I had found the skin at freshers’ week.

“I love it! Love it love it love it!”

Michael Peter Morgan, twenty-three years old, about to start an economics doctorate. His first degree was from Harvard, his parents, both dead, had left him a sizeable inheritance. An awkward youth with almost impossibly black hair, thick eyebrows and shoulders that curved forward before the gaze of other men, at first I had dismissed him as a candidate. However, look again and somewhere beneath the hooded eyes and clenched fists, a handsome man was struggling to break free.

The second Janus slipped into his body like a hot dressing gown after a cold shower, my suspicions were confirmed. His shoulders rolled back, his head rose, his knees unlocked, and as Janus stripped before the mirror, he, who was an instant before a she, puffed his chest out and exclaimed, “Wow, do I go to the gym?”

“You did tae kwon do at Harvard.”

“Oh I can see!” he shrilled, turning his naked body this way and that. He raised his arms and squeezed the muscles tight, squeaking with satisfaction. “How long do I take to grow a beard? Do you think I need a beard?”

“Morgan shaves every three or four days, not very well.”

“I think I’d suit grizzled. Adds masculinity. How much do I have in the bank?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“And what do I do?”

“You’re about to begin a doctorate.”

“So I’m qualified?”

“Highly.”

“Is my doctorate in something exciting?”

“No,” I admitted. “I suspect… for these purposes, no.”

“It’s fine, I can do without the doctorate. Now–I can’t quite see–my arse, would you call it tight?”

I considered his arse.

“It seems very nice.”

He slapped it with a loud crack of palm on buttock, feeling around the flesh on his bum, his thighs, his belly. “Jesus,” he said. “Tae kwon do is the shit, isn’t it?”

“You haven’t practised for a while. I thought you would be pleased by how well you retain the benefits.”

“Hell yes! Though I always find it’s easier to stay at a level when I’m a guy.” His gaze, wandering round Morgan’s room, settled on the wardrobe. Throwing the doors wide, Janus’ face dropped. “So yeah,” he grunted. “Shopping trip tomorrow.”

I tried not to drum my fingers on my knees. “Do you think you’re going to take it?”

An overdramatic sucking in of air followed this enquiry, before Janus’ face split into a delighted grin. “Just one question–do you think I can get away with wearing yellow?”

Janus was Michael Peter Morgan for thirty years.

He married.

Had children.

Lived well and, from what I can tell, never once jumped away. Such a life is a luxury that only an estate agent can provide. It is the luxury of wooing a wife over many a rocky year, the empowerment of worrying about a mortgage, the privilege of going to the doctor for an ingrown toenail. It is the joy of friends who love you for the words you speak and the thoughts you think, the honour of being honoured for the deeds you yourself have achieved. It is a name, an identity, which becomes through years of labour entirely yours. A thing that is almost real.

I do not know what the original Morgan would have done with his life, had he lived it.

Questions of “what if ” are not an estate agent’s occupation.

Do you like what you see?

Chapter 51

I don’t know how long it took them to get to Rathaus Steglitz.

To find that Nathan Coyle was not, in fact, there.

Eugene, restored to full hazmat glory, entered the room, then the room within the room, my transparent cage, without a word. He marched forward, drew his right hand up to his left shoulder, and on the backstroke hit me as hard as he could across the face.

It was a slap more than a punch, but the shock of it reverberated down to my very toes.

“Where’s Nathan?” he said.

I shook my head.

He hit me again.

“Where’s Nathan?”

And again.

“Where’s Nathan?”

On the fourth stroke his hand became a fist, and his fist sent my chair over sideways, and my head bounced against the floor, and a tooth rattled in my mouth, and I thought, that’ll cost someone some day, losing a tooth like that, and the chair that I was secured to creaked under the strain.

Bored with hitting me, he tried kicking, and the third time he kicked my kidneys, something inside went pop. A feeling like a blister bursting, the warm glow of fluids seeping into places within my body where such fluids should not seep.

Had he stopped hitting me, I could probably have found some reason to answer his question. As it was, he didn’t, so I couldn’t, and when he stamped down on my little finger hard enough to crack it, it occurred to me that Eugene’s personal problems were getting in the way of his professional integrity. Then he stamped again, and I largely stopped thinking.

“Where’s Nathan?”

I gasped, “Steglitz. He’s in Steglitz.”

Eugene kicked again.

“Steglitz!”

He grabbed a fistful of hair, his gloved hand digging into my scalp, pulled my face close. “You’re going to die in this place, Kepler.”

Ghosts have one defensive move.

We move.

A tale was told of one of my kin who, pursued for her life, hid in the body of a mother. She was eight months pregnant, and as the captain of the killers demanded her name–which the ghost did not know–she hid in the only place left to hide, in the body of the near-born child within its mother’s womb.

Of the consequences of this–life, death–the story is more vague, but the lesson survives: when cornered, a ghost will always run rather than fight.

Now seemed as good a time as any to buck the trend.

I slammed my head, as hard as I could, into Eugene’s visor. Hair tore from my scalp, Eugene staggered back, a thin plastic crack in the sheet across his face. I rolled on to my knees, then dropped back as hard as I could on to the chair.

Plastic snapped beneath me. I tried to move my hands and found that one was free, the leg that had held it broken wood. My other hand was still cuffed to the seat of the chair, which was either a terrible dragging weight or a weapon. I looked up into Eugene’s startled features and swung the chair into his face. The crack spread through his visor like a spider’s web, and he fell to the side as the weight of my makeshift club slammed into the side of his head. Others were moving, one reaching for a Taser, Alice for a gun. I tried to charge them, but my feet were still cuffed and I fell forward. I saw the man with the Taser bring it up to fire, and raised the chair in front of me. The electrodes hissed and spat as they struck, a buzz through my palms and the pop-pop of the gun. An arm went around my neck from behind, squeezing tight enough to send a pulse of blood through my ears, fog across my eyes, and as Eugene stuck his knee into my back and his fist into my jugular vein, I twisted round, tangling my chained feet against his knees, drew my head back and, biting down a hysterical laugh, slammed my forehead into the crack in his visor as hard as I could.

Plastic shattered, biting into my face, my skin, my eyes; a shriek came out of someone’s lungs–mine?–and as a gun fired and a bullet shattered my shoulder blade in a primrose roar, my forehead brushed Eugene’s cheek and

another gunshot. The body beneath me jerked, cried out in pain, and I held on, sweat running down my back, panting for breath, but I held on, my arm across the throat of the security guard beneath me, blood running down his back from where the bullet had broken his shoulder, popped one of his lungs like a can of Coke. He stared up at me, confused, trying to breathe and finding his lung expanding with blood not air.