This life is too short for self-hatred and celery sticks.

  ~ Marilyn Wann

  Within minutes Tawnya awoke, blissfully unaware. She chatted excitedly with Almeda about how wonderful it was to be back in her own body, despite her injuries, and discussed the upcoming physical therapy.

  Tomas arrived a moment later and helped Tawnya into a wheelchair. He didn’t even glance in Sarah’s direction before wheeling Tawnya from the room. A second staff member came for the old renter body and wheeled it away.

  Sarah waited impatiently for Almeda to leave so Tomas could come retrieve her, but the woman only moved to the work bench directly below Sarah’s hiding place, out of her range of vision.

  A moment later the door opened again and a pretty young woman in a baggy orange correctional facility jumpsuit entered the room, followed by a uniformed officer. The jumpsuit made it hard to see specifics of the woman’s body, but Sarah had developed a great sense of shapes from all the times she’d transferred.

  Actually, the convict’s body wasn’t too different from the one Sarah had transferred to a lot lately. In fact, it might be pretty close to Sarah’s. It would make an excellent temporary replacement.

  Almeda pointed at the empty gurney. The convict sat on the edge of the bed and glanced around the room nervously.

  “Whatcha gonna do to me?”

  “Lie down. This won’t hurt.”

  The convict complied, but repeated her question.

  “Don’t worry,” Almeda said. “You’ve volunteered to be part of an exciting new technology.”

  “I ain’t signed up for nothing.” The convict tried to sit up, but the officer held her down and growled something threatening.

  Almeda produced a needle and swiftly injected the pre-op tranquilizer.

  The convict yelped. “Ow. Hey, I got rights. I . . .” Her voice trailed off as the fast-acting tranquilizer pushed her into oblivion.

  “Thank you,” Almeda told the officer, who retreated from the room.

  As soon as he left, Almeda positioned herself over the convict’s head. Sarah tried to frown as Almeda grasped the sleeping woman’s face and dug her fingers under the lower edges of her jaw.

  Almeda’s eyes began to glow just as Dr. Maerwynn’s had. Purple fire ignited across her fingers, and they sank into the skin along the convict’s jaw.

  Sarah watched in confusion and growing concern as the purple fire rippled up along the convict’s jawline. If Almeda was preparing for a transfer, why hadn’t she attached the life support unit? Where was the SOTRUN unit? What was that crazy purple fire?

  Then the prone woman’s face began to peel away from the skull with a wet, sucking sound like a boot being pulled out of thick mud. A gap appeared between the woman’s face and the skull near the jaw, and widened up toward her forehead until half her face was leveraged up.

  There was no blood, just the front of her face peeling away from her skull. It was the freakiest thing Sarah had ever seen. It was so unexpectedly horrible, that she couldn’t quite process what she was seeing. Then with a loud pop, the face came free, complete with her nose, and with eyeballs trailing ragged nerve clusters.

  Sarah bit back a horrified cry as she watched with stunned disbelief. Almeda had just ripped that convict’s face right off!

  Lacking the concealing protection of the machinery, Sarah witnessed in full, disgusting detail as trailers of flesh dropped away and the face thinned, the eyes compressing into half-spheres. By the time Almeda raised the face to shoulder height, it looked like a translucent, shimmering full-face mask trailing tendrils of rainbow smoke.

  As Almeda threw her head back in silent ecstasy, mirroring Dr. Maerwynn’s reaction when she operated on Tawnya, Sarah fought to keep from screaming. Who ripped people’s faces off? They weren’t living in the middle ages, and Almeda wasn’t some kind of Viking berserker.

  Worse, what was up with that woman’s face? It wasn’t like Sarah had ever witnessed anyone’s face get ripped off, but bodies didn’t work that way. Flesh didn’t slough off, and bones didn’t look like that shimmering mask. What the hell was going on?

  She was so rattled, so horrified had she had command of her stomach, she would have puked all over the room. Tomas had said she needed to see, but he hadn’t prepared her for the awful reality of what she was going to witnessed.

  He had said she wouldn’t believe him if he told her, and that much was definitely true. Who would believe anything that had happened to her since getting put under for the last transfer? Waking up as a living doll, witnessing doctors rip off patient’s faces? It was too much.

  She didn’t know the convict, but couldn’t bear to see such torture being inflicted on the unsuspecting woman. The way Almeda and Dr. Maerwynn had acted, it seemed that the procedure was common? How did that relate to the transfers they did for everyone else?

  Did they rip off pieces of everyon’es faces? How could they without anyone dying? How many times had they ripped pieces of Sarah out of whatever body she possessed while she’d lain innocent under their hands?

  She wanted to scream at Almeda to stop, wanted to claw at the creature’s eyes, but she couldn’t do anything while stuck in the doll body, and was forced to silently witness the horrible procedure.

  On the gurney, the skin where the convict’s face had been removed settled into a smooth, blank mask, flowing together like water in a pond. One more impossibility in a long line of craziness. Compared to everything else, Sarah almost missed how insane it was for skin to do that.

  Only when Almeda stood holding the convict’s translucent face free of the woman’s body did Sarah realize something else was wrong. There was no other body in the room to transfer the face to.

  That fact chilled her with an inexplicable sense of dread. Was it worse to witness someone’s face get ripped out of their head, or realize there was actually no plan to shove it back into another skull, assuming that was even possible?

  Almeda placed the face on a counter and extracted a rectangular box from a cabinet. It looked like a safety deposit box, about as long as a person’s forearm, and half as wide. She flipped open the lid, revealing a blank, padded interior, and dropped the face inside.

  ‘No,’ Sarah thought, a fresh wave of icy horror chilling her entire doll body. No no no. She couldn’t be discarding it.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  Sure enough, Almeda closed the lid and latched it. Then she covered the faceless body with a sheet and attached a life support unit over the head and neck.

  A moment later, a staff member arrived to wheel the body away. With the life support unit’s opaque shield blocking their view of the missing face, they had no way of knowing what mutated person they were pushing from the room.

  With the face gone, the front of the skull had ended up looking a lot like a blank mannequin head, the front covered with smooth skin, broken only by a narrow slit where the nose should go. Strangely, the skull looked intact, as if the jaw and facial bone structure remained, although somewhat flattened.

  What the hell was going on? Sarah saw bodies with those life support boxes attached all the time. Did they all have missing faces?

  How was it possible? What was that mask-like thing Almeda pulled from the face?

  The shimmering face mask looked pretty thin, but how would the muscles retain their shape? Even if Almeda only pulled off the soft tissue atop the actual bones, she’d just have a handful of bloody flesh, not a face mask.

  How . . . she didn’t even know how to phrase the next question. The entire concept was just too far outside of normal reality for her to hazard any rational guesses.

  Just as Almeda took up the box that held the convict’s face, the door opened and another of Dr. Maerwynn’s assistants entered the room. Mai Luan was a slender Chinese-American who had inherited the best of both ancestries.

  She wore her silky, black hair long, tied back to accentuate her delicate features. Her face looked more American than Chinese, and she stood average height, with a slender, athletic build.

  “I’ll take that,” Mai Luan said without preamble as she collected the box containing the convict’s face.

  “Of course,” Almeda said quickly. “I was just coming to find you.”

  “I bet you were.” Mai Luan regarded her with an icy, unfriendly look. “Stay out of the vault unless I send for you.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she tucked the gruesome package under one arm and strode from the room.

  Almeda scowled at the closed door and whispered, “I hope you trip your own runes.”

  What did that mean?

  Then Almeda visibly shuddered and muttered, “Not while I’m in the building.”

  The woman glanced around the room furtively. For a second Sarah feared she might have made some kind of noise to give herself away. But Almeda did not notice her up on the high shelf and, after straightening her hair, left the room.

  Sarah stared after her, filled with icy horror. They took the convict’s face and didn’t give her another body.

  Mai Luan was taking her to the vault. Tomas had mentioned the vault before, but Sarah knew next to nothing about it.

  Sarah wished she could cry just to release some tension. The vault had never seemed ominous before, but knowing they were going to lock the convict away in the vault with no body, stuck in that little box made it seem like the lair of a vampire, or death cult.

  Would the woman die? Was that face thing even the conscious part of her? If it was, would she wake up in that tiny coffin?

  Would they do the same to Sarah?

  The thought was so terrifying she wanted to scream. How could she have lived in that nightmare place and think for a moment that it was great?

  Tomas arrived then, and if she could have moved, she would have thrown herself off the shelf to reach him. Anything to escape that room of horrors and feel another normal human nearby.

  He pulled her down from the shelf. “Are you all right?”

  “I saw it,” she told him in a voice that shook so badly she could barely get the words out. “But I have no idea what I saw. What the hell did I just see, Tomas?”

  “Calm down and I’ll explain.”

  “Calm down? Calm down? Almeda just ripped a woman’s face off, Tomas!”

  “I know, but you wouldn’t have believed me until you saw.”

  “What did I see?”

  “The truth.”

  Sarah took a deep breath to try to calm her nerves, but it didn’t help. She lacked a heart or lungs. She was a freaking doll!

  Tomas held her up so they could look eye to eye. “Dr. Maerwynn is not a doctor at all. She’s a Facetaker.”

  “A what?”

  “A facetaker. One of a very small number of people who have the power to remove a person’s soul and place it into a different body.”

  If she hadn’t just woken up as a china doll and seen Almeda just rip off that poor convict’s face, Sarah would have laughed in Tomas’s face. “So that mask she yanked out of that woman’s head was her soul?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Sarah tried to laugh, but the helium-high doll voice annoyed her so much she growled. That sounded stupid too.

  “Her soul? So Almeda just ripped out her soul?”

  “Pretty much,” he repeated.

  Sarah wanted to rub her hand across her face, but that wasn’t working very well either. “Okay, let me get this straight. Almeda and Dr Maerwynn can pull out people’s souls. Like magic?”

  “That’s as good a term for it as any right now.”

  “Are we on candid camera?”

  Tomas barked a laugh. “If only.”

  Sarah tried to reconcile the insanity he was talking about with the nightmare she was living, and the horror freak show she had just witnessed. Could it be magic, or was she just going insane?

  Magic was better than insanity.

  “So . . . Are you saying the technology we use to transfer between bodies . . .?”

  “Is a lie,” he stated. “The machines do help keep souls stable, but the whole program is based on a lie. There is no technology to transfer consciousnesses between bodies. It’s facetakers moving souls.”

  She tried her hardest to glare at him, but in her current form, it didn’t work. Hating how her doll voice made everything she said sound like a child’s giggle, she hissed, “You could have warned me.”

  “You wouldn’t have believed me.”

  “You could have tried.”

  He held her a bit closer, his gaze steady. “No, I couldn’t.” She tried to object, but he talked over her.

  “Sarah, I’ve tried before. It never works.”

  “I could have lost it and screamed or given myself away.”

  “I know. In a way, that would be preferable.”

  For a second, all she could do was stare. “Are you insane?”

  “If only it was that simple.” He sighed, “Listen, Sarah, if you had given yourself away, they would have scooped you up and threatened you until you broke.”

  “Or just dump me in one of those little boxes.”

  “Unlikely. You’re a well known donor, with a high profile body sale coming up. They don’t need any extra scrutiny right now. They would have dumped you in another body, terrified you into silence, and kicked you out, wealthy and blessedly ignorant.”

  That much was probably true. They’d been trying awfully hard to strong-arm her into signing the paperwork to make everything legal.

  Tomas added, “Not everyone can handle the truth. Most people would have lost it, and that would have been how their journey continued. For someone like that, it would have been the best possible outcome.”

  “And for me?”

  He gave her an approving smile. “You can choose another path, if you wish. It takes a special mind, someone with a flexible and strong soul to accept what you just saw and roll with it.”

  “You think this is rolling with it?” she snapped.

  He nodded. “You’re handling the truth better than most. Listen, we don’t have much time, and you need to decide. You’ve seen the barest glimpse into a darker and far more dangerous world. The wise choice would be to take their offer and get out now before you draw any more attention to yourself.”

  She considered that for a moment as the horror of what she’d just witnessed played through her mind. It was terrifying, and a big part of her wanted to wash her hands of it all and get out. Would that be the smart play?

  No.

  She couldn’t accept just abandoning herself. There were crazy things going on, but there had to be a better way.

  “What is the other option?”

  His smile widened. “I figured you’d say that. We have to tread carefully, but you’re ready to learn more. There’s a path forward, but it will be risky, and if we screw up, they won’t let you get away so easily.”

  She shivered at that, then took a deep breath. First, she needed to understand what the hell she’d just witnessed.

  “Let’s assume I believe you. How was what I saw possible?”

  “I’m not a facetaker, so I can’t explain their powers, but I know that they’ve been around since the dawn of time. Their ancient power has been a carefully-guarded secret for millennia.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. They can’t keep a secret by publicizing it. The truth will get out eventually.”

  “Probably. That doesn’t seem to bother them any more.”

  “They’ll be arrested, or worse.”

  “Maybe not. There are other things going on here, masked by the rental company.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the vault.”

  That sent another shiver down her little china spine. “They keep the convicts transferred from the prison there, and Mai Luan just took the face, soul, thing there, right?”

  “Yes. The vault is huge, and it’s not a prison in the traditional sense.”

  “What do you mean?” She asked cautiously.

  “The convict donor program includes about a hundred convicts, but the vault can store thousands of souls.”

  Sarah tried to frown, but she wasn’t entirely sure it worked. “Why would they do that?”

  “It’s a gathering place. Under cover of the rental agency program, they’re gathering souls here.”

  “Why?” she repeated.

  “I’m not sure. I can think of a couple of possible reasons, and none of them are good.”

  “That woman . . . Will they let her out when they’re done with her body?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, but his expression made it clear that he at least suspected what they would do, but didn’t want to say.

  “Meaning they won’t. Tomas, this is crazy!”

  “I know. We can talk about it more later, but we have to get back. It’s time for your next transfer.”