I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.

  ~ Vincent Van Gogh

  Consciousness returned like a bucket of icy water dashed across her mind. Sarah started awake and tried to sit up, but her body felt wrong, heavy.

  She frowned and blinked. Her eyelids moved slowly, as if she were still half asleep.

  What’s wrong with me?

  She’d never had so much trouble waking up in a new body. Only then did her surroundings register, and she stared. She was not lying in the transfer lab. The room looked like a lounge, but something was wrong. Everything was surrounded by rainbow halos, and it was all . . . huge.

  It was like she’d been dumped into some gigantic movie set and she was a hobbit, or maybe even Thumbelina. The room seemed like a vast open cavern, filled with the biggest furniture she’d ever heard of, complete with an impossibly huge television hanging on the far wall.

  She glanced to her left. Her head turned very slowly, as if she’d lain unmoving for weeks and her muscles had stiffened. She sat on some kind of gigantic sofa in the crazy-huge lounge. She could get a dozen friends and play a game of football on that sofa. Who would make such a monstrosity, and why?

  Maybe something had gone wrong with that last transfer? Her sight was messed up, and she could not smell anything. Could it be a hallucination? That would almost be better. Dr. Maerwynn would fix it. Everyone said the doctor was brilliant.

  She felt as if every muscle had fallen asleep and hadn’t started tingling yet, so she glanced down.

  Definitely hallucinating.

  She stared in abstract fascination at her doll-like body sitting in the fold of the gigantic sofa. She’d never imagined what a doll would look like from its own eyes, but if she ever tried, it would be this. The details were amazing. It all looked so real. She tried to move her arm, and one of the little china hands raised an inch. She’d never had such vivid dreams.

  Sarah turned to the right to glance down the far expanse of the couch. Another doll sat beside her, dressed in a pretty pink dress, with its little china hands clutching a tiny television remote.

  Sarah started to smile at the life-size china doll, but it turned toward her. It wore Jill’s face. A terrifying suspicion began dawning, something so absurd it couldn’t be real.

  The Jill-doll smiled. The china doll face actually smiled, and it spoke with a voice that might have been Jill’s if she’d just inhaled a helium balloon. “Isn’t this incredible!”

  Sarah tried to recoil, but her body did not react. She’d managed to move her one hand and her face, but the rest of it still seemed asleep.

  “Get away from me,” she shouted, her voice also pitched helium high.

  The Jill-doll laughed, a flat, tinny sound that made Sarah shiver. “I can’t, Sarah. Only the hands move.”

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  “Wake up, Sarah,” she said to herself, tilting her head back to look up at the ceiling that soared what looked like half a mile overhead. “Just wake up! It’s just a transfer nightmare.”

  “Sarah, look at me,” Jill said in her high pitched doll voice.

  “No. I’m dreaming, that’s all.”

  “Sarah, don’t be an idiot. This is wonderful.” The absurdity of that statement brought Sarah’s gaze back to the Jill-doll, and drove a dagger of fear into her cold porcelain heart. Even in a dream, she’d never make Jill so ridiculous. Only the real Jill could do that.

  “Check this out,” Jill-doll said. She lifted her little china hands, pointed the remote at the far wall, and pushed one of its three buttons. On the far wall, the television came to life.

  Jill-doll laughed her little laugh. “Already preset to my favorite show. This is great.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Is everyone all right.” Tomas’s voice boomed like a thunderclap from across the room.

  Sarah slow-turned her head as an impossibly huge Tomas crossed the room and dropped to one knee beside the giant couch, his head bigger than her entire body.

  “Please tell me I’m hallucinating,” Sarah begged in her helium-high doll voice.

  He shook his head sadly. “I tried to warn you.”

  “Warn me.” Sarah shouted, terror turning to anger, heightened by her silly voice. “You said it would be strange. How is this strange?! We passed strange back in Oz. This is . . . is . . .”

  Tomas held up a hand mirror to show her reflection in full china doll glory, complete with yellow sun dress and matching slippers. Her fake doll hair was gathered on both sides of her head, and stood out almost horizontal. Seeing her own face staring out of that china doll body drove home the truth of the nightmare.

  She would have fainted if the doll body would allow it, but when it didn’t work, she closed her eyes instead.

  “I just won’t look. I’ll wake up soon and it’ll all be a dream.”

  “Sarah,” Tomas’s voice rolled over her. “Look at me.”

  “No.”

  “Sarah, what’s gotten into you?” Jill-doll asked.

  That made her look. She slow-swiveled her head around to meet Jill-doll’s tiny gaze. “Have you not been paying attention? They’ve turned us into dolls!”

  “Not exactly,” Tomas said. “Your souls were transferred to the dolls just like they have been to other bodies dozens of times.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Really?” Tomas asked with a hint of a smile. “You’re living it.”

  “It’s a nightmare. That’s all.”

  Jill-doll said, “Get a grip. This is great. I can watch TV all day like this. What a vacation.”

  Sarah turned back to Tomas, who regarded Jill with a pitying expression.

  “How is this possible?”

  “You’ve been lied to.”

  “No, I’ve been turned into a doll.”

  “We need to talk.” Tomas gently lifted Sarah and stood. The room tilted and shifted as she soared up into the air in his hands. At least the doll body didn’t suffer vertigo.

  Tomas crossed to the far side of the room and sat Sarah carefully on a little shelf high on the wall. He glanced back at Jill, but she didn’t even seem to have noticed they’d left. She sat staring at the giant TV, and her little doll laugh echoed across the room.

  “Why don’t you want Jill to hear this?”

  “She’s not ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “The truth. Everything you know about Alterego is a lie,” Tomas stated.

  “You’re saying old rich people aren’t really renting our bodies?”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “That’s just a carefully-crafted cover. The so-called technology that allows Dr. Maerwynn to transfer your consciousness between bodies is just an elaborate smoke-and-mirrors. It doesn’t exist.”

  “Something exists. I got turned into a doll, remember?”

  Tomas regarded her for a second. “You may find the truth hard to believe.”

  “I’m a doll. How much weirder can it get?”

  Tomas managed a little smile. “Remember you’re the one who said that.”

  “That’s not ominous at all. What’s with the mystery? I’m already a doll, so why not just tell me what’s going on?”

  Tomas gave her a very serious look. “How badly do you want your body back?”

  “More than anything.”

  “What are you willing to do to get it?”

  “Whatever it takes,” she assured him instantly, and she meant it.

  Tomas nodded. “You’re ready, that’s why.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Ready to see the truth.”

  “You could just tell me.”

  “You wouldn’t believe it. You have to see it.”

  “See what?”

  Tomas lifted her from the shelf. “Come on. It’s time you get a glimpse of what’s really going on here at Alterego.”