Exile m-2 Page 6

  ‘Having you home, Lel, it’s better than any drug,’ Mrs Neill whispers before losing consciousness again.

  It’s almost evening and the council carer’s been and gone. She cooked a nutritious meal for Mrs Neill, which I put through the blender and tried to feed to her a spoonful at a time. But she wouldn’t eat, said it hurt too much.

  There was no point me turning around and going back to the Green Lantern, so I told Georgia she could go, too, that we wouldn’t need anyone from the palliative care team overnight.

  ‘You’re sure you can cope?’ she’d replied, searching my face.

  I could tell she was still unable to understand how she’d misread the signs. Mrs Neill’s sudden turnaround knocked her for six, as they say in the strange local idiom, making her question her own judgment.

  The house is quiet now with just the two of us here. I want to head back out into the teeming, dirty world to find the answers I’m searching for, but if Georgia was right and Karen Neill is indeed at death’s door, I don’t want to be responsible for depriving her of her daughter’s company in her last hours. I’m not that heartless. One more night can’t hurt, can it?

  When I come back from the bathroom, Lela’s thick hair still damp, Mrs Neill is asleep again. The sunlight piercing the windows of the old house, warming the floorboards of her bedroom, striking sparks off the mirror, the walking frame, the mobile washstand, is the colour of amber wine.

  I sit cross-legged in the armchair beside the bed and watch Lela’s mother sleep. The shadows begin to lengthen, and I am lost in thought when I feel a hand on my shoulder.

  Faster than I would have believed possible, I half-pivot in my seat to crush the intruder’s wrist with my burning left hand — but it meets nothing but air.

  I turn and look up into his face and my animal fear turns to a kind of rapture. For suddenly he is with me again, in this room, love in his eyes. For me. The one who is so like Luc that he could be his brother, his blood. Save that he is mortal.

  ‘Ryan,’ I whisper, as he pulls me into his arms. The knowledge of his name is almost reflexive, like something embedded at some murky, cellular level.

  ‘You should see the look on your face, it’s priceless,’ he teases as I tentatively place my cheek against his achingly familiar profile and breathe in his addictive clean, male smell.

  He’s wearing a beat-up leather jacket, faded navy tee, scuffed boots and blue jeans. And it feels so right, the two of us standing together like this.

  I’m almost afraid of what I’m feeling, surging like a sea inside. What would Luc say, if he knew? He’s always been so … protective of me, though protective doesn’t even begin to describe how carefully he watched me and watched over me. When he chose me for his own, that was how it was to be, forever and ever, in saecula. He made me feel safe. Made me the centre of his world.

  I am pierced by a vision of Luc and me entwined in each other’s arms within a living bower of flowers, the air heavy with the fragrance of neroli, jasmine, white magnolia, orange blossom, a thousand different blooms that no human hand could possibly have put together. It was our place, the hanging garden he created for me alone. Seen since that day only in dreams, and likely gone forever.

  ‘All I want,’ he’d said, resting his forehead against mine, ‘is your enduring happiness. You are the best and most loved thing in my life — let nothing ever be possible, or complete, if you are not with me. And may the elements witness my vow in all their silent glory.’

  The memory is so real that when I look up and see Ryan there in Luc’s place, I feel the lines of my face collapse like crumpled paper. The pain is so intense, I wonder how I can feel this way and still be alive.

  Ryan pulls me closer. ‘God, I’ve missed you. You have no idea how much. I’ve been in agony since you’ve been gone.’

  He looks down at me, smoothing back my long, dark hair with his hands. ‘They’re fighting dirty this time. They actually managed to make you forget who I am. I didn’t think it was possible to mess you up any more than They already have, but They did it. I’d congratulate Raph if I wasn’t so angry with him I could destroy him.’

  I frown, something I’m missing in his words.

  Ryan steps back, holding me at arm’s length the better to look at me, really look at me. And I realise with a start that I’m standing here in my own body, my garments drifting around me — white, glowing, ghostly — though there is no breeze in the room. Beside me, Lela’s sleeping form is curled up in the chair. I am myself as I once was before I was cursed to roam the earth.

  The truth hits me an instant later.

  ‘This is a dream,’ I snarl. ‘When I wake, you’ll be gone again. And I won’t remember you.’

  ‘You don’t even remember “me” now,’ Ryan laughs, ‘and I need you to remember. It’s the first step.’

  And, suddenly, it’s no longer Ryan with his arms around me but Luc. It had been Luc all along.

  ‘You’re disappointed,’ he says, his expression curious, watchful.

  ‘Of course not,’ I reply quickly. ‘How could I be? When it’s only ever been you?’

  Do I imagine that my voice falters a little as I say the words? Luc must not hear, for he spins me around lightly so that the room dissolves — in the way that dreams make possible — and I find that we are standing on a desolate beach under moonlight. It’s a place I’ve seen before, through someone else’s eyes. Deserted of any living thing except we two. Grey, tempestuous, with vast offshore waves, a dangerous reef out beyond the shallows, shaped like a devil’s crown.

  Despite the roaring wind coming off the water, whipping the sand through our hair, stinging against our skin, I hear Luc clearly when he murmurs, ‘What would it take to unlock the mystery of you?’

  I shake my head, helpless to answer him, the elements outside a replica of what’s inside me.

  It’s as if we are standing in the eye of a perfect storm. Lightning pierces the blanket of night around us, striking the distant water, lighting up the horizon, illuminating the stark coastline, the jagged rocks that rise up beyond the shallows like reaching fingers or claws, the lashing boughs of the trees that line the shore like a vast, crowding army of the undead.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten you,’ Luc breathes against my neck as the elements rage around us. ‘I haven’t forgotten a single thing we said or did together. I’m obsessed by my memories of you. They’re eating me alive. Why can’t I find you? Why haven’t you tried harder to find me?’

  ‘Tried harder?’ I cry, distressed at the implication in his words. ‘You can’t know what it’s been like for me!’

  ‘Or me,’ Luc growls. ‘When you … left me, it ruined everything.’

  I shiver, wanting the dream to be over, desperate to wake myself up. I try to pull myself out of his arms but Luc’s grip is suddenly like iron.

  I begin to struggle and twist in earnest. ‘I don’t respond well to threats,’ I growl. ‘You, of all people, should know that about me.’

  Luc shakes me roughly. ‘Where are you?’ he cries, as if I haven’t spoken. ‘Answer me!’

  He shakes me again and the feeling in my heart turns to … anger.

  A surge of fury breaks in me, higher than any wave. And my left hand begins to burn.

  I draw breath sharply, contemplating the pale corona engulfing my hand, beginning to creep silently up my wrist, white, like ghost flame. How can something so beautiful be so … corrosive?p>

  Luc’s eyes gleam with an answering fire as he contemplates my evanescent skin. ‘That’s the key,’ he hisses.

  ‘Key?’ I gasp, unable now to flex the fingers of my left hand. The agony is leaching into my voice. Can he hear it? The flame is like a living thing. I see it throw out questing tendrils, as if it is sentient and seeking new sources of fuel.

  ‘Fear and anger,’ he replies. ‘Fear and anger allow you to access your true nature, those powers that are yours by right. Fear and anger are a window upon your soul; shall lead you back to m
e. Fear and anger,’ he laughs, almost to himself. ‘It’s only fitting.’

  I cannot look away from the steady conflagration of my flesh. My forearm is now wholly incandescent. It feels as if nothing will ever rival this pain.

  ‘What of love?’ I remind him sharply, my voice rising as the flame also rises. ‘It’s a currency I would rather deal in.’

  Luc seems so different now, from when I first knew him. Mocking, self-confident. The look that drew me to him in the first place, all those long years ago — of love, and longing — is missing, as if it was never there.

  ‘Love!’ His voice is disdainful. ‘Love is what got us into this mess in the first place. The time for love will come again, but now is the time for war. If you won’t look for me, then find that mortal boy, Ryan, return to the place where he lives, and I will come for you. But do it quickly — I have waited long enough.’

  ‘When you’re like this,’ I whisper, ‘I don’t even know you.’

  In answer, Luc shakes me again. ‘Stupid creature! Without him there will never again be an us. You will always and forever be just a lost girl. Ryan is only the first step of many that must be taken. Don’t you understand? Find him.’

  With a growl of frustration fierce enough to shake ancient bedrock, he suddenly streaks skyward with me in his arms, held fast, a living projectile.

  And I remember … my terrible fear of heights —

  — the surface of the earth falling away from us at a speed that must surely be against the laws of nature; the vault of heaven looming until we break into the cold embrace of the eternal night sky, continue streaming away into absolute space, the airless, aching void. How is it we are able?

  In dreams, anything is possible.

  Yet it all feels so real that I cannot draw breath; terror is interfering with my musculature, my physiognomy.

  Luc steers us madly, deliberately, at a piece of space junk the size of a small mountain — a rain of certain death were it to fall upon the earth — and smashes through it, laughing wildly. Though I cower and turn my face away within the circle of his embrace, the debris seems not to touch us.

  This may be a dream, but dreams bring the truth to the surface, don’t they? And I know now that I cannot bear any distance away from the solid surface of the world. And yet we spiral deeper through the uncaring universe than anyone has ever been, and I wonder why I — why Luc, the one who loves me — would inflict a dream like this upon my sleeping consciousness. A dream as real, as terrifying, as this could bring death to someone like me.

  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 ordi
nary. 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.