Chapter 3

June had always been thin, but the last few months had hollowed her out. Skin pale as paper. Cheekbones too sharp. The only thing that hadn't changed was the look in her eyes—bright and steady, crinkling into a smile the second she saw me.

"Look who remembered us." She rolled back to let me in. "What are you doing here? It's late."

I shut the door, locked it. "I need to tell you something. And you can't laugh."

"I never laugh at you."

The room was the size of a closet. Bed, desk, wheelchair. A half-eaten bowl of something on the desk, next to a stack of paperbacks with cracked spines. June had been here the longest of any of us. We'd arrived the same year. At five years old:  bone cancer, right leg gone below the knee. She'd never walked again.

She used to tell me about her dreams. Two legs, running uphill, wind screaming past her ears. She'd laugh when she said it. She didn't know I could hear her crying after lights-out.

I sat on the edge of the bed and told her everything.

The cake. The warnings. The way Margaret had backed her up. The plan, the swap, the gutter.

June listened without saying a word. When I finished, she sat very still.

"Swap bodies," she said finally.

"That's what they said."

June looked down at her legs. The right pant leg hung flat and empty.

"Then the girl—Camille—she'd get this?" She touched the armrest of the wheelchair.

"Yeah."

"And I'd get..." Her voice trailed off. She looked up. Something in her face had changed. "I'd get hers."

I nodded.

June laughed. It was a strange, cracked sound. "Give it to me."

"June—"

"Give it to me." She was already reaching for the cake. "What am I supposed to be saving myself for? This chair? Another year of this room?"

"This could kill you. Or worse. We don't know what—"

"So what?" June lifted the cake out of its parchment. "I've been dead since I was five. I'm just still moving." She looked at it for a second, then took a bite. "If it works, I get a life. If it doesn't, I get cake. Either way, I win."

She chewed. Swallowed. Took another bite. Then the last bite.

I held her free hand and felt every tendon in it tighten.

When the cake was gone, June folded the parchment into a neat square and looked up. "Well?"

"I don't know—"

June's body convulsed.

Her back went rigid. The wheelchair jerked back an inch. Her mouth opened but nothing came out, and then her eyes rolled back and she went limp, head lolling against the chair.

"June!" I grabbed her shoulders. "June—"

Silence. Three seconds of nothing.

Then June's eyes flew open.

And they were not June's eyes.

She looked around the tiny room like a cornered animal—wild, panicked, furious. Looking at the bare walls, the cracked desk, the wheelchair, the empty leg.

Looking at me.

They were Camille's eyes. There was no mistaking it.