The pendant will help you see, her grandmother had said.But the seeing was always in you.
She thought about her parents, working eighteen-hour days at the restaurant so she could go to Columbia. Her mother’s hands, scarred from years of kitchen work. Her father’s back, bent from carrying boxes. They’d sacrificed everything so she could have a chance at something better.
This was something better. Terrifying and impossible and probably damned—but better.
Ava picked up her bag and walked to the elevator.
The button for the lobby glowed when she pressed it.
The button for sixty-six glowed too, faintly, as if waiting. As if it had always been waiting.
Monday. Nine AM.
She’d be back.
CHAPTER 2
The Henderson merger was trying to kill her.
Not literally. Probably. But Ava had been staring at the same page for twenty minutes, and the Latin had started to blur into indistinct shapes. Her eyes burned. Her neck had locked into a position that would require professional intervention to undo. The coffee had gone cold hours ago, and she’d drunk it anyway, and now her stomach was staging a quiet rebellion.
Her laptop screen read 9:43 PM. Outside Conference Room Seven’s windows, Manhattan glittered with Friday night possibilities: restaurants, rooftop bars, people whose biggest concern was where to get late-night tacos. Lives that didn’t involve soul-binding clauses written in dead languages.
You could be one of them, something whispered.You could still walk away.
She couldn’t. Four days in, and she’d found nineteen different soul-transfer mechanisms hidden in the Henderson documents. Some tied to employment contracts. Others buried in stock options. The parent company had contingencies that activated based on lunar phases.
Lunar. Phases.
Columbia Law hadn’t covered that.
She stretched. Her vertebrae popped in sequence, a sound that would have horrified her mother. The volcanic glass table reflected someone she barely recognized: hollow eyes, messy bun listing dangerously to one side, the particular pallor of a person who’d been reading about soul harvesting for four straight days.
The building was too quiet. During the day, the sixty-sixth floor hummed with activity: phones ringing, keyboards clicking, the soft murmur of conversations in languages she was starting to recognize. Now there was only the whisper of the ventilation system and the distant hum of the city far below.
Her phone buzzed. Mia again.
Are you dead? Should I send a search party?
Still breathing. Home soon.
That’s what you said three hours ago. The pad thai is congealing.
Ava set the phone face-down and returned to the clause that had been haunting her since Tuesday. The words swam. Refused to cooperate.
“Still here, Ms. Feng?”
She jumped hard enough to knock her legal pad to the floor.
Victor stood in the doorway. Charcoal suit still immaculate. Not a wrinkle, not a hair displaced. At nearly ten PM on a Friday, he looked like he’d stepped out of a photoshoot. She was acutely aware that she did not.
“The Henderson documents keep revealing new issues.” She gestured at her workspace: legal pad covered in sticky notes, laptop surrounded by photocopied pages, three empty coffee cups she kept meaning to throw away. “I’ve found nineteen soul-transfer mechanisms. Some of these contracts reference precedents I can’t find in any database.”
“Nineteen?” His eyebrows rose. A fraction. The most emotion she’d seen from him all week. “Most associates only find twelve.”
“Most associates probably can’t read…” She gestured at the page that had been tormenting her. “Whatever this is.”
“May I?”
