As she hurried up the street to the police line, her smile grew a little brighter. The cop working that crowd was Charlie Sims. Charlie was one of Yuki’s “people.”

Charlie was smiling, too. Charlie had two kids, and in this economy kids were expensive.

“Talk to me,” said Yuki Nitobe.

Patrolman Charlie Sims, the officer at the barricade cut a quick look around. Most of the crowd was around front, but the side streets were still pretty clear. The only spectators were yards away, peering at the parked police cars as if the empty machines held some answers to the big commotion.

“It’s a mess up there,” said Sims. “I wasn’t up there for long, but it was long enough to see how bad it is.”

“Tell me,” she urged. “Remember the Boddinger thing a couple of years ago?” She chewed her lip for a moment, accessing the vast heaps of data stored in her head. Every major crime, every disaster, every drop of blood that came onto her personal radar was filed away. She nodded. “Husband and wife killed, right? Russian mob was suspected. Is that what we have here?”

“No, not the Russians, or at least I don’t think so; it’s the way it was done. Blood everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. And even though I was only a few feet inside the door, I could see through into the bedroom. The bathroom door was wide open, and it was all right there.”

“What was right there?”

“The girl. In the bathroom and in the bedroom.”

“Which one?” asked Yuki, confused.

“What?”

“Was she in the bathroom or the bedroom?”

“Both,” he said with a crooked jack o’lantern smile. “Whoever did this cut her to frigging pieces, Yuke.”

She hated being called “Yuke,” but right now she didn’t care. This was good stuff. This was really, really good stuff.

“I need to get in there,” she said.

Sims laughed. “Not a chance. The Goody-Goody Twins pulled this one.”

Yuki cursed. With most of the detectives, Yuki could manage to bribe, bully or flirt her way right up to the edge of the crime scene. Close enough to get a quick photo or some footage with a lipstick cam. But not with Schmidt and Yanoff. They gave nothing to the press. Not a word, not an inch. The miserable pricks.

“Tell me what you saw,” she said. “Everything.”

“We good with the rates?” he asked.

“Come on, Charlie, don’t be that way. You know I’m always good. But let me say this,” she added, “If you can get me a copy of a crime scene photo, there’s an extra hundred.”

“They’d fry me.”

“Only if they figured out who leaked the photo, and you’re too smart for that.”

Sims gave her a sly look, well aware that he was being played. But the money was sweet, and he had a friend in forensics who could get him pretty much anything.

“A hundred for a picture,” he said. “But if there’s more, then we talk.”

“If it’s good, we’ll talk.”

He thought about that, then nodded.

“Okay,” he said. He told her everything he knew.

— 9 —

75 Bedford Street, NY

October 4, 8:36 a.m.

Nine Days before the V-Event

It was junk.

Broken. Tangled. Smeared.

Junk.

Three hours ago it had been beautiful.

Two hours ago it had sweated and groaned and clawed and cried out a name that wasn’t his. Not really his. Not deep down.

One hour ago it had screamed.

Now …

Now it was junk.

He watched it change colors as the night changed. As clouds moved in front of the moon. As the slashed and stained curtains moved in the sluggish breeze, painting the debris with translucent shadows. There were colors he had never seen before. Nothing was black. Nothing was white. But there were ten thousand shades of blue and gray and red.

Before, he had never suspected such colors existed. Now, he could not bear the thought of never seeing them again. Nothing could be as beautiful as this. Not in daylight. He wasn’t sure — he had never seen daylight — but he was positive that its glow would wash colors to a uniform opaque nothingness. For him, at least. The way night did to them.

To the other him.

The old him.

To Michael Fayne.

Fayne. The one whose perceptions were blunted. Christ, how could he have managed to walk down a street with perceptions as fractured and useless as that? How could anyone?

He was not yet Michael Fayne, though. Not entirely.

He wrapped his arms around his shins. It wasn’t to protect himself from the sting of the October breeze. No, he liked that. He liked that just fine. Wrapping his arms around his legs was comfortable. It felt somehow more natural as he crouched there on top of the refrigerator. Barefoot, naked. Painted in a thousand shades of red.

Staring at the junk on the floor. And on the table.

He counted the pieces. He frowned and counted again, coming up short again.

Where was the rest?

He cut a glance at the window, wondering if he’d thrown some pieces out. It’s possible. For a while there he wasn’t tracking everything that he was doing. For a while he just was.

Now he was aware of everything. The colors, the smells. Some of them were smells he used to hate. That was all changed. Every smell had a thousand layers. Peel one back and there was another. And another. It frustrated him that he couldn’t identify them, but then he thought about it. He would have time to catalog each and every one. If he was right about things, he would have time.

If he was wrong …

The thought of losing all those smells, all those colors, all those tastes — God, the million subtleties of taste — was the only thing that frightened him.

And suddenly he realized that it truly was the only thing that frightened him. Everything else just didn’t. Not anymore.

Not since the change.

How long had it been?

Time meant almost nothing to him, and he realized that with barely a flicker of concern.

No, that was wrong. That was a lie.

Time did matter.

Time meant change. Time meant night and day.

He looked out of the window at the cloudy sky. It was deep into the night now. Maybe two o’clock. Or was it three?

Suddenly fear was there, blossoming like a tumor inside his chest.

What if it was four or five o’clock?

What if the end of night meant the end of this? The end of all these beautiful smells and tastes and sounds and textures? What if it meant the end of him?

He closed his eyes, trying to hear the pulse of the night. New York was so loud and loud in so many ways. A minute ago he loved that symphony, now it was a cacophony. On one side of a fractured moment, it spoke to him in its ten thousand voices, revealing truths to him, and on the other side it yelled so loud that he could not understand any single thing. The change was that fast, that complete; and he was aware that it was not an actual change. It was perceptual, but that made it no less terrifying.

What was the night hiding from him?

What did time mean to him?

As he struggled to understand this sudden mystery, he realized that the color of the night was different. Someone had splashed blood on the clouds.

He stared at it for a long minute, eyes unblinking.

“Oh, God,” he said in a voice that was thick and wrong. There were too many teeth in his mouth, and too much mucus in his throat. Too much bile in the blood that burned in his mouth.

The bloody clouds whispered an awful secret to him.

It was not five o’clock.

It was dawn.

And dawn was going to tear him apart. As he had torn her apart.

It would reach into him and rip out whatever it was that allowed him to smell ten thousand smells and see ten thousand colors. It would smash down his perceptions, cracking them, blunting them.

Turning them all to junk.

Turning him to junk.

Turning him back.

He jumped down from his perch, landing in the lake of blood that covered the kitchen floor. He stared down into it, seeing his naked body, seeing the belly swollen with quarts of blood. Seeing the face that was new and not at all like the face he had worn for thirty-four years.

Seeing the teeth.

Seeing the eyes. And only in this muted reflection did black and white exist.

White, white teeth.

Bottomless black eyes.

Yet, even as he watched, the teeth changed. The eyes dimmed from a totality of blackness.

“No,” he begged. Still in his voice, not in Fayne’s.

He looked wildly around the apartment. His clothes were smeared with blood. His shirt was torn.

It didn’t matter. He dressed as fast as he could. If he hurried, if he was fast, maybe he could make it home before true daylight stripped the magic off the sky. Maybe he could wash away the blood, hide the clothes.

Would he forget this? Would he think this was all a dream?

“Please, God, please …” he begged, though he was not at all sure to which God he prayed. He — the imposter who would soon reclaim this body — believed in nothing. Maybe he believed in money, maybe in his dick, but nothing else. Nothing grander. There were no mysteries in his mind.

But since the change, the new him — the true him — knew that there were many mysteries. Vast mysteries. Beautiful secrets waiting to be whispered in his ear. Secrets waiting to be torn from the flesh and read in the movement of blood through capillaries and veins.

Would the god of that world listen to prayers?

“Please,” he whispered as he hurried out of the apartment. “Please.”

If he was what he knew that he was, if this change was what he believed it had to be, then there must be a god of this dark world. Nothing else made sense.

He closed the apartment door behind him and fled down the back stairs. His car was parked behind the building.

Suddenly he was behind the wheel and did not remember opening the door or getting in.

He blinked.

He was ten blocks from the apartment.

How — ?

He was reaching for a doorknob. His. No, his.