‘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 me. 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.
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.
‘Georgia brought me up to speed on what happened yesterday,’ Abby whispers as she sets down her medical kit near Mrs Neill’s bed. ‘We’ll call you if there’s any change.’
I practically fly down the footpath, feel like vaulting the fence. Want to grab the steering wheel out of the bus driver’s nicotine-stained fingers so that we ignore all the stops, all the angry people, and reach the city faster. Because Luc’s got it so right. He can’t find me, and I’ve had a lousy time of finding him, but Ryan Daley’s
mortal
. He has a physical body and a physical location. I’ve touched the guy, broken bread with him, called his cell phone, even stayed at his home. Met his parents, for Christ’s sake, and his bitch of an ex-girlfriend. He lives in a small town called Paradise, on a coastline somewhere; the ugliest place you’re ever likely to see, a complete misnomer. But that’s the point: there can’t be too many places like it. I know I can find it again.
Luc, on the other hand, I’ve never seen outside the realms of sleep this century or the last. I’ve lost count of how many years it’s been since we were in the same place together, flesh
and
spirit. I’ve never been able to track him down, not even after all this time, not even after all the hints he keeps dropping like crumbs from a benevolent god. Until I began to fathom what had happened to me, I’d taken Luc for a figment of my diseased imagination, a recurring dream, a vision of glory sent to blight my rest.
Though there are still holes in my recall big enough to steer a whole fleet of cruise ships through, maybe some things are finally beginning to . . . stick. Because something happened to me last night. Whatever it is that keeps me this way — caged inside another; doomed to play the ghost-in-the-machine — something changed when I saw Ryan Daley again in my dreams.
And what’s more, none of the Eight, not even Luc himself, has any idea of the extent to which I’m
back
.
I’m feeling something I haven’t felt in a long time. Hope so raw, it’s akin to pain.
Lela’s boss, Mr Dymovsky, is back behind the till this morning and I nod in his direction before throwing myself into the breakfast rush. I’m snappier than usual as I bag the orders and shovel them out in a steady stream; even Reggie’s in awe of the way I’m handling the jerks and losers, the downtrodden women and born-to-rule types that filter in here looking for sustenance.
Maybe I’m overdoing it, allowing too much of my own personality to shine through, because Mr Dymovsky says shrewdly in his Russian-accented English, ‘Maybe you forget to take care of yourself. Something about you, about your face, looks different, I think? Thinner, maybe. Sharper. You up to this? Because if you not, I find another girl to do the job, okay? Because we no need another Reggie here. One Reggie, she’s plenty.’
He’s a perceptive man, Dmitri Dymovsky, which you’d never know if you simply took him at face value. Because who would ever wear a cartoon tie with a striped, short-sleeved shirt? And the way he’s tucked both into the waistband of a pair of tight brown slacks gives him the rear profile of a boiled egg. He has wispy grey hair that seems to be trying to float off his head, a thin moustache, and big pouches under his pale blue eyes. He might be anywhere between fifty-five and seventy-five. He looks like a kind fool, put upon from many and diverse angles. But to misjudge him would be a mistake. I like him.
‘Sorry, Mr Dymovsky,’ I say as I slap together bacon and egg rolls with lettuce, bacon and egg rolls with cheese, bacon and egg rolls hold the barbecue sauce. ‘I’ll tone it down.’
‘Good girl,’ he says mildly. ‘Oh and Lela, next time wear black, okay?’
I nod like I mean it, but I’ve got one eye on the door the whole time waiting for Ranald to arrive.
Mr Dymovsky puts on a battered straw fedora, lifts it in our direction, then heads out to the market to do his weekly shop for bargain tomatoes, smallgoods, cheese, lettuce and fruit by the boxload.
At 10.42, like clockwork, Ranald’s batting aside the sticky plastic curtain and practically falling through the front door with his laptop bag, toobig suit jacket and his serious expression. It’s 10.45 on the dot by the time he sets up his computer and Cecilia’s sliding the first heart-starter of the day his way. Time for me to get what I came for: information.
When I walk up to his table, Ranald closes the window he’s working on and smiles. ‘Did you want me to find out more about Carmen Zappacosta for you?’
I shake my head. ‘The focus of my enquiry has shifted slightly. I need to find Ryan Daley, the brother of one of the abductees. I need to contact him in real time but all I have is a mobile number and no country code. Find him for me and I’ll be in your debt forever.’
‘You mean that?’ Ranald says, surprise and eagerness warring in his expression. ‘I’m going to hold you to it — dinner and a movie, if I get you what you want.’
‘Deal,’ I shoot back, not intending to stick around long enough to have to go through with anything. This time it’s about
me
. It’s my time now, and if I have to climb over the bodies of lovelorn IT guys to get the answers I’m seeking, then so be it.
Ranald types Ryan’s name straight into the search engine and gets ten pages of search results. He shakes his head, unprepared to wade through random fishing blogs and
heavy metal’s all-time greatest hits
lists generated by schmucks called Ryan Daley.
‘Let’s narrow it down a little more,’ he says. ‘Mobile number?’
I give it to him, and feel a jolt when my eyes settle on the first item that comes up on the first page of new search results.
‘What is that?’ I breathe, leaning in closer to the screen and running my finger along the string of letters and numbers beneath Ryan’s name and mobile number.
Ranald’s voice is dismissive. ‘It’s the URL for his page on a social networking website for show ponies, fake friends and stalkers. How do you know this guy again?’
I almost can’t speak for the sudden rapid pounding of Lela’s heart in my ears. ‘Someone I lost contact with. An old friend that I’ve been meaning to look up for a long time but the whole Carmen thing flared up. He should be a lot more . . . receptive to contact from me now.’
Ranald’s looking at me suspiciously.
‘That’s why I needed the background info you dug up the other day,’ I say hastily. ‘I had to know if I had the right guy, and I do. Can you . . . click on this?’
‘Sure,’ he says, lips pursed as if the action is distasteful.
A web page fills the screen almost instantly, with a heart-stopping photo of Ryan in the top left corner. It’s a moody black and white shot, and he’s looking away from the camera, but I’d know the planes of his face, the curve of his mouth, that fall of black hair, anywhere.
Just seeing him again like this brings back the sound of his voice, the way he holds a steering wheel, the way I wanted to hold his hand but didn’t trust myself to, because me getting involved with someone like him — where would it lead?
The page asks politely if I would like to add Ryan Daley as a friend or send Ryan Daley a message. I feel a surge of that sea that I carry around inside.
‘You found him,’ I say, placing my hands on Ranald’s shoulders in gratitude. ‘You found him.’
My defences are down, as they always seem to be where Ryan is involved. So I’m unprepared when Ranald takes his hands off the keyboard and places them over mine where they rest on his shoulders. Before I have the sense to rip my hands away, I see, I see —
—
a dead bird nailed to a tree by its wings.
Small, shrieking rodents set alight in their cages.
A battered cat strung up by its tail, a crossbow bolt through its ravaged body
—
I break contact abruptly and the images of those small, tortured creatures leave me and I can no longer smell the winter air, the scent of smoke and accelerant, feel the dry crunch of leaf litter and gravel under my feet. His feet.
‘Jesus God, Ranald,’ I say raggedly. ‘Don’t ever touch me again.’
I’m shaking, but he doesn’t need to know why. Nor do I need to know why he carries such things around in his head, like surface scum. I hate being touched; but this? This was something else altogether. I feel . . . dirty for witnessing something I was never supposed to see.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ranald says, crossing his arms and blinking rapidly. ‘I don’t know why I did that. I hope you didn’t take it the wrong way.’
For a moment, I think he’s talking about the atrocities he carried out when he was a boy. They
were
wrong. What other way could I take them? But then I realise he’s talking about grabbing hold of Lela’s hands, and the tenderness of that act belies the things I saw inside his mind. Maybe he’s changed. Maybe that’s what boys do — hurt things that are even smaller and more defenceless than they are. I wouldn’t know. In the wider scheme of human history are Ranald’s childhood acts so heinous?
I look at the laptop open to a recent image of Ryan Daley and feel Lela’s heart leap again. I push the hideous squealing of the tortured animals, the smell of burning flesh and fur, to one side — I still need Ranald’s help and I can’t afford to be judgmental. A telephone on its own is no use to me right now; I know because I dialled Ryan’s number this morning before I left Lela’s house — the number I’d memorised when I was Carmen Zappacosta — and all I got was a pre-recorded woman’s voice telling me to
Please check the number before trying again
. I need access to this seething universe, this internet, that is wholly man-made, and Ranald can provide that. I just need him to show me how it’s done and I can take it from there.
If Ranald’s — how had the bus driver put it? —
sweet
on Lela, I can milk that. But carefully; I don’t want to mix Lela up in something she can’t back out of later. Engage, get what I want, disengage. I can be ruthless that way.
I pull my fractured thoughts together and reply as calmly as I can manage, ‘Of course I didn’t take it the wrong way, Ranald. And I shouldn’t have touched you, either. It was inappropriate. Overly familiar. I apologise.’
I hope he’s hearing me, because it works both ways, buddy.