tuesday morning ballet class.

  ‘He’s hooked up,’ says Steve, and Fletcher starts pressing at the lit sections on the machine. It took him a few weeks to figure this out and, even now, he’s never quite sure what he’s doing. When you’re operating it you can often feel the machine itself talking back to you in your head, like it knows what you’re trying to do and is, in a limited way, guiding you. On one side of the pyramid it shows a local map so you scan for a suitable body, you select one, then transfer. That body is held, a blinking light, on a different side of the pyramid. When you want to reverse that transfer, you hit the active light and the machine swaps them back.

  The light isn’t there.

  ‘Oh, don’t start . . .’ Fletcher moves around the machine, trying to see if it’s moved elsewhere. Maybe O’Donnell’s body waking up has disrupted the connection somehow.

  The light definitely isn’t there.

  ‘Are you doing it, Mr Fletcher?’ Steve asks and Fletcher is a few deep breaths away from punching him.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ he admits and Steve looks really panicked then. Later, Fletcher will think back on that moment and realise he should have read more into that look but, for now, he’s so occupied with the single problem in front of him that it passes him by.

  ‘Think, think . . .’ He moves around the pyramid again. Definitely no light.

  There’s a low groan from O’Donnell’s body.

  ‘I think he’s waking up, Mr Fletcher,’ says Steve.

  Oh, this is just getting too much. He should just kill O’Donnell now and make the whole problem go away. But Fletcher really doesn’t want to lose the money. He makes a decision.

  ‘I need to think how to sort this out. For now we lock him up.’

  ‘Lock him up?’

  ‘Just grab his bloody legs again, will you?’

  They pick O’Donnell’s body up and Fletcher guides them back out into the corridor and towards the room at the far end. The only room with a lock.

  ‘In there?’ Steve looks worried; he knows he’s not allowed in this room. It’s another one of the rules. Fletcher’s actually slightly pleased by that. See? All you’ve got to do is scare your staff; then they’ll always do as they’re told.

  ‘Just help me get him to the door then you can go and check on Mrs Cummings.’

  Steve looks relieved.

  They prop O’Donnell against the wall and Fletcher gets his keys out of his pocket.

  ‘What about his pockets?’ Steve asks. ‘He might have a phone or something.’

  This hasn’t occurred to Fletcher and, as relieved as he is that Steve has suggested it, he’s damned if he’s going to give him the credit for it.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ he says, digging around in O’Donnell’s suit. ‘You think I’d lock him up without checking?’

  ‘No,’ says Steve, looking worried. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Just go and check on Mrs Cummings,’ Fletcher says. ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’

  Steve jogs back down the corridor and into the transfer room.

  Fletcher takes O’Donnell’s phone, wallet, and keys. He nearly leaves the loose change and then decides that would be a waste. It’s not like O’Donnell is likely to ask for it back.

  ‘Every penny goes to a worthy cause,’ he says, shoving it all in his own pockets.

  Then he opens the door and the foul smell from what’s inside washes over him. He shoves O’Donnell’s body through the door, rather loving the sound it makes as it lands painfully on the other side, and then he locks the door behind him.

  He needs to figure this out. All problems can be solved, all it takes is a bit of thought.

  In the room behind him he hears whoever that is inside O’Donnell waking up. There’s groaning, swearing, a pause, and then a cry of horror. Yeah, thinks Fletcher, don’t blame you—I wouldn’t want to wake up looking at that either. Why don’t the damn things just rot away? Weird aliens. Who needs them?

  God, but this is all becoming a mess. This morning he was on top of the world, now he can feel it all falling apart unless he can somehow slam the brakes on. He deserves this, this has been his big break, he’s fought for it. There’s no way he’s going to give it all up now.

  FIFTEEN

  AN ABATTOIR IN SILHOUETTE

  The smell is what wakes him. As Ram struggles to his feet in the dark room, he can’t even begin to imagine what it is that reeks so badly. His glasses have fallen off, so he puts them back on and squints at the purple, shiny lump in front of him, just barely lit by the light through a dirty window. He finally realises it’s a face, and the panicked cry that comes from him is entirely involuntary.

  In a way, the low light helps him realise what it is he’s looking at. If the body parts around him had been clear, he might have been distracted by their alienness, but in the semidarkness, the shape and the foul smell is enough for him to realise he’s sitting in the remains of a massacre. They’re clearly not human bodies, but he can recognise the shape of severed limbs when he’s looking at them.

  His hands are sticky and he wipes them on the front of the suit he’s wearing, desperate to be clean. How many bodies are there? He just can’t tell—it’s an abattoir in silhouette and he’s never been more desperate to get out of somewhere in his life.

  He gets up and carefully walks over to the window, hoping to get a sense of where he is. The glass is so dirty he can barely see through it, just the vague shape of a wall outside and a thin band of sky above. At least it’s not blacked out like the others. He guesses whoever refitted this place didn’t want to come in here, not with all the remains. Maybe that will be useful—could he break the window and get through it before someone comes running? Then he has to remind himself of his new size and wonders if he can get through it at all.

  At least he’s not dead, though if he’s stuck in this body for the rest of his (likely now much shorter) life, he’s not entirely sure he wouldn’t prefer to be.

  So where did all the dead aliens come from? Did Fletcher kill them? Were they already dead when he found this place? Did Fletcher steal all this stuff? It makes sense that it would be alien; it’s not li
ke you can pop into the Apple Store and buy body-swap kits, and this obviously isn’t an official government setup.

  Who knows? Right now, Ram’s not even sure he cares, he just wants to get out. Trapped here, he’s in no position to fix anything. At least if he can get free he might be able to do something, to find some way of forcing them to give him his own body back.

  In fact, why haven’t they swapped him back already? The clue’s in the company name, Joyriders; this obviously isn’t supposed to be a permanent deal. Whoever’s riding around in his body, the owner of this annoying bag of bones, is expecting to get his body back. So why hasn’t he already? What’s gone wrong?

  They must be hoping to fix it, because otherwise he’d be looking like the alien stew he’s currently sharing a room with. He’s alive because they need him. Is that useful? He thinks it might be. In fact, he thinks he might have the beginnings of a plan. He just hopes this old guy really does want his body back. I mean, God knows why, he’s currently riding around in perfection. If someone offered to trade you a knackered old Fiat for their Porsche you’d bite their hand off, but surely you wouldn’t want to swap back again?

  SIXTEEN

  DATA RETRIEVAL

  John O’Donnell stands in front of the mirror and looks at the beautiful body that will never truly be his.

  ‘You’re pretty vain, you know that?’ says the boy in the bed.

  O’Donnell glances at the reflection of the other body he’s borrowed this morning and sneers. ‘If I wanted your opinion I’d have paid for that as well.’

  The boy shrugs and reaches over to the bedside table for his packet of cigarettes. O’Donnell can’t help looking at him, spread out like that, buttocks clenched as he stretches out for his smokes. He feels that borrowed part of him twitch and hates himself for it. If his wife could see him now, or his mother, he’d break their hearts. Not that his mother had much of a heart to break, even before the cancer took her.

  ‘Please,’ he says, ‘just go.’

  The boy now has an unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He stares at O’Donnell’s false reflection, scratches his balls, and shrugs.

  ‘Suit yourself. It’s your time, but you’re not getting a refund. You booked me for a couple of hours. I could have got another client.’

  Just listen to him, O’Donnell thinks, how easily he sells all that prettiness of his.

  ‘I don’t want change,’ he says. ‘I just want to be on my own.’

  The boy starts getting dressed. ‘Whatever.’

  O’Donnell tries not to watch him while he pulls his clothes on, but can’t quite tear his eyes away. Finally, the beautiful boy leaves this cheap hotel room and the equally cheap smell of sex left in it.

  O’Donnell sits down on the corner of the bed, still staring at this body in the mirror. Part of him wishes he’d never heard of Garry Fletcher. Before him, all of this had just been a fantasy, something he could pretend wasn’t real. A phase that had clung to him. (For so many years, John. Can you really call something that’s pulsed away inside you for over fifty years a ‘phase’?)

  To begin with, he’d not even believed Fletcher’s process was possible, of course. Take over someone else’s body? Fletcher had admitted that all of his clients were sceptical the first time. But once O’Donnell had accepted what was on offer, he’d convinced himself that it was the perfect opportunity to cure himself of these stupid urges, these dirty urges. He’d put himself in a position where he could act on them, face himself with it, then, for sure, he’d realise he didn’t actually want to. Fantasy’s one thing but the reality of it? ‘Yes,’ he’d lied to himself, ‘it’ll almost be like aversion therapy. I bet you’ll never have those thoughts again.’

  Ha ha.

  Now he barely thought about anything else.

  He knew it was wrong, of course he did. They all acted like it was fine these days, men with men, women with women, but he knew better. He’d been brought up properly. His mother had made her feelings quite clear on the subject when she’d caught him kissing Nigel from school. It hadn’t meant anything, he’d insisted, they’d just been playing, really. But Mother knew better. She’d seen it in him, she said, the perversion, the disease. Oh, how she’d hoped she was wrong but deep down, in her heart, she’d known what he was.

  She would help him, she promised, cure him.

  And he’d tried, hadn’t he? Certainly he’d tried. He’d stopped looking at boys, got a girlfriend. Poor long-suffering Sandra; she’d always thought there had been something wrong with her—she’d deserved better. He’d never forget her tears and the look on her face, that awful acceptance that whatever was wrong, whatever it was about her that repelled him, she knew it was her fault, knew and hated herself for it. If only he could have found a way to convince her that wasn’t true, a way to explain that wouldn’t involve him saying that he was . . . that he might be . . . that he liked . . .

  Then finally he’d met Cheryl and that was perfect. Cheryl had no interest in the bedroom and had been wildly relieved to find a husband who shared her feelings. With Cheryl the question was never asked, the answer buried deeper and deeper over their years together.

  John checks the time on the kid’s phone—so many missed calls—did kids spend their whole lives on the damn phone these days? There is still a while left. He gets up and goes to the mirror again, running his fingers over this thing he can never be.

  When there is only half an hour left of his allotted time, he showers (It’s only fair; he wouldn’t want this body to be contaminated just because of his urges. He feels guilty about that too—not enough to stop him, of course, no amount of guilt was enough for that). Then, taking one last regretful look in the mirror (‘Maybe I could borrow this body again?’) he puts on his clothes and goes downstairs to check out.

  He always expects the person at reception to look at him with disgust but they never do. They don’t care who you are. They rarely even look at your face. He’s prepaid for the room so he just hands over the keycard and walks out.

  This is always the worst time, walking down the street, knowing that at any moment he is going to end up back in that fat, slow, ugly worthless body of his.

  But the moment doesn’t come.

  He checks the phone again. Fletcher is definitely late. Part of him doesn’t mind of course—better to be in this body than his own—but he hates not knowing when the hammer will fall.

  Should he call him? Should he see what’s going on? He swipes the phone and taps in the four-digit passcode.

  Then pauses. How did he know that? This isn’t his phone. Does the body remember somehow? An unconscious memory? Have these fingers tapped that number out so many times that they remember it even now, when their owner isn’t in possession?

  O’Donnell stares at the phone, at the picture of the girl on the home screen. She seems familiar too, but that certainly is impossible. There’s no way O’Donnell can have met someone this body knew. Rachel, he thinks, and somehow, impossibly, knows that this is right, that that’s this girl’s name. He knows something else too: she’s dead.

  Why would you keep the image of a dead girl on your phone? More importantly, how does he know all this?

  He’s read about how memory is processed, theories that the brain itself can keep a physical store. But this has never happened before, so why now?

  For some reason he’s still here, and now he’s picking up on the host body’s memories. Something’s wrong. Something’s seriously, seriously wrong.

  He scrolls through the phone contacts, seeing screen icons and names, and one by one he remembers them all. Then, staring at the picture of a boy called Charlie, he knows something else and, if his mind hadn’t already been reeling, it certainly is now.

  SEVENTEEN

  A HARD TIME FOR THE COAL HILL SCHOOL ADMINISTRATIVE WASTE BIN

  ‘I should have just gone to my ballet lesson,’ says the person who on the outside is Amar Sai, an unremarkable Year Eleven student who, until now, has only
ever been in trouble for talking in class.

  He’s sat in the school office, alongside Charlie, April, and Tanya. Quill loiters in the doorway as the school counsellor, Toby Moore, does his best to be useful. Mr Moore is beginning to feel a little out of his depth in his current posting. In fact, Mr Moore is giving serious consideration to handing in his notice.

  ‘It just used to be pre-exam nerves and fretting over pubic hair,’ he frequently complains to his wife. ‘Now the whole place has gone mad and I feel like I’m going mad right along with them.’

  To make matters worse, now that the school is stuck in between head teachers, he seems to be being allocated a good chunk of the role’s duties. To begin with, he liked to think it was because the rest of the staff had recognised his abilities and wanted to see them put to good use. Now, a few days in, he realises that he’s simply being thrown every job that nobody else wants to deal with. He has become the Coal Hill School Administrative Waste Bin and he feels like he’s being buried alive.

  ‘Ballet lesson?’ he asks.

  Amar nods. ‘That’s what I usually do, but after last week, I started to think about it. Having these lessons is one thing but it’s never going to lead to anything, is it? It’s not like I can actually become a ballet dancer, I just can’t. It’s a dream, that’s all. I’m just getting to pretend on a weekly basis.’

  Toby is dreadfully lost. He glances up at Miss Quill, purely because she’s the only other source of authority within reach. He doesn’t like her very much. In fact being near her often brings out his infrequent stutter.

  ‘We don’t do ballet lessons here, do we?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course we don’t,’ she says.

  ‘I didn’t think so.’

  ‘I don’t mean here, you ridiculous man,’ says Amar. ‘I don’t take ballet lessons here.’

  Ridiculous man? He often feels like one, but he’s not sure the students should be agreeing with him so openly.

  ‘Please keep your tone civil, Amar,’ he says. ‘Anger is often useful, but we shouldn’t direct it at those who are trying to help.’ He’s slightly proud of this and looks at the other three students, as if expecting them to smile and nod at his well-phrased words. They don’t, they’re just twitching in their seats, seemingly desperate to be anywhere but here. Toby sympathises.