But Allie handed him a clipboard. “Not until you fill out the accident report.” Then she excused herself to the restroom where she promptly left the nurse’s body asleep in a stall.

In the examining room, Seth watched as the guard filled out the report. “See,” the guard said. “Doing that to yourself was a waste of time.”

“And,” added the other guard, “it’ll hurt even worse in the morning.”

Seth kept waiting for Allie to return, but she didn’t. Then as the two guards led him out of the infirmary, the one on his left said, “You’d better not try anything funny; this place goes into computer lockdown the second you try to escape. With technology like that, who needs snipers in high towers?” Then he said, “Come on. The warden is waiting.”

The other guard looked at him strangely. “We’re taking him to the warden?”

“You know our orders. If anything unusual happens to the Benson Burner, we’re supposed to take him straight to the warden.”

The other guard wasn’t convinced. “That’s not protocol.” He pulled out his walkie-talkie. “Let me call it in.”

Allie leaped out of the left-hand guard, through Seth, and into the right-hand guard just before he pressed the button to talk—but she had leaped so suddenly that the first guard—who she had put to sleep while skinjacking him—was jarred awake. He didn’t even stumble.

“Hey,” he said reaching for his weapon, knowing something strange had happened. “How’d we get in the hallway? What’s going on?”

Damn! Allie leaped back again into the left guard—she never even had the chance to put the right guard to sleep, and he knew something had been possessing his body.

“Something’s wrong here!” he said.

There was no time to think now, so Allie tried something she had never done before; she leaped from one guard to the other and back again, over and over, back and forth, staying just long enough to keep them from doing anything she didn’t want them to. Faster and faster she bounced, until she was seeing double—two separate images from two pairs of eyes. She kept increasing the speed of her jumps, images flickering like a projector getting up to speed, until she couldn’t tell whose body she was in anymore. Then she realized that she was skinjacking them both at once! Allie settled into the rhythm of this alternating current. It was exhausting, but she had no choice.

“What’s going on?” Seth asked.

“Move it,” she said and found that the words came out of both men’s mouths simultaneously. Striding in unison, they came to the first set of security doors, and punched in the code, bringing them one step closer to escape.

They needed to be buzzed through the next door, and the guard on duty asked,

“Where are you taking this prisoner?”