The pain comes before everything else.
Not a warning. Not a gradual climb. It arrives fully formed, a burning line across my throat like someone had pressed a wire there and pulled until something gave. I open my eyes. White ceiling. Cold light. A room I have never seen.
I do what I always do when something goes wrong: I count what I know.
My name is Léo Marchand. I am twenty-two years old. I was in Paris this morning, or what felt like this morning, sitting in a lecture hall listening to a professor explain liquidity traps to forty students who didn't care. I had coffee. Bad coffee, the kind the vending machine on the third floor produces with quiet contempt.
That is the last thing I remember clearly.
My hands are resting on my knees.
They are red.
I look at them for what is probably too long. The brain needs a moment with certain kinds of information. It needs to run the image through several filters before it agrees to process it as real. The knife is there too, handle pressed against my palm like I've been holding it for hours, like it belongs there.
It does not belong there.
I stand. Too fast. These legs are not mine. Longer, heavier, with a center of gravity I haven't learned yet. I catch the edge of the bed with both hands, the knife hitting the floor with a sound that seems very loud, and that's when I see her.
A woman. On the floor. Eyes open, aimed at the ceiling, seeing nothing.
I don't scream. I want to. Whatever body I'm in right now doesn't seem to operate that way. The panic is there, fully present, but it runs cold instead of hot. It calculates.
Who is she.
What happened here.
Those are your hands, Léo.
Outside, somewhere below the window, sirens. Still distant. Moving closer.
I look at the woman. Late twenties, maybe thirty. Dark hair spread across the floor. She's dressed like someone who had somewhere important to be tonight. A press badge is clipped to her jacket, face down. I can't read the name from here and I don't go closer. I've watched enough procedural television to know I shouldn't touch anything else.
As if the knife wasn't already enough.
I catch my reflection in the dark glass of the window. The face looking back at me is not my face. Stronger jaw. A scar cutting through the left eyebrow. Black hair, shorter than mine. The marks on the throat are visible even from here, red and raw, the kind that come from a cord or a cable pulled tight.
Someone tried to kill this body before I arrived in it.
Or this body tried to kill itself.
I file that question under later because the sirens are not distant anymore.
The room gives me what it can in thirty seconds. High-end apartment, Shinjuku judging by the skyline through the glass. Clean, minimal, the kind of space that belongs to someone who doesn't keep things they don't need. No photographs. One glass on the table, one chair pulled slightly out. Someone sat here recently. Someone was expected.
The woman had an appointment.
My throat burns when I swallow. I look at the press badge again, still not moving from where I'm standing. I can read three characters from here. Not enough.
A phone is on the bedside table. I pick it up with the hem of my shirt because I am apparently still capable of basic thinking under extreme circumstances, and the screen lights up. Locked. The reflection in the screen shows the face again. Not my face.
Whose face.
The front door of the apartment doesn't give me a choice. Two sharp knocks, the kind that aren't asking.
"Police. Open the door."
A woman's voice. Calm, precise, the tone of someone who has said those words enough times that they've become completely neutral.
I put the phone down. I look at the knife on the floor. I look at my hands, still red, and I make a decision based purely on the fact that I have no better option: I sit back on the edge of the bed and I wait.
The door opens anyway. She had a key, or something that works like one.
She comes in with one other officer behind her, but I barely register him. She stops two steps into the room, takes in the scene with a single slow sweep that misses nothing. The woman on the floor. The knife. My hands. My face.
Something happens in her expression. It's small and it's fast and she shuts it down immediately, but I'm an economics student and we are trained, above everything else, to notice the moment when someone's calculation changes.
She knows this body.
She was not expecting what she found in it.
"Saitō-san," she says. Her voice doesn't move. "You have the right to remain silent."
Saitō. That's the name, then. I turn it over once. It doesn't produce a memory. It doesn't produce anything except the understanding that I now have a surname in a country I have never visited, in a body I don't own, with a dead woman six feet away from me and a police inspector looking at me like she's trying to solve an equation that used to have a known answer.
I look at her directly. "Who is she."
Not a performance. A real question. The only question that matters right now because if I know who she is, I know what happened here, and if I know what happened here, I know whether this body is guilty or whether someone built this room to look that way.
The inspector's jaw tightens. Fractional. She closes her notebook, which she had opened without me noticing, and she looks at me with something I can't name yet.
"You're asking me," she says, "who she is."
"Yes."
A silence. The other officer is speaking into his radio. The sirens outside have stopped.
She takes one step closer. Close enough that I can see she's younger than her voice suggested, that there's something behind the professional neutrality that isn't just professional, that whatever she expected to find in this room tonight, it wasn't this version of the face she knows.
"Saitō-san," she says again, quieter this time. "What happened to your voice."
I don't answer. Because the honest answer is: I don't know. I don't know what his voice sounds like. I only know what mine sounds like, and apparently the difference is visible.
She crouches down beside the dead woman without taking her eyes off me for more than two seconds. She reads the press badge.
She stands back up slowly.
Whatever she just read, it changed something.
"Don't touch anything else," she says. "Don't speak to anyone but me."
She moves to the window and looks out at the street below, her back half-turned, and I watch her and I think: she's not just conducting an investigation. She's buying herself thirty seconds to think.
So am I.
My name is Léo Marchand. I am twenty-two years old. I am in Tokyo, in a body called Saitō, with blood on my hands and a dead journalist on the floor, and the only person in this room who might accidentally keep me out of prison is a police inspector who looks at this face like it owes her something.
Wonderful.