Preface

It had all started with one woman’s spite.

She’d been trouble long before she became notorious---volatile, charming in short bursts, then cruel without warning. Her ex-boyfriend had learned the hard way, and when he finally walked away from her, he thought that was the end of it. He didn’t know that she had been experimenting in secret, honing an ability no one should have possessed.

She began small. A handful of men, strangers at first, vanished from their own lives, reappearing hours later as unrecognizable women. No one believed the victims’ stories---those who even dared to tell them. Soon it was dozens, then over a hundred. By the time she turned her attention back to her ex, she was already well-practiced.

The change came without warning. One moment he was locking his apartment door; the next, he was staring at slender hands that weren’t his, hearing a voice that wasn’t his own. Staring back at himself in the mirror was a plus-sized woman...just like all the rest. He was not her first transformation, and he would not be her last.

The authorities eventually uncovered her scheme. She was caught, but by then the damage was irreversible. Hundreds of men were now women, their old bodies gone as if they had never existed. For the sake of public order---and perhaps to avoid questions science could not yet answer---the truth was kept quiet. Officially, there had been no crime.