Free Exile by Rebecca Lim Page A

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