I know Luc feels my fear, yet he does nothing but take us faster, higher, in loops, tail spins and whorls through the vacuum-sealed cosmos. We scream past the echoes of dead and dying nebulae, speed through ancient echoes of light, dust, gas and radiation as if such things have no power over us. Like all crazy rides, you’ve got to remember to breathe — but I’m so afraid, I feel light-headed, like I’m going to black out.
Luc tightens his already suffocating grip about me — and takes us through an asteroid as big as a fifty- storey building.
For an infinite moment we flow through the crystalline structure as if we have become reduced to our base particles — we are commingled with the very rock itself. It’s as if we have become . . . atomised. Luc still himself, me still myself, separate but strangely blended, running through, between, facets of immovable stone. It is a sensation that is at once familiar and yet skin- crawling, extraordinary.
And as we emerge, whole and individual, from the other side of the spinning asteroid, my torso, my entire self, is engulfed in white flame and I see —
— a multitude of lives playing out before me; myriad existences that I have lived before and am somehow able to live again. Some terminate abruptly with the sense of something frustrated and unfinished; some go for years at a stretch and seem interminable. But then there’s a sense of escalating dislocation, time seems to spool forward, and I see glimpses of —
— bloody unifications: the state of Qin? The fall of Samarkand? Troy is under siege; and Antioch; and Jerusalem; the Huguenots are put to the sword before my eyes, the streets running with blood — all as if happening right now, in this moment, and not some long lost yesterday. People run every which way around me, as ants would when under attack, and it occurs to me — even as I reel from the horrors I am witnessing — that men, like ants, engage in these same behaviours over and over again, wreaking senseless destruction upon each other through the generations. There is warfare on horseback, by ship and by plane; crucifixions, beheadings, burnings; explosions, earthquakes, tsunami; acts of genocidal madness, acts of God; death on a scale so large that I perceive the stars through a veil of blood, life in extremis, and I gasp, ‘Why are you showing me these things?’
‘All this is your own doing,’ Luc replies. ‘Your own self’s way of telling you that it is time to wake from the punishing nightmare, time to reclaim your true place at my side. Think of this as merely a . . . catalyst. It’s all inside you — everything you need to know, everything you are capable of. It’s still there.’
I look at him wide-eyed. Could it be true? The power to reclaim my freedom, my identity, has been inhing yospan> me all this time?
Luc’s arms are about me still, his chin resting atop my hair. ‘Memory is power . . . Mercy.’
He laughs as he utters the name I have given myself; and as he does, I am assailed with images of my life as Carmen Zappacosta.
There’s a girl standing before me — once beautiful; now tiny, wasted, abused. I get a name — Lauren?
‘Yes,’ Luc says, pleased.
There’s a man, too. Tall, lean, also once beautiful . . . though now there are bleeding holes where his eyes should be, blood running from his ruptured ears, his mouth shaped forever in a scream.
Paul? I name this one hesitantly, shrinking from his image.
‘Yes,’ Luc repeats, satisfaction in his voice. ‘Good.’
For a singular moment — a breath suspended — Luc and I drift, still encircled in each other’s arms, watching the stars wheel silently about us. Comets flare away uncaringly across the galaxies, the edges of the universe pulse and contract like a living organism, a beating heart. And it almost feels like the way it used to be. But then I remember the rage I saw in his eyes and I shiver.
I stare at his face, struggling to reconcile that look with the smile I see playing now on his lips. He’s so beautiful that it’s as if he’s been touched by the sun itself, as if he carries some of its light with him always.
‘Memory is power, Mercy,’ he says softly. ‘It shall restore you to yourself in the end.’
As I look on with horror, Luc’s beautiful features begin to twist into a parody of themselves, a fearful carnival mask. And then shatter — like glass, like a mirror breaking — and his image disintegrates out of being.
I am alone again, screaming, ‘No!’ A cry loud enough to shatter the fundaments of a world.
And I am falling, falling, falling through the night sky. Burning earthward, like space junk wrenched out of orbit, like a fatal meteor, my screams rending the seen and unseen universe into shreds about my ears.
Chapter 8
I wake with a jolt in a girl’s body, in a chair, in red plaid pyjamas that are worn out at the knees, as if I have just, literally, fallen out of the sky. I am rigid with fear, and it takes me some time to work out where I am, who I am meant to be.
Finally, the beat of my borrowed heart begins to fall, my breathing grows easier, my sight grows clear once more. It’s dawn. I can tell from the cool, clear quality of the light, the stillness outside punctuated only by birdsong. We’ve just crossed the threshold into morning. Though it feels as if I’ve returned from a place so distant, I’ve crossed light years to be back at Karen Neill’s bedside.
She’s still asleep, still breathing, her condition unchanged from the night before.
I stare at the backs of Lela’s hands, which are shaking a little. Turn them over, study the palms. So small, so ordinary. And yet . . . I can still almost feel a faint tracery of fire in the fingers of her left hand.
I recall every moment of my dream, as if the fear and anger I felt were, indeed, a key to unlocking memories that my enemies would prefer remained hidden. For I know now why the Eight tried to make me forget my brief life as Carmen Zappacosta. They were trying to hide Ryan Daley, his feelings for me.
And I’m angry at myself, too — for allowing myself to forget someone so unforgettable in the first place. When I was Carmen, Ryan made me feel so much less alone; he treated me as an equal, like someone whose opinion actually mattered, like I was actually part of the life I was living, part of the family I was living with. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. When I was with him, I felt less of a . . . freak. I liked him a lot. Wanted to know more about him. Hadn’t wanted to leave him, but had always known that I would have to, and it made every second we spent together that much more precious and sacred. Beyond that, I can’t contemplate a future, an alternate universe, where someone like him and someone like me could be together in any way, shape or form, so I’m just going to look at this the way Luc does — coldly, pragmatically — and try not to think about the other stuff, the human stuff.
You’re not human, I tell myself fiercely. So stop behaving like one. All you have to do is find Ryan and wait it out. That’s all. Feelings can be put aside. You’ve done worse.
And I know it for a truth.
I rise unsteadily and head to the kitchen.
Maybe it is all inside me, everything I need to get the real me back, but I’m like someone who has to relearn how to walk, talk, eat. The connections are missing, or badly compromised. And I have so much lost ground to cover. But I’m a fast study. I’m awake now, more than I have ever been before. Body and soul are beginning to synchronise. Overnight, something in me has begun to regenerate, to lay down new wiring.
The blockages inside me are dissolving, so that I remember, too, how, when I was Carmen, I was able to call on unexpected powers that I still can’t explain. Like how if I’m ticked off enough, I have the ability to hurt people with my bare hands.
Paul’s eyes? His ears? I did that. The knowledge makes me go cold inside.
I study the refrigerator door and locate the telephone number, cross to the wall phone to dial it. The woman who answers promises that a member of the palliative care team will be over shortly.
I hurry down the hallway to Lela’s bedroom, dig a random tee-shirt out of a pile of clothes lying on a chair, put it on. Pull on a pair of shorts. It’s like I’m colour blind thing I 14; the top’s sky blue; the shorts are pumpkin- coloured, baggy and ill-fitting. But I don’t care. I know what I have to do now, and it’s as if a fire has been lit within.
I wait impatiently until a kind-faced woman called Abby arrives to help out until Georgia can get here.
