Karyn staggered inside Jon’s body, blinking as the strange double-echo of thought and sensation rattled through her. Jon’s consciousness pressed against her own, both of them trying to speak at once, their words muddled and half-formed.
“This—this isn’t right,” Jon stammered through lips that weren’t fully his anymore.
“No kidding,” Karyn hissed. The weight of his taller frame felt alien, clumsy, and she could feel Jon’s panic inside her skull like static electricity. “I didn’t mean for it to be both of us jammed into one body. It was supposed to swap us. This is—God, Jon, this is unbearable.”
“Then wish it back,” he snapped.
Karyn tightened her grip on the stone. “No… not back. That won’t work. The stone doesn’t undo things, remember? But maybe—”
Jon felt her thought crystallize before she even spoke it aloud. His stomach dropped.
“Karyn, don’t—”
“I wish that the wish I just made forces the original person out of their body entirely and puts them somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
The sensation hit like a hammer between their shared eyes. A sharp, tearing heat ripped through Jon’s mind, and then—
Silence.
Karyn gasped, staggering as her head cleared. The pressure was gone. She was alone inside Jon’s skin now. She flexed his hands—her hands, now—and looked down at the stone still pulsing faintly in her grip. “Oh my god. It worked. I’m—Jon.” Her voice cracked with awe, both thrilled and horrified. “I’m actually you.”
But then the realization sank in like lead.
If she was Jon… then where was he?
Her chest tightened as she glanced toward the door, almost expecting him to walk back in wearing his own face again. Instead, there came a faint, deliberate knock.
Karyn froze, heart hammering in Jon’s chest.
The knock came again, louder this time. Whoever it was didn’t sound uncertain. They sounded… steady. As though Jon himself—wherever he’d been pushed—was already adapting.
Her throat went dry.
“Oh no,” she whispered, stepping toward the door with a hand that wasn’t hers.
And as she reached for the knob, one thought pulsed louder than the rest:
What body did I just put Jon into?
