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"I can barely hear you," I said.
"That's ... you don't ... experience."
Although I couldn't hear the full sentence, I could guess at the missing content. I couldn't hear her because I was new at this. The problem had nothing to do with her inexperience. Naturally.
"... Ruth?"
"She's okay."
"Good." Louder, clearer, as if the reassurance added to the signal. "How about you? Are you okay?"
"Surviving."
"Good. Hold on then."
"Hold--?"
Too late. The signal disconnected. I was alone. Again. Damn her.
Twenty minutes later. "Okay, I'm back."
Paige. Another easy contact, probably because, once again, I wasn't expecting it.
"You ready?" she asked.
"For what?"
The floor slid out from under me. I twisted to break my fall, but there was nothing there. No floor. No "me." The order to move came from my brain and went ... nowhere. I was pitched into complete blackness, but I didn't lose consciousness. My brain went wild, issuing commands, move this, do that, look, sniff, listen, scream. Nothing. There was nothing to respond. I couldn't see, hear, speak, move, or smell. Every synapse in my brain exploded with panic. Absolute animal panic.
"Elena?"
I heard something! My mind scrambled back to sanity, clinging to that one word like a life raft. Who said that? Paige? No, not Paige. A man's voice. My heart leaped with recognition before my brain even figured it out.
"Jeremy?"
I said the word, didn't think it, but said it and heard it. Yet my lips didn't move and the voice I heard wasn't my own. It was Paige's.
I saw light. A blurred figure in front of me. Then a mental pop and every thing became clear. I was sitting in a room. Jeremy stood in front of me.
"Jer?"
My words. Paige's voice. I tried standing. Nothing happened. I looked down and saw my hands resting on the arms of a chair, but they weren't my hands. The fingers were shorter, soft, bedecked with silver rings. I followed the line of my arm. Brown curls spilled over my shoulder, lying atop a dark green lily-o
f-the-valley-print sundress. A sundress? This was definitely not my body.
"Elena?" Jeremy crouched in front of me--or not me. He frowned. "Did this work? Are you there, sweetheart?"
"Jer?" I said again.
At the bottom of my field of vision, I saw my--the--lips move, but I felt nothing. Even my field of vision itself was skewed, the angle all wrong, like I was watching the scene through an oddly placed camera. I tried to shift upward, add some height to my position, but nothing happened. The sensation was unsettling to the point of panic. Was this what it was like to be paralyzed? My heart fluttered in my chest. I didn't feel it pounding, only perceived it in my mind, some gut-level awareness of my body's normal responses to fear, knowing that my heart should be fluttering, even if it wasn't.
"What--" I began. The voice was so alien in my ears that I had to stop. Swallowed. Mentally swallowed, I mean. If my throat moved, I wasn't aware of it. "Where am I? Who am I? I can't move."
Jeremy's face clouded. "Didn't she--?" He muttered something under his breath, then started again, calm. "Paige didn't explain?"
"Explain what? What the hell is going on?"
"She's transported you to her body. You can see, hear, speak, but you won't have any sort of mobility. She didn't explain--?"
