Exile by Rebecca Lim Read Free Book Online Page B

gritty yet miraculous, as if I’m seeing it all for the first time. As if I am truly . . . awake.
    But I can’t be, can I? Because I’m suffering a spectacular case of — what was the word that the internet story about Carmen Zappacosta used? That’s right: amnesia . Only, I can still remember what Lucy’s horrible high-rise apartment looked like; recall the exact scent of the headache-inducing perfume that Susannah’s mother liked to wearI even have memories from the lifetime before Susannah, when I managed a bookshop and learned how to knit. But I get nothing from my time as Carmen, no matter how gingerly I probe. It’s a complete blank.
    That’s when I feel it. Like an energy, at once hot and cold, hair-raising, like a hum, like vinegar in my bones. Distant, but moving closer at a speed faster than I can credit, because the strange maelstrom of sensation I’m feeling is strengthening all the time.
    I look around wildly for the source and my eyes pass over the face of the middle-aged woman behind me, fanning herself resignedly with the edge of a glossy brochure, her other hand on the bag on her lap. She’s just past her fifties, I’d say. Thick, wavy wheat- coloured hair cut into the kind of short, easy-care style unanimously favoured by European royalty in the 1980s. She’s plump, rounded, of average height, in a Liberty-print, short-sleeved blouse, round tortoiseshell glasses, tomato-red lipstick. Even from here I can smell freesias and face powder. She’s wearing a tag with the name June written on it and she’s looking out the window.
    Whatever it is, it’s not in the bus with us.
    I scan the passing streetscape and that’s when I see it. A smear of light, a small, dirty patch of luminosity, of ambient energy, streaking across the surfaces of parked cars, bouncing off street signs and shopfront windows, sometimes outpacing our vehicle, then falling back as if keeping the bus in sight.
    No , I realise with a start. Keeping me in sight.
    I’ve got my nose pressed up against the grubby window, trying desperately to follow the thing with my eyes, until I suddenly comprehend that it doesn’t intend for me to lose it. I’m supposed to see it. And that gingery, eggshell feeling in my skull keeps building and intensifying until all I can hear is the sharp zing , zing of its impossibly fast movements as it ricochets off the physical world outside.
    Like something metallic, that noise, almost unbearable, worse than fingernails on a blackboard, of steel on steel, and yet the bus driver’s slump-shouldered position hasn’t changed at all, and neither has the other passenger’s. She’s still fanning herself, lost in the view out her window, lost in her thoughts. They don’t see it, feel it, hear it. How can that be?
    I think I’m going to scream. Or throw up.
    Qualis es tu? I think, gritting my teeth. What are you?
    And, in that instant, the smudge of gravity- defying light vanishes with a noise like a sonic boom in my head. I am, literally, reeling backwards in my seat when I feel hot breath on the back of my neck.
    Te gnovi , something growls into the space inside my head. I know you .
Chapter 6

    You need to understand something about me. I am not often afraid, or lost for words. Those two things are part of the bedrock of me: like how I know that I’m essentially strong; that I never feel the cold, though I crave the sun, the light, with a feeling like worship. They are things that can’t be erased, even if the higher-order parts of myself — like my name, my memories, my emotions — are somehow open to being tampered with. But at this moment? I am literally frozen with terror. I can’t turn around, can’t speak.
    And the creature feels my fear, because it laughs, and the sound has sharp edges to it, makes me want to claw at my eardrums.
    I see rapid movement at the edges of my sight and the woman from three rows back slides into the seat beside me. The world around us, even time itself, seems to