Product Description <br/>When Sabrina picks up Adrien battered and bleeding outside Zagreb station, she knows only that she is drawn to this stranger and to the sense of danger he represents. She has no idea that she is also touching the Watcher, a mysterious figure who can inhabit Adrien's body using a brain implant. What might have been a love affair is about to turn deadly as Sabrina is drawn into Adrien's world, she will become the object of the Watchers desire in a battle over a metamorphic new technology known as I.<br/> From the Inside Flap <br/>The notion of identity has become clouded in a future where the Watchers are able to inhabit the bodies of well-paid slaves through satellite links.  Two people who have become surrogate bodies have two entirely different takes on the experience.  Adrien Reyes views the link as a trap he needs to escape, while Sabina Lazarich sees it as a chance at true empathy.  But neither knows that the experimental brain implant, I, could give a dying Watcher a second chance, and it has targeted one of them as a host.<br/> Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. <br/>He was on the wrong train and he had to get off.  As he crawled from his seat, grappling for the door amid the scramble of passengers, he was seized by the conviction that there was no such thing as the world except insofar as it was defined by his personal and specific pain.  The world was turning all to smoke and aquarelles, whereas his pain was as precise and ruthless as a panther.  His pain, in fact, was carving out its own identity, a private timestrand, snarling and obscene.  It was athletic, gifted--bewildering--so that when the train whirled away he was left swaying on the platform while his senses, one by one, crunched down toward singularity, eliminating the world and admitting nothing but--you guessed it--pain.<br/><br/>This probably meant he was about to pass out.<br/><br/>Voices; shuffling bodies.  Fearful of collapsing in public, he checked his thoughts: agony is vulgar.  Tamed by discipline.  Think about something else.  Zagreb.  The conductor said Zagreb.  Luckily he still had his bag.  Better keep moving.  Find a hotel.  If any bones were broken, they weren't important ones.  He would buy drugs, sleep for one day, and then on to New York.  There, if still coughing blood, hospital.<br/><br/>He was moving unsteadily toward a welter of kiosks.  Embarrassment was surely called for.  Or anger.  Or fear.  But at the moment he was strictly into feeling sorry for himself.  The Watcher had abandoned him; his role now would be merely to slither away and lick his wounds.  He had been put in his place.  No one would care what he did anymore, so why keep up pretenses?  He permitted himself the luxury of limping.<br/><br/>There weren't enough taxis lined up to cope with the crowd.  It was just occurring to him that if he had to stand and wait he would probably faint, when he saw this girl at the far end of the row of cabs.  She leaned against her car smoking a cigarette and watching the throng approach.  The car was either parked or broken down, a fragile-looking doorless affair, piebald with rust.  She had presence, or he was giddy with pain, or both, because he made an effort to stop gasping and dragging his right leg.  Her leather jacket and old trainers were stained, but the way she inhabited them made their condition immaterial.  He wondered if the bruises on his face were visible yet.  He gritted his teeth and told himself to beat the two businessmen who were also bearing down on the girl, conversing in rapid Chinese.  Picking up his feet, he shouldered past them, muttering, "Discourteous occidental fuck coming through."  He flung himself ahead, falling with a wheeze on the hood of the car.  Clutching his midsection, he lowered his head toward the gutter and loosed a long cough; he could feel her eyes on him, so he swallowed the warm, foul admixture of bodily fluids and tried to straighten up.<br/><br/>She put out her cigarette delicatel