Chapter 1

Viv didn’t believe in hangovers.

He had built a company on that principle. Hangovers were inefficiency, a tax on the ambitious. He had eradicated them from his life with a combination of intravenous hydration, custom-blended nootropics, and the kind of monastic discipline that turned a Stanford dorm-room startup into a fifteen-billion-dollar public company. So the feeling of someone driving a railroad spike through his left temple while a bass drum pounded somewhere in his spinal column was not familiar.

It was, however, undeniable.

A groan scraped out of his throat.

Two things hit him at once: the sound of that groan, wrong register, wrong timbre, a smoky contralto that didn’t belong to him, and the smell. Stale beer. Cigarette smoke sunk so deep into fabric it had become part of the molecular structure. Something floral and chemical. Perfume? Hairspray?

His eyes opened.

Ceiling. Water stain shaped like Florida. Cracked plaster. A string of Christmas lights, unlit, sagging from thumbtacks.

He blinked. The ceiling didn’t resolve into the clean white planes of his penthouse bedroom. It stayed stubbornly, authentically shitty.

“Fuck,” he said, except his mouth shaped the word differently, and the voice that came out was female.

His hand flew up. A stranger’s hand. Slimmer than his, nails painted a chipped metallic blue, a silver ring on the middle finger shaped like a serpent eating its own tail. The knuckles. The fine bones visible under pale skin. The calluses on the fingertips, guitar calluses, his brain supplied, though he’d never touched a guitar in his life.

The body sat up. He didn’t tell it to. It just did, and he was along for the ride, inside it.

A room materialized around him. Small. Dingy. Posters on the walls: PJ Harvey, The Distillers, a black-and-white photo of Joan Jett flipping off the camera. Clothes everywhere. A bass guitar propped against a milk crate. An ashtray overflowing. The window showed a brick wall six inches away and a fire escape laced with snow.

Snow. February? He’d gone to sleep in July.

The body’s hands, his hands now apparently, dropped to the mattress. They pressed into the sheets. He watched them. Waited for them to stop being his.

They didn’t.

A full-length mirror leaned against the wall near the door, its glass foxed and speckled with age. He told the body to stand. The body stood, wobbled, caught the doorframe with one hand. The coordination was wrong. The center of gravity had shifted in ways his muscle memory couldn’t account for.

He walked to the mirror.

The woman who stared back was in her mid-twenties. Maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. Black hair hacked short and messy, hanging over one eye. The other eye was dark, heavily lashed, ringed with smudged eyeliner that had survived sleep and turned into a smoky bruise around the socket. High cheekbones. A mouth that looked like it spent a lot of time smirking. She wore a ripped Smiths t-shirt and nothing else. The hem hit mid-thigh. The legs below it were long, pale, bisected by a scar on the left knee.

He stared.

She stared back.

Then his mind, still his mind, still Viv, still the neural architecture of a forty-three-year-old CEO who had just been body-snatched by a goth waif in a flophouse, did what it was trained to do when confronted with an unsolvable problem. It began running differential diagnoses.

Drugs. Possible. He’d taken nothing last night. But someone could have dosed him. A rival. A disgruntled employee. The board. The thought unspooled with the comfortable paranoia of wealth.

Psychotic break. He’d been under stress. The acquisition talks had stalled. The IPO of their main competitor was eating market share. He hadn’t slept more than four hours in three weeks. The mind cracked. He was in a hospital somewhere, hallucinating vividly, and soon someone would push benzodiazepines through an IV and he’d wake up to the clean white ceiling he deserved.

Dead. This was the afterlife. And the afterlife looked like a squatter’s apartment in what his brain was now helpfully identifying, based on the architecture, the radiators, the quality of light angling through the filthy window, as New York City, probably Brooklyn, circa late 1990s.

Which was impossible.

“Alexa,” he said.

The voice came out in that stranger’s alto. The room didn’t answer.

“Siri.”

Nothing. Obviously.

His eyes swept the room and found, on a nightstand cluttered with guitar picks and loose change and a condom still in its wrapper, a pager. A Nokia 5110. And a ticket stub.

He picked up the ticket stub. September 17, 1999. Bowery Ballroom. SIRENICA was scrawled across it in jagged Sharpie.

The name detonated something in his chest. A flare of recognition he couldn’t place. Sirenica. Sirenica. He’d heard that name before. A band? Yes. A band. He’d known someone who was obsessed with them, back when he was young.

He was forty-three. He’d gone to bed in a two-thousand-square-foot bedroom with museum-grade climate control and a mattress calibrated to his sleep metrics. He’d woken up here. In 1999. In the body of a woman who apparently played the Bowery Ballroom two days ago, who had a pager and chipped nail polish and a bass guitar she could probably actually play.

The hands, his hands, were trembling. She was coming down from something. The headache was a chemical headache. He could feel the residue of whatever she’d taken, amphetamine maybe, a crash lurking in the joint spaces.

He, she, needed water.

The bathroom was through a door that stuck. He shouldered it open and found a toilet with a cracked seat, a pedestal sink caked in toothpaste, and a shower curtain printed with faded pink flamingos. The medicine cabinet had Advil. He dry-swallowed three. Then he stood over the sink and looked at the face in the mirror again, closer this time.

She’d been crying.

The smudged eyeliner wasn’t just sleepy carelessness. There’d been tears, recently, enough to carve tracks through the makeup. Her pupils were huge. The whites were pinked.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

The mouth moved. Her mouth. His. Theirs.

And then, unbidden, a word surfaced, a name, floating up through whatever neural bridge connected Viv’s consciousness to this stranger’s gray matter.

Lex.

Short for Alexis. No, Alexandra. Alexandra Voss. Goes by Lex. Born 1974 in Portland, Oregon. Moved to New York at nineteen. Bassist. Vocalist. Second album dropping in three weeks. Manager is a cokehead named Richie with a ponytail and a gambling habit. The band is, Sirenica.

“Sirenica,” she said, and this time the voice wasn’t just smoke. It was embers.

The door to the apartment slammed open.

Viv, Lex, whoever, spun around, heart jackhammering, one hand grabbing the bathroom doorframe for balance.

A man stood in the doorway. Tall. Scarecrow-thin. Faded flannel over a Misfits t-shirt. Hair that hadn’t been washed in a while, pulled back in an elastic band. He was holding two paper cups of coffee and looking at her with the specific exhaustion of someone who’d been dealing with her disasters for years.

“You’re up,” he said. “Good. We gotta be at the studio in forty-five minutes.”

Viv stared at him and waited for the body to supply a name.

It did. Mikey. Drummer. Clean for three years. The only one who can read my moods.

“Mikey,” Viv said. The name felt strange in her mouth, like a word in a language she’d studied but never spoken.

“Don’t ‘Mikey’ me like you didn’t almost jump off the goddamn fire escape last night.” He set the coffees down on a milk crate. “You solid?”