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Back in the car, Jack felt less connected to Margaret’s body than he had since he’d first tried it on. He was hovering somewhere near the surface, yanked loose from his tethers by the strange series of events that had taken over his afternoon. He’d felt this way before, back when he was still alive: as though he wasn’t fully in his own skin. It always seemed to happen when life took a turn for the unexpected, but back then he was anchored enough to himself that he never actually thought he would be catapulted from his body the way he feared he could be now.

He was so close to getting his final hurrah. So close to one last caper. So close to really being alive again. And yet, they were no closer to actually getting the ball rolling than they had been before. But that wasn’t what had Jack clinging to his host like a balloon on the verge of release from a child’s careless hand. It was in the way Eli spoke, in how he held himself and how he looked at Jack as though he was looking not only through Margaret but directly through the soul inside as well. Something was wrong.

“I still think we could do it on our own,” Dale said from the passenger seat.

Jack decided he hadn’t heard that. He looked at the dashboard clock. It was nearly four. He needed to get back to the office and write up a report on Dale’s collection before anyone got suspicious. The bright side of working in the Murder department was that you typically had only a handful of cases a day; some days not even that. The downside was that your paperwork was scrutinized more closely than in Accidents or Natural Causes, departments where agents had less thumb-twiddling time.

“I don’t think this is happening,” he said at last, finally putting the car into drive.

“What’s not happening, Jackie?” Dale asked, heavy brown eyes still bright with the kind of earnest hope that made Jack squeamish.

Jack had to make a choice: protect his new life as Margaret, or let himself be Jack again for one more fleeting moment. But part of being Jack was having the You Agains at his side, and if that was off the table, the decision was an easy one.

“I need to get you moved on, bud,” he said. “I have to get back to work.”

“You’re giving up?”

“Yeah,” Jack conceded. It was a first, but the past few months had been full of those. At least this time it wasn’t a bladder leak.

“That sucks, Jackie. That really sucks.”

Jack couldn’t argue with that. Still, he felt a little pang at Dale’s words. Jack never liked to let his friends down. It was kind of his whole deal. He wasn’t a particularly paternal man, unless you counted the class turtle he helped raise in fourth grade, but he took pride in taking care of his own. He let a sigh creep from his bottom lip, the air that escaped with it attempting fruitlessly to flutter through Margaret’s stiffly sprayed hair.

“All right, tell you what. I’ll drop you at my new digs on the way back to work. You can watch some TV or something and we can have a good catch-up when I get back after work. Have a heart-to-heart and shit. Then we’ll get you going, cool?”

Dale shrugged. “I guess,” he said. “I mean, yeah. Sure. Thanks.”

It wasn’t the level of enthusiasm Jack had been hoping for, but under the circumstances, he’d take what he could get. He’d just have to bullshit his paperwork on Dale’s case a little. It was something he’d’ve had to do if they’d gone through with the initial plan anyway. And if there was one thing Jack could do in any body, it was bullshit.

Half an hour later and he pulled into the driveway of Margaret’s mini McMansion, complete with a two-car garage and old-money beige stone walls with matching shutters.

“Damn,” Dale said on a whistle. “I always said you’d strike it rich someday, didn’t I, Jackie? Didn’t know you’d be dead first, but still.”

“It was a lucky possession,” Jack said, boasting modestly. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

Inside, the home glistened with the kind of polished marble and upper-middle-class white walls that stood as the antithesis to apartment 3A. Margaret had excellent taste in both house and house cleaner. Thanks to a small but formidable woman Jack knew only as Mrs. Shaw, who came by every Wednesday, the home was unfamiliar with concepts like dirt, dust, mildew, or a clean clothes pile that shifted from floor to bed to floor until their owner either finally folded them or they ended up back in the dirty pile, ready for the cycle to repeat itself.

Dale whistled again as they moved from the high-ceilinged foyer into the living room.

“Have a seat,” Jack said, flipping on the ninety-inch TV and finding a college football game. “All right, hang tight. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

Dale plopped onto a white leather couch cushion without argument, his focus immediately transfixed by the giant screen full of giant men in giant shoulder pads. Jack looked on for a moment with the same sort of paternal pride with which he’d once looked at his class turtle. Dale wasn’t too different from that turtle, really. Dangle the right treat in front of them, be it lettuce or televised sports, and they’d do what you needed them to—whether that was crawling back into their tank when playtime was over or, Jack mused, crawling into a different kind of tank so he could get back to work knowing Dale was where Jack needed him to be for the moment. He’d always appreciated this about both Dale and Mr. Shellington, and he couldn’t help but feel as though he’d trained them both well.

Satisfied with his distracted little turtle man, he left the house and headed back to work.

• • •

By the time Jack got back to the S.C.Y.T.H.E. offices, a good half of the Murder department was at their desks, wrapping up their respective days. Jack gave a polite bob of the head to two agents he vaguely recognized as he made his way to Margaret’s cubicle. His office neighbor was a middle-aged man with razor-sharp features and the kind of hearing that meant a mouse couldn’t fart in peace on the opposite side of the building without it being noted and, more than likely, commented on. Jack mentally referred to this man as The Eagle, though there was a good possibility that wasn’t actually his name. Jack figured this was something Margaret should know, so he never asked, and besides, The Eagle suited him better than Ron or Tom or Bartholomew or whatever he was actually called.

Just now, The Eagle was clacking away on his keyboard as though he actually knew what he was doing in his job, which Jack considered both impressive and a bit smug. His tippy-taps stopped as Jack’s heels clicked by, and The Eagle’s sharp eyes landed on him. Jack gave a tight smile. The Eagle made a sound of acknowledgment and then returned to his keyboard, clearly swept away in his report-writing in a way Jack could never imagine and hoped he’d never have to.

Jack slid into Margaret’s desk chair and cracked open the laptop that sat waiting for him on the desk. He opened a new document and typed Dale’s name and case number into their designated columns at the top. Fiddled with the font for a moment. Then the font size. Then the color. These all had to follow the S.C.Y.T.H.E. standard, of course: Times New Roman, 12 point, black. The higher-ups had clearly taken inspiration from every high school essay rubric in North America. But the fiddling gave Jack time to think about exactly what he’d say about Dale’s case. Processing would know Dale’s essence hadn’t arrived yet, so Jack would be screwed if he said otherwise and his manager took the time to do any cross-referencing. He remembered something he’d stumbled across during his crash research into the organization down in the S.C.Y.T.H.E. archives: a case involving a soul who wasn’t with his body, only to be found later at a nearby park, so there was precedence for a missing essence, even if it was rare. But a story like that would raise too many questions.

He switched the font to Wingdings and was tapping his fingers on the desk, still pondering, when a phone rang. Jack stopped tapping and reached for his office phone.

“Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences, this is Margaret Chen speaking,” Jack said down the line. In reply, a dial tone beeped in his ear. Jack’s brows knitted. The phone rang again. Jack looked at the receiver in confusion for a moment, then replaced it and fished Margaret’s cell phone from her purse. Its screen was blank save for the photo of Margaret and her husband, Wesley, on a postcard-perfect beach. The ringing continued.

Jack froze.