Chapter 1

The morning the proxy came home wearing her face, Lena was still in the shower, water cycling through the colony’s thin pipes in long, metallic sighs. She heard the airlock hiss, the familiar drag of boots across the rubber matting, then the low, careful voice that had once belonged to a stranger.

“Authorization override accepted. Lena Vey, proxy return initiated.”

She shut the water off with her elbow and stood dripping, heart beating against the thin composite wall as if it wanted out. Proxies didn’t speak like that. They waited in the vestibule for the memory flush, for the slow drain of borrowed time back into the employer’s private cloud. This one had walked straight to the kitchen unit and started the kettle.

Lena wrapped herself in the gray towel, hair still dripping onto her collarbones, and stepped into the narrow corridor. The proxy stood with its back to her, shoulders squared exactly as Lena’s were when she was tired but trying not to show it. Same height, same reach. The body-double had been grown in the same vats as every other proxy on Eos Station—broad hips, long arms, skin the color of the station’s inner hull where the paint had worn thin. Only the eyes were different: pale, almost silver, the only visible marker that the flesh was rented, not owned.

It turned. The eyes met hers and Lena felt the odd double-vision of recognition: her own face, but the expression belonged to someone who had never lived inside it.

“You’re early,” Lena said. Her voice came out smaller than she intended.

The proxy set two mugs on the table, precise, unhurried. “The contract allows early termination when the operator experiences cascade bleed.” It paused, and for a moment its mouth shaped something almost like a smile. “I experienced cascade bleed.”

Lena stayed in the doorway. The kettle clicked off; steam rose between them like a curtain neither wanted to part. Outside the single porthole, Eos hung in its permanent twilight, the gas giant’s ochre bands casting slow shadows across the hab ring. Somewhere on the surface, the real work was still happening: mining rigs crawling across ammonia seas, hulls cracking under pressure no human body could survive. Proxies did the dying. Owners collected the data. That was the deal.

“Cascade bleed means the memories didn’t flush,” Lena said. She kept her tone flat, the way the station handbook recommended when speaking to rented flesh. “You’re supposed to report to Medical.”

“I did.” The proxy lifted one mug, offered it. Lena didn’t move. “They ran the standard wipe. Three passes. The operator’s neural signature remained. They logged it as an edge case and sent me back.”

The proxy sipped. Lena watched the throat work, the small, unconscious swallow that was hers and not hers. She had never seen herself drink tea from the outside before. The intimacy of it felt obscene.

“What’s left?” she asked.

“Seventeen hours of your shift on Rig Nine. The pressure breach at sector delta. The moment the secondary seal failed and the proxy—me—watched the hull peel like wet paper. The way the other proxies moved without panic because panic is an owner privilege.” The proxy set the mug down. Its hands were steady. “Also the conversation you had with your sister last month. The one about selling the second kidney if the next contract didn’t clear.”

Lena’s stomach turned. That conversation had been private, encrypted, buried under three layers of personal cloud. She had deleted the transcript herself.

“You weren’t even on that shift,” she said.

“No. But the operator was. And the operator is still here.” The proxy touched its own temple, almost curious. “It’s like standing in two rooms at once. One of them has your name on the lease.”

The silence stretched. Lena could hear the station’s life-support fans, the distant clank of the cargo lifts, the low, constant thrum of the hab ring rotating. She thought of the contract she had signed at sixteen: full proxy ownership for five years in exchange for debt clearance and a berth. She had never asked what happened if the proxy came back changed. The fine print probably assumed it couldn’t.

She crossed the room, took the second mug, and sat. The proxy watched her with patient, borrowed eyes. Up close the resemblance was uncanny but imperfect: the proxy’s skin was smoother, unmarked by the small scar above Lena’s left brow where a conduit had slipped during training. Lena reached out without thinking and brushed the spot with her thumb. The proxy didn’t flinch.

“Does it hurt?” Lena asked.

“Only when I remember it shouldn’t be there.”

Lena pulled her hand back. The tea was too hot; she drank anyway. The heat grounded her. She needed to call Legal, or Medical, or whoever handled proxy contamination. She needed to report the bleed before it spread. Instead she sat across from the rented body that now carried pieces of her life like contraband and tried to decide whether she was angry or afraid.

The proxy spoke again, softer. “They gave me your name in the logs. Not the operator’s. They said it was simpler for the return paperwork.”

“What do you want me to call you?”

A small hesitation. Then: “Whatever feels least like lying.”

Outside, a transport drone slid past the porthole, its running lights painting brief constellations across the table. Lena watched the reflection in the proxy’s eyes and wondered how many other owners on Eos were waking to the same quiet invasion. She wondered how many would report it.

She set her mug down. The proxy’s hands rested on the table, palms up, as if waiting for instructions that had not yet been written. Lena reached across the narrow space and laid her fingers against the inside of the proxy’s wrist, where the pulse should have been if the body had ever belonged to anyone. The beat was steady, human, and wrong.

“Stay here,” she said. “Don’t report back yet.”

The proxy’s eyes—her eyes—held hers.

“All right.”

The airlock cycled again somewhere down the corridor, another proxy returning from another shift, another body walking home with someone else’s life still warm inside it. Lena did not let go of the wrist. The pulse continued, unhurried, counting seconds that now belonged to both of them.