Chapter 1: Mile-High Makeover: No Going Back Now
The lavatory door rattled violently, a tinny shudder that Mike felt in his teeth. Outside, the jet plummeted through a patch of turbulence, the seatbelt sign pinging insistently overhead. He braced himself against the sink, the cool porcelain a stable point in the swaying world. His own reflection looked back—sharp jaw shadowed with a day’s stubble, dark hair mussed from the headrest, shoulders broad under his simple grey t-shirt. Normal. Him.
Paula had been acting weird since takeoff.
Not her usual bubbly, champagne-in-first-class weird. A quiet, wire-tight weird. She’d squeezed his hand, her smile not quite reaching her eyes, and said she had a surprise. For their Mallorca vacation. She’d practically pushed him into the bathroom, whispering she’d meet him there in a second. The lock clicked behind him.
Another jolt rocked the plane. The doorhandle twisted.
She slipped inside, a flash of blonde and a cloud of that perfume she wore—something expensive and opaque that always seemed to wrap around a room. It immediately swallowed the clean, antiseptic scent of the tiny space. She was smiling now, but it was a different smile. The one she used when she was about to win a debate.
“Mike, baby, relax,” she said, her voice smooth over the engine’s drone.
“Relax? You kidnap me to the world’s smallest room at thirty thousand feet and tell me to relax?” He tried to laugh, but it came out thin. Her presence filled the cubicle. “What’s the surprise? A new cologne? Because this one’s kinda aggressive.”
She ignored the joke, her eyes gleaming in the low light. She held up her phone. On the screen was an app he didn’t recognize—a sleek, black icon with a single, looping arrow. It looked expensive.
“It’s called Proteus. Beta version. My dad’s company bankrolled it for… well, let’s call it ‘extreme market research.’ Physical optimization, without the tedious surgery.” Her thumb hovered over the screen. “Think of it as… a vacation upgrade.”
A cold trickle, unrelated to the air conditioning, traced his spine. “Paula, what are you talking about?”
“I need a partner for this project. Someone inside. Someone nobody would ever suspect.” Her gaze was unwavering. “I need you to be her.”
Before he could process the words, she tapped the screen. A soft, ultraviolet light bloomed from the phone’s flash, washing over his face in the mirror. It was disorienting, like a camera flash in a dark room, but it didn’t fade.
A tingling started at his temples. Not pain. A sensation like warm soda fizzing under his skin.
“What was that?” he snapped, trying to turn away from the mirror. She pressed a hand firmly against his chest, pinning him gently to the sink. She was stronger than she looked.
“Shhh. Just watch.”
He looked.
His reflection… wavered. Like heat haze off asphalt. The line of his jaw, the one he saw every morning shaving, began to soften. The hard angle melted, curving into a smoother, more delicate slope. His Adam’s apple shrank, disappearing into the column of his throat.
“Stop it.” The words were his, but the voice… it was higher. Lighter. A thread of panic tightened it further.
“It’s already done, Mikey. The process is cellular. It’s rewriting you from the inside out. Just breathe.”
He couldn’t breathe. He watched, hypnotized by the horror, as his dark, short hair seemed to grow. It lightened, strands spiraling into a cascade of honey-blonde waves that tumbled past his—no, her—shoulders. The shoulders. They were narrowing, pulling in, the musculality of his delts and traps receding like a tide, sculpting into the graceful, sloping architecture of Paula’s own silhouette.
His hands flew to his face. His own hands. But they were smaller. The knuckles less pronounced, the fingers longer and slimmer. The coarse hair on the back of them was gone. He stared at these foreign objects, then back at the mirror.
The stranger staring back had his eyes. But they were wider now, lashes suddenly dark and full, set in a face of dusky gold. High cheekbones rose where his had been flat. The lips in the reflection—soft, full, painted a faint, shimmering rose—parted in a silent gasp.
He gasped. She gasped.
The fizzing sensation was moving, cascading down his neck, over his collarbones, across his chest. His t-shirt began to feel loose, then strangely tight in entirely new places. A deep, internal shift made his knees buckle. He grabbed the sink edge, his new, slender fingers gripping the porcelain. The physical reorganization was profound, dizzying. He felt a weightlessness in his upper body, replaced by a new, unfamiliar center of gravity lower down. His hips flared, the bones seeming to push against the fabric of his jeans, which were now straining, tight across thighs that had softened, shaped.
He panted, the sound high and quick. The scent of Paula’s perfume was everywhere. It was on him. Woven into this new skin.
“Oh my god… Paula… undo it. Now.” The voice was a stranger’s plea. Clear, feminine, laced with terror.
“I can’t,” she said, and she did sound sorry, for a fleeting second. Then the mischief flooded back in, fierce and determined. “The reversal protocol takes twenty-four hours to initiate. We’ll be in Mallorca by then. And you’ll have gotten… comfortable.”
She leaned in close, her lips near his—her—ear. The reflection showed two stunning young women, one whispering to the other in an airplane lavatory. The surrealism of it threatened to crack his mind.
“Relax, sweetheart,” Paula murmured, her tone a mix of affection and absolute dominance. “By the time we land, you’ll beg to wear my lingerie.”
The seatbelt sign pinged again. The captain’s voice crackled, announcing their descent, asking the cabin to prepare for landing.
Mike could only stare at the woman in the mirror. The woman with his eyes in a face he’d never seen, in a body that felt like a borrowed, too-tight suit. The immense, horrifying truth settled into his new, narrower bones.
This wasn’t a surprise.
It was a kidnapping.