Chapter 1: Midnight Over the Atlantic: A Swap at 30,000 Feet
The first thing I noticed was the smell. Not the sterile, recycled cabin air, but something floral and sweet clinging to my skin. My skin. I shifted in the plush leather seat and felt a weight on my chest, a soft, unfamiliar pressure against the fabric of my shirt. No—not my shirt. A thin, worn cotton tank top.
I opened my eyes to the muted blue glow of the first-class cabin. Everything was angled wrong. The seat was too big. My view was from the window seat, not the aisle where I’d sat down. Where I’d plugged in my laptop, ordered a scotch, and… and what?
A strand of hair fell across my vision. Blonde. Short.
I brushed it back, and my hand froze in front of my face. The fingers were slim, the nails neatly filed and painted a pale, shimmery pink. A woman’s hand. A tremor started deep in my gut, a cold, expanding dread. I stared at that foreign hand, turning it over. A small, silver ring on the middle finger.
“Miss? Can I get you anything before we begin our descent?”
The voice was above me. I looked up. The flight attendant was smiling patiently, her gaze directed at me.
Miss.
My throat closed. I tried to speak, but only a dry click came out. I shook my head, a quick, jerky movement. The flight attendant nodded and moved on.
Descent. How long had I been out? The whole flight? That was impossible. I never slept on planes.
I needed to see. I needed a mirror. The black surface of the window was useless. My breathing hitched, growing shallow and rapid. Think, Justin. You’re dreaming. A stress dream. Too many deals, too much travel. Wake up.
I pinched the skin of my forearm with those delicate, alien fingers. It hurt. A sharp, bright pain.
To my left, in the aisle seat, a man was stirring. He let out a low groan, a sound of pure disorientation, and pushed himself upright. He was wearing my suit. My charcoal Brooks Brothers suit, now rumpled. He lifted his hands—my hands, with the scar on the knuckle from a long-ago bike accident—and stared at them in the blue light.
Then he turned his head.
And I was looking into my own face.
My own thirty-six-year-old face, with the faint lines starting around the eyes, the five-o’clock shadow I’d meant to shave. My brown eyes, usually sharp, were wide with a terror so complete it mirrored the scream building in my own chest.
It was me. It was my body.
But it wasn’t me behind the eyes.
The person in my body saw me seeing him. His gaze—her gaze—dropped to the front of the tank top, to the swell of breasts beneath the fabric, then back up to meet my eyes. Her lips, my lips, parted.
“What,” she whispered. Her voice was low, rough. My voice. “What is…”
“Who are you?” I hissed, the sound barely escaping. My voice was higher. Softer. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” she whispered back, the words frantic. She looked down at herself, at the broad spread of my shoulders in the suit jacket, and patted her chest with my hands. A jolt went through her—through him. Me. “Oh my god. Oh my god, oh my god.” She grabbed a fistful of the dress shirt. “Is this… am I…?”
“You’re in my body,” I said, the reality clanging into place with a final, horrifying weight. “And I’m… in yours.”
I looked down again. The evidence was indisputable. The curve of hips under soft jeans. The slender legs. A silver bracelet on my wrist. I brought a hand to my head, felt the short, pixie-cut blonde hair. I flinched.
“What’s your name?” I demanded, turning back to the woman in my skin.
“Chloe,” she breathed. “Chloe Miller. I’m… I was going home for a wedding.” She was staring at my face with a kind of horrified fascination. “You have… you had a whiskey. You were working on a spreadsheet. You muttered something about quarterly projections.”
A finance exec’s bedtime story. That was me. Justin Hayes. Quarterly projections.
The plane hit a pocket of turbulence, a sudden drop that made my stomach lurch. Chloe—in my body—grabbed the armrests, her knuckles whitening. My knuckles.
“Okay,” I said, forcing a calm into my voice I did not feel. It sounded strange in this lighter tone. “Okay. We’re on a plane. We’re descending. We need to… we need to figure this out before we land.”
“Figure what out?” she asked, her voice rising. She had my expressions, the way my brow furrowed when I was pissed. It was unnerving. “How do you figure out that you’ve swapped bodies with a stranger at thirty thousand feet?”
“Keep your voice down,” I snapped. The command, issued in this new voice, lacked its usual force.
She leaned closer, the scent of my own cologne coming off her. Off me. “Did you drug me? Is this some kind of… twisted thing?”
“If I drugged you, why would I be the one in the wrong body?” I shot back, logic my last remaining anchor. “Think. What happened before you fell asleep?”
“I was watching a movie. You were typing. I got a headache. I closed my eyes.” She shook my head. “That’s it.”
A headache. I remembered a pressure behind my eyes, a sudden fatigue that had felt like a wave crashing over me. I’d chalked it up to the long week.
The FASTEN SEATBELT sign dinged overhead. The cabin lights brightened slightly. Time was slipping. The real world, with its consequences and explanations, was rushing toward us.
Chloe looked down at the leather briefcase by her feet—my briefcase. She bent, her movements awkward in my larger frame, and pulled it onto her lap. She fumbled with the combination locks. “What’s the code?”
“Why?”
“I need my phone! My phone has my life in it. My friends, my family…”
“Zero-seven-one-four,” I said flatly. My birthday. She flipped the latches, opened the case. Inside was my MacBook, a folder of contracts, my wallet. And there, nestled in a pocket, was an iPhone with a floral case. Not mine.
She pulled it out, powered it on. The screen lit up with a photo of her—of me, now—with two other young women, grinning on a beach. Her face crumpled.
I watched her, a cold knot tightening in my stomach. This was happening. This was real. I was a thirty-six-year-old man trapped in the body of a twenty-one-year-old woman. And she was… her. In mine.
“We have to tell someone,” Chloe said, her voice trembling.
“And say what?” I kept my voice low, leaning in. “That we magically switched bodies? They’ll sedate us and hand us over to psych when we land. We’ll be institutionalized before we can blink.”
“So what’s the plan?” she demanded, a flash of spirit in my eyes. “We just… walk off this plane and pretend? I have a job! School!” The word stuck in her throat. “You have a life!”
I didn’t have school. I had mergers. I had an apartment. I had control. All of it was now sitting in the aisle seat, on the verge of a panic attack.
“For now,” I said, the words tasting like ash, “that’s exactly what we do. We walk off this plane. We act normal. We get to a private place. Then we… we research. We figure this out.”
She stared at me, her—my—face pale. The captain announced our initial approach. The wheels would be down in twenty minutes.
“What’s my name?” I asked her abruptly.
“What?”
“My name. If someone asks you. What is it?”
“Justin,” she said. “Justin Hayes.”
“And you’re Chloe Miller. You’re twenty-one. You’re in college.” I was reciting facts, building a shaky wall against the rising tide of madness. “We stick to the basics. We get our luggage. Then we find a way to fix this.”
She nodded slowly, a grim acceptance settling in. She looked down at the phone in her hands, then over at the small purse by my feet—her feet. “My ID,” she said. “In the purse. You’ll need it.”
I leaned down, the motion feeling foreign, and picked up the small crossbody bag. It felt impossibly light. I unzipped it. A wallet, a lip gloss, a hair tie. I opened the wallet. Chloe Miller’s driver’s license stared back at me. Bright blue eyes, a shy smile. Date of birth: two decades after mine.
This was her. This was me now.
The plane banked sharply, beginning its final turn. The pressure changed in the cabin, and in my head. Everything tilted.
Chloe reached out, her hand—my hand—grabbing my arm. Her grip was strong. Familiar.
“Don’t freak out,” she said, and it was my own voice trying to steady me. “Just… don’t freak out yet.”
But as the landing gear thumped into place beneath us and the city lights rushed up to meet us, I knew it was already too late for that. The world had already cracked open. We were just falling through the crack.