Allie had skinjacked a well-dressed middle-aged woman who very well could have been Clarence’s wife. As Clarence no longer had any ID, she had to skinjack a couple of security guards to get him through. Easy as pie.

As they circled the airport waiting to land in miserable weather, the turbulence became so severe it nearly knocked Allie out of her host.

“Sorry to ruin New Year’s Eve for all you good folks,” the captain announced, “but I guess the old year is hurling hailstones at Baltimore. I promise to have you down before the ball drops.”

Allie could feel the tension filling the living—even the seasoned travelers. Allie felt tense as well, but it had nothing to do with the rattling of the jet. Her turbulence would start after they landed.

Time was of the essence, but the task was daunting. So Allie did something she rarely did. She took care of herself. After they landed, Allie skinjacked a wealthy woman with nowhere to go. Then she lavished upon herself and Clarence the finest New Years’ dinner Baltimore had to offer. Afterward they retired to their respective rooms in a penthouse suite.

But while Clarence slept, Allie did not. She opened the laptop of her host, and spent the night scouring the Web for information—and when old news reports proved insufficient, both she and Clarence hit the streets in the morning, hoping to dig up all the facts they could on the tragic tale of a Russian immigrant boy who was not entirely dead.

Vitaly Milos Vayevsky.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of eleven. Fell from the roof of a five-story apartment building at sixteen. A tree broke his fall. But not entirely.

He suffered massive internal injuries and a subdural hematoma that left him one step short of brain-dead. He spent more than a year in a long-term care facility, and then, when insurance and money ran out, the decision was made to take him off the machines that monitored his faint life signs.

Prognosis: grim.

The doctors gave him just a few weeks to live in such a nonresponsive vegetative state. His parents brought him home, for his mother was determined to make her son’s final days peaceful. However, those days turned to weeks, turned to months, turned to years. And now, in a bedroom, in a fourth-floor apartment, in a working-class neighborhood of Baltimore, the body of Vitaly Milos Vayevsky slept . . . while his soul journeyed in a world between life and death.

Each day, the drip, drip, drip of the intravenous feeding tube marked time for the family. His younger sister went off to college, graduated, married, and had a son that she named for him. Milos was an uncle, but he would never know.