Ronald Cain died on a Tuesday.

  He knew it was Tuesday because he’d specifically taken the job on a Tuesday, thinking it would be straightforward. Get in, eliminate the target, get out. He’d done it a hundred times before. The problem with the hundred and first time was that the rival gang had apparently also hired people, and those people had been considerably less arthritic than Ronald.

  Three bullets. One in the shoulder, one in the stomach, one somewhere in his lower back that made his legs stop working before his brain got the memo. He remembered hitting the concrete. He remembered thinking that this was an embarrassing way to go for a man of his experience. He remembered the cold spreading from his fingertips inward.

  Then nothing.

  Then pain.

  Different pain. Sharper. Localized at the base of his skull like someone was pressing a heated screw directly into his spine.

  Ronald opened his eyes.

  The ceiling above him was white and sterile, fitted with lights so bright they made his eyes water immediately. He was lying flat on something cold and metal. His wrists were strapped down. His ankles too. He could feel that his shirt was gone, replaced by nothing, and that he was colder than he’d ever been in his life, which was saying something given the winters he’d worked through.

  Morgue, was his first thought.

  His second thought, when the ceiling didn’t match any morgue he’d ever seen and the pain in his skull continued with clinical persistence, was that he was somewhere considerably worse.

  He turned his head slowly. The room was clean in the way that expensive places were clean — not scrubbed, just never allowed to get dirty in the first place. There were two figures standing at his left side wearing pale grey clothing that wasn’t quite a uniform and wasn’t quite a lab coat. They were speaking to each other in low voices. One of them was holding an instrument Ronald couldn’t identify. The other was watching a screen mounted on a mechanical arm above the table.

  Neither of them was looking at his face.

  He took a slow breath and ran through his inventory. Fingers — working, though stiff. Toes — working. The restraints at his wrists were metal, bolted to the table, no give whatsoever. The pain at his skull was continuous but not worsening.

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  He did not panic.

  Panic had never once helped Ronald Cain in fifty-three years of living and he saw no reason to start now, wherever now happened to be.

  What he did notice, and what took him a moment longer to process, was that the hands strapped to the table were not his hands. Or rather — they were his hands in the sense that he was controlling them, flexing the fingers, feeling the restraint against the wrist. But they were not the hands he’d spent five decades looking at. These hands had no scar across the right knuckle from a knife fight in 1998. No broken-reset finger on the left that had never quite straightened properly. These hands were smooth. Young.

  Ronald stared at them for a long moment.

  Huh, he thought.

  One of the figures in grey finally glanced toward his face and went very still.

  “He’s awake,” the figure said, to the other one, in a tone suggesting this was not supposed to happen.

  “I can see that,” Ronald said. His voice came out wrong — younger, slightly different in pitch, like hearing a recording of yourself and not recognizing it immediately. He cleared his throat. “You want to tell me what’s in my skull?”

  The two figures exchanged a look that people exchanged when they didn’t have a good answer and knew it.

  “Neural interface,” the second one said carefully. “Standard implantation. You’re not supposed to be conscious.”

  “I get that a lot,” Ronald said. “What is this place?”

  Neither of them answered that one.

  Which told him everything he needed to know about what kind of situation he’d woken up into.

  He turned his head back toward the ceiling and breathed slowly, cataloguing facts the way he’d always catalogued facts — without judgment, without emotion, just information arranged in order of relevance.

  He was alive, technically. He was in a young body that was not his. He was strapped to a table while someone installed hardware into his brain. He had no weapons, no contacts, no money, and apparently no name that anyone here would recognize.

  He’d been in worse positions.

  He was trying to remember when exactly, but he was fairly sure he had.