“Here to stock up again, sexy?” The young teenager at the counter of the shop gives me a good long look. His eyes rest on my chest. He puts two fingers to his lips and licks between them, making eye contact again. My grip tightens, I snap a threat. “Better keep your eyes safe kid, unless you want to lose them.” I flick open the lighter, the flame burns tall.

The boy clicks his tongue and throws the packs across the counter. “Fuckin’ bitch.”

I give it no more attention. I throw the coins on the counter, snatch the goods, and walk away as fast as I can. Is this what Emily has to go through? It explains why she lives primarily in the hospital doing night shifts. The night here is terrible. Clouds droop like wet clothes on the skyscrapers and a musty smell leaks from the alleys. This particular city or town or wherever this is…it’s a horrible place for safety. On the way here a bus driver taunted me with his vehicle. Every time I walked forward he'd come really close to the curb. There was a policeman who blew his whistle and stopped me because I was ‘walking funny’. Tried to get his grubby hands closer, so I doused him in pepper spray and ran. It seems like Emily dealt with this quite often. Shortly after, a small group of four men cornered me, clearly wanting a some sort of service. I stabbed one of them in the eye with a pen and bolted for my life until I lost their tail. I may have earned myself a minor criminal record, but who cares? The law here is useless. The corruption isn’t much different back home, but I could trust some of the police there. Then again, back home, I have a ‘biological advantage’.

I reach the back of the hospital after some careful sneaking, and, as I expected, Sika is nowhere to be found. A long sigh accompanies the numbing pain of my shoulder which is just about recovering. I must give it to Emily, she has a high pain tolerance and a lot of patience to have dated Doctor Florence in the past. I’ve been ignoring her memories for as long as I can, especially because her former lover’s body is now possessed by my close friend.

Taking a deep breath, I rub my eyes and squint in the rain to find traces of Sika’s soul. If my knowledge from reading that book on Soul Arts is correct, I should be able to perform some magic. Red souls are supposed to be super powerful, right?

Maybe if I trigger a flight-or-fight response, my soul will kick-start it’s abilities or something.

I give my hurting shoulder a good pinch and instantly curse myself for it. The pain shoots up my arm and makes me dizzy. “Man I really need a smoke.” I grit my teeth and look again. There are a few golden wisps leading me some way. They’re much clearer now, and directly connect to my chest. Be it the Soul Bind, or my own capabilities, I’ll take it as a successful performance.

Holding my arm, I follow the wisps into a narrow alleyway dimly lit by a singular light. It’s the only place without rain, wedged between two residential buildings, shielded from the sky by the overlapping balconies several feet high. I eye the cigarettes again. The packaging looks like the ones I used to get back home, when things weren’t going too well in college. The sky is dark with storm clouds. Prodding open the pack, I make my way further before putting one to my lips and flicking open the lighter. The wisps before me fade in and out of existence, sometimes golden, sometimes blue.

I take a long draw and instantly feel the smoke clean out my years of hard work of abstinence with a bout of coughing. “Ah fuck!” I throw the cig down and stomp it out. “Fuck–this! Fuck everything! I just got a new job, I was supposed to celebrate! And I can’t even fucking–smoke! I just want to go home, I want to see Mum, I want to see Milko, heck I don’t even mind seeing him again, I just want to go home–”

“But you can't, can you?”

“Hah?!”

I raise my head and see a scrawny figure slouched on the ground by the streetlamp. A small girl. “…What did you say?” I cautiously approach. The figure shifts slightly with my footsteps nearing.

The girl looks up slowly, yellow streetlight flickering to fall on her soft features stained with blood. There’s a sharp piece of glass beside her. Her skirt is torn, her top is tattered. “Oh no.” I shuffle through my bag and find a small shawl, wrapping her tightly in it.

“I’ll get you out of here, can you…stand…”

They say our eyes are the colour of our soul.

Thin green strands of smoke leak from the cuts on her wrists, mingling with the golden wisps I see in the air. Together they form a captivating blue reflected in her familiar eyes. “You…”

“...Robert?”

No doubt about it. The soul leaking delicately into the air in front of me is…“Ray?”

Her weak hands tug at my skirt, “Y-You are Robert, aren’t you?”

“No, I'm–” Who am I to her? What do I say? That her beloved Robert died when I became him? That I'm also Robert? “I’m…”

“…I see. I was right…haha …he’s gone, isn’t he?”

“I’m sorry.” I cannot lie to her. She helped me. However distant the memory is, it felt real enough. “You’re not entirely wrong though. You helped me, remember?”

“And then you committed suicide too, didn’t you? You left me, alone. You took Robert’s life–”

“And you’re doing the same right now, aren’t you, Ray?” I hold her ‘bleeding’ wrists, her soul slips past my fingers and combines with the red from mine, forming a gentle purple ribbon of smoke. “I know what it’s like to transmigrate. I don’t know how you’re here or how you got into this mess, but I want you to know that, even if I wasn’t your Robert, you were my only Ray.”

I’m not lying. I did, even if it wasn’t my true memory, love her at a point of time in that short span of a day. My memory does not lie. “I’m sorry for not telling you the truth sooner, I was afraid.”

She looks at me with her beady eyes, her grip on my leg is almost painful. I pull her up and support her frail body. She takes a shaky breath, letting the tears fall at last. “I’m…so glad to see you!” She throws herself into my arms, wailing. “I’m so, so glad to see you–and I don’t even know who you are!”

I wrap her tightly in the shawl and hold her up. “I’m Yin. Yin Rivers. This body I am in belongs to a very brave nurse named Emily Parr.” I gently pat her hair, “I’m originally a man, old enough to be your uncle, really. I live with my Mum and my cat, Milko, in a small town near a place called Greater Yang City. When I first met you, it was my first soul-swap, my first transmigration.”

I can only imagine how scared she must feel right now. The fact that she’s here, means that transmigration is happening to other souls out of my time. If she’s here then…how?

“I have all of Robert’s memories, up until the point I became him, and till the point I ran in front of that bus…I’m sorry.”

She sucks in her blocked nose noisily and nuzzles against my top. “I’m really lucky, aren’t I? I got to meet you again. It doesn’t matter who you were, you chose to not tell me because you wanted to protect me, didn’t you?”

I instinctively hold her a little closer, “…Yeah.”

I look up at the roofs. The injuries on her body hint to something quite clear. “This body,” she whispers softly, voice muffled in my shirt, “Her name’s Dahlia. Her father was…was…”

“You don’t have to recall anything.”

“H-He was gonna pull the trigger so I…jumped off the roof of that tall building. I really wanted to die…so I…” She slowly lets go of me and wipes her face, the blood from her wrists drip down her elbows, melting into bits of green and blue before miraculously returning to the cuts in the form of soul-wisps. “I don’t blame you, Mr Yin.”

My problems can wait. Sika can wait. As long as I’m alive here, he’ll be fine. Bending down, I scoop her up onto my back, lifting her off the ground. “Hold on. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“No! I’m healing–”

“Still.”

“Mr Yin, your shoulder–”

“It’s nothing.”

“No! It’s torn, isn’t it? Doesn’t it hurt?”

“I have a very high pain tolerance. Though, I think you’re the more amazing one.” I can only support her leg with one hand, she holds onto my shoulders tightly. She had said some things of key importance earlier: she’s unable to go home, she remembers me, and she’s healing. Which means that suicide isn’t an escape route this time. “If only he was here…”

“Who?”

“Oh uh, a friend of mine.” I’m not sure how she’d react if I told her about Death.

Just as I’m about to make my way back through the alleyway, I hear a puddle splash behind us. Ray instantly freezes, her breath rapidly escalating into near hyperventilation. “Mr Yin!”

“You hold on tight. I will protect you. I promise.”