Gunfire erupted across Broadway. Aya flinched as brass shells spat from the weapon clutched in unfamiliar hands. The recoil punched against a shoulder that wasn't hers, muscles taut beneath armor she had never worn.
*This isn't my body.*
The thought struck with piercing clarity. She wasn't in the sterile chamber anymore. The hospital gown was gone. Now she was buried beneath a soldier's weight—the Kevlar vest biting into her ribs, ammo pouches slapping against her thigh with every movement. Even her voice, ragged in the back of her throat, sounded different.
Around her, others fired desperately into the smoke. Two men crouched behind a wrecked cab, the glowing barrels of their rifles searing holes through the dark. Sirens wailed, half-devoured by the crackling blaze of the city.
And then the world answered.
From beneath the collapsed awning of a diner, a shape unfurled: pale, glistening, limbs bending wrong. Its mouth split too wide, serrated teeth stretching in every direction. It shrieked—a piercing cry that made the air pulse with vibrations.
"OPEN FIRE!" someone roared.
Bullets tore into the thing, but flesh knitted back over the wounds as fast as they opened. The creature lunged, smashing the cab in half with weight that should not have belonged to any living form. The men screamed.
Aya moved before she realized it. Her rifle came up, her body obeying the instincts of the soldier whose skin she now wore. Bullets streamed in tight bursts. For one dizzy second she *wasn't Aya*, she was someone else—Corporal Jacobs, twenty-two, a man who'd never seen winter outside Brooklyn. She knew his heartbeat, his terror, even the way his thoughts flickered with the face of a younger sister he might never see again.
And when the Twisted leapt, jaws wide enough to swallow the world, Aya pulled the trigger for him.
The monster's head snapped back. Black ichor sprayed across the asphalt. It crashed at her feet, trembling before it convulsed into ash.
Aya staggered. Her lungs begged for air, though it wasn't her chest that rose and fell. She looked at her bloody hands—no, *Jacobs' hands*—and nearly dropped the rifle.
"This isn't real," she whispered. "It can't be real."
But pain scorched her cheek where a shard of shrapnel had kissed her. Heat blistered her fingertips when the rifle barrel brushed her skin. Real. All of it.
More shadows crept into sight.
Across the ruined avenue, other Twisted slithered from the darkness, their shapes wrong—some spiderlike, others hunched and lumbering with distorted spines. Every step rattled the street. They were closing in.
A new voice crackled in her head, threaded through static.
> "Aya? Listen to me."
Hyde.
The words weren't spoken aloud; they were landing directly inside her skull.
> "You've Overdived cleanly. Good. Now hold. Remember: they die, you slip back. Focus on their bodies as vessels, nothing more."
Aya croaked, "Vessels? They're people!"
> "Not for long, if you hesitate. These soldiers are already lost without you. Don't waste time worrying—save the city, Aya."
Another blast rocked the street. A bus overturned in the distance, flames spilling like liquid down the steps. Screams cut through the chaos, sharp and human. Aya grit her teeth. The soldier's heartbeat pounded in her chest.
The Twisted surged.
She fired again, this time faster, every shot slicing through the dark. Another soldier dove beside her, his expression wild. "Covering right!" he shouted, taking aim at a second creep lunging for their position.
Aya focused on him—and felt the pull.
The world bent. A thread of her spirit yanked free and slingshot across the battlefield.
For one heartbeat she was weightless. Then—impact.
Her vision snapped into new eyes. Her body was older now, heavier, scar along the chin. Sergeant Lewis. His rifle steadied automatically while his legs braced against the shockwave of a nearby explosion.
Aya gasped, but the sound came from his throat, not her own. He was hers now.
And beneath the panic, she felt something horrifying: pleasure.
The power was intoxicating. The ability to slip from body to body, stealing not just skills but memories. For a second she caught flickers of Lewis's mind—his pride in leading men, the ache in his bad knee, the fear smothered under duty. Aya almost drowned in it.
"Focus!" Hyde barked inside her skull. "Use them. Keep moving until the Babel heart is exposed."
The order jolted her back. Aya aimed through Lewis's scope, fired three precise bursts. The twisted form collapsed in spasms.
But Lewis's pulse—his *life*—throbbed under her control, and fear returned with brutal weight. What if she led him straight into death? Would that death also be hers?
Aya wanted answers. She wanted to scream them into the void. But the monsters kept coming.
And all she could do was fight in bodies not her own.