Chapter 9

The woman at the intersection gave me her phone number. Insisted on it, actually. Said she'd been waiting eight months to talk to someone about what she saw, and now that she'd found me, she wasn't letting go that easily.

I took it. Didn't know what else to do. Thanked her for telling me what she remembered and drove home in a daze, her words rattling around my skull like coins in an empty jar.

People don't just appear out of nowhere.

Except apparently I did.

The apartment felt different when I got back. Not in any way I could pin down. The furniture was the same, the layout unchanged, the nailed-shut closet door still bristling with its useless hardware. But something in the air had shifted. Like the space knew its original owner was gone and was trying to figure out what to do with me instead.

I sat on my couch and stared at the wall until the light through the windows turned orange, then purple, then black.

The other me was gone. I kept circling back to that fact like a dog returning to a spot where something died. They'd spent eight months fading away, watching me live their life, trying to warn me about what I was. And now there was nothing left of them but a handful of messages I barely understood and a newspaper article about a disappearance I couldn't remember.

I should have felt something. Grief, maybe. Or guilt. I'd stolen this person's entire existence, worn it like a costume, and now they were gone forever because of me. Because of what I was.

But I didn't feel guilty. I felt empty. Hollowed out in a way that went beyond exhaustion or shock. Like someone had scooped out my insides and forgotten to put anything back.

Maybe that was the transformation. Maybe "almost done" meant almost done removing whatever made me feel like a person.

I fell asleep on the couch without meaning to. One moment I was staring at the dark window, and the next I was somewhere else entirely.

The dream was different this time. Not the house with blue shutters. Not her sad smile and cryptic warnings. Just darkness. A void that stretched in every direction, without floor or ceiling or walls. I floated in it, weightless, formless, unable to tell where I ended and the nothing began.

Somewhere in the distance, I heard her voice.

"You're almost ready."

I woke at 3:33.

The room shifted. Blue curtains materialized where gray ones should have been. The plant appeared by the window, its leaves casting familiar shadows. The wooden headboard solidified into existence like someone was painting it into reality one brushstroke at a time.

But the bed was empty.

I knew it would be. Had known since that last glimpse of them slumped in the corner, barely visible, holding up their final message with hands that were already fading. But knowing and seeing were different things. The empty bed made it real in a way that thinking about it hadn't.

They were gone. Completely and permanently gone.

I sat there in the darkness, watching the empty room that had belonged to someone who no longer existed. The seventeen seconds felt different now. Longer somehow, though I knew they weren't. The air between the two realities felt thinner, like a membrane stretched past its capacity.

I looked down at my hands.

They didn't look right.

In the dim light bleeding through those blue curtains, my fingers seemed slightly transparent. Not completely. Not like a ghost in a movie. Just a little less solid than they should have been. I could almost see the outline of the sheets through my palm if I squinted.

I held my breath. Watched. Waited for it to be a trick of the light, a shadow falling wrong, anything that would explain what I was seeing.

The transparency stayed.

And then the seventeen seconds ended and my bedroom snapped back and my hands were solid again, ordinary flesh and bone, nothing to see here.

I turned on every light in the apartment. Held my hands up in front of my face and turned them over and over, looking for any trace of what I'd seen. They looked normal. Completely, boringly normal. Skin and knuckles and the small scar on my left thumb from a kitchen accident three years ago.

Or from someone else's kitchen accident three years ago. The memory wasn't mine. Nothing was mine.

I didn't sleep again that night. Sat in my blazingly lit apartment and waited for the sun to come up, watching my hands like they might betray me if I looked away.

The next day passed in a blur. I went through the motions of being a person. Showered. Ate something. Checked my phone and found three missed calls from my sister that I didn't return. The world kept turning like nothing had changed, like I hadn't just learned that I was a constructed replacement for someone who'd been erased from existence.

But things were changing. Small things. Things I might have missed if I hadn't been watching for them.

I made coffee that morning and my hands knew exactly how much water to add, exactly how long to let it steep, executed the whole process with a precision I'd never had before. My coffee had always been mediocre. Hit or miss. The kind of thing you drink because you need caffeine, not because it tastes good.

This coffee was perfect.

I stood in my kitchen staring at the cup like it had betrayed me. Such a small thing. Such a stupid thing to notice. But I hadn't learned to make coffee like this. I hadn't practiced or watched tutorials or done anything different.

The skill had just appeared. Like someone had uploaded it while I wasn't paying attention.

I tested myself throughout the day. Picked up a book I'd abandoned months ago, one of those dense literary novels I'd never had the patience for, and suddenly the prose made sense. The layers I'd missed before were obvious now, connections and themes lighting up like someone had given me a map to a territory I'd been lost in.

I sat down at my laptop and opened a document and started typing, just to see what would happen. My fingers moved faster than they ever had before, thoughts translating to words with an efficiency that felt foreign. Like a machine running at optimal capacity.

That night I dreamed in a language I didn't speak. The words were clear and precise and I understood every one of them, though I couldn't have told you what language it was or how I'd learned it.

When I woke up, I could still remember some of the words. They sat in my brain like stones, heavy and immovable, waiting for a reason to be used.

3:33 came again.

The room shifted. The empty bed. The blue curtains. The plant.

And my hands, even less solid than before. I could definitely see through them now. The shape of my fingers was there, the outline clear, but the flesh inside was becoming something else. Something that didn't quite belong in this reality.

I tried to move. Tried to reach toward that empty bed, that absent person, that life I'd stolen without knowing I was stealing it. My arm extended but the motion felt wrong. Delayed. Like my body was lagging behind my intentions by a fraction of a second.

The seventeen seconds ended. My hands returned to normal. I sat in my bedroom breathing hard, feeling the boundaries of myself and wondering how long they'd hold.

She'd said I was almost done. The intake notes said I'd been repeating those words since the beginning. She's almost done. She's almost done. A status report I'd been delivering without consent, tracking my own transformation like a computer logging its updates.

What happened when she finished?

What would I become when there was nothing left of whatever the original had hidden inside me?

The next morning I woke up knowing how to pick a lock.

I didn't realize it at first. Just noticed, while I was making my suspiciously perfect coffee, that I was looking at my apartment door differently. Seeing it as a puzzle rather than a barrier. Understanding exactly how the mechanism worked, where the pins sat, how much pressure it would take to manipulate them.

I'd never picked a lock in my life. Never had any reason to learn. Never even watched a video about it.

But the knowledge was there now, complete and detailed, like I'd practiced for years.

I tested it. Went to the hardware store and bought a cheap padlock and a set of picks that the bored teenager at the register didn't even question. Sat down at my kitchen table and had the lock open in under thirty seconds.

Not beginner's luck. I could feel the difference. This was skill. Muscle memory that didn't belong to muscles that had never done this before.

She was adding things. That's what I realized as I sat there with the open padlock in my hand. She wasn't just completing me. She was uploading capabilities. Skills. Tools I'd need for whatever purpose she'd designed me to fulfill.

The lock picking was just the beginning. Over the next few days, more things appeared.

I knew how to throw a punch now. Not in the vague way most people think they know. I mean I knew. The weight transfer, the rotation, the way to use your whole body as a weapon. I shadow-boxed in my apartment and my form was perfect, honed, the product of training I'd never received.

I could read people differently too. Watching strangers on the street, I'd catch microexpressions I'd never noticed before. The tiny tells that revealed what someone was thinking before they spoke. A skill for manipulation. For getting what you wanted from people who didn't realize they were being played.

Languages came next. Not fluently, not completely, but enough. Enough to understand conversations I shouldn't have been able to follow. Enough to read signs and documents that would have been meaningless to me a week ago.

I was being equipped. Prepared. Every day brought new tools, new abilities, new evidence that I was becoming something other than human.

And here's the thing that scared me most. Part of me liked it.

Part of me wanted to see how far it would go. What else I could do. What I would become when the process finished and all her plans finally clicked into place. There was a hunger in me now, a curiosity that felt too sharp to be natural, and I couldn't tell if it was coming from me or from whatever she'd built.

The 3:33 window kept opening. Every night I sat up in bed and watched that empty room materialize around me. Every night my hands got a little less solid, my outline a little less defined. The barrier between realities was thinning, and I was thinning with it.

One night I tried to stand up during the seventeen seconds. Tried to walk toward the empty bed, to cross whatever distance separated me from that other room. My legs moved but the floor didn't feel quite real under my feet. Like walking on a surface that was only pretending to be solid.

I made it three steps before the seventeen seconds ended and I found myself stumbling in my own bedroom, disoriented, my sense of space all wrong.

The rooms were getting closer. Or I was getting closer to something. The transformation wasn't just changing what I could do. It was changing where I existed.

I thought about the original. The person who'd hidden inside me for eight months, watching their life get stolen, trying to warn me about what was coming. They'd lived in that room with the blue curtains and the plant and the good coffee and the books they actually read. They'd made choices I never made. Built a life I never built.

And then something had happened to them. Something that turned them into a passenger in their own existence, slowly fading while a replacement walked around wearing their face.

Was this how it felt for them? Watching yourself become less real? Feeling the boundaries of your existence get eaten away by something you couldn't stop?

The other me's final message echoed in my head. Find the article. They'd wanted me to know the truth. Wanted me to understand what I was before it was too late.

But too late for what? To stop it? Or just to understand what was happening as I disappeared?

Seven days after the other me vanished, I woke at 3:33 and the room didn't shift at all.

I sat up in bed, braced for blue curtains and empty beds, and nothing changed. My room stayed my room. Gray curtains. Cheap nightstand. No plant, no wooden headboard, no window into another reality.

For seventeen seconds, I was just a person sitting in the dark.

Then the time passed and I was still just sitting there, and I realized what had happened.

The other room was gone because there was no other reality anymore. No original to anchor it. No parallel version of my life playing out in a space I could only glimpse.

There was just me now. Whatever I was.

I looked down at my hands in the darkness. Solid. Real. No trace of the transparency I'd been seeing during those glimpses.

But they didn't feel like my hands. They felt like tools. Instruments waiting to be used.

I sat in my bedroom and waited for something to change. For her to appear, or for new skills to manifest, or for the final piece to click into place and transform me into whatever she'd been building.

Nothing happened. The night stayed quiet. The apartment stayed empty.

Maybe this was the pause before the end. The moment of stillness before everything accelerated.

Or maybe the transformation was already complete and I just didn't know it yet.

I lay back down and stared at the ceiling until morning, wondering what I was now, wondering what I would do when I finally found out.