Rebecca Lim - Fury

‘I don’t just suffer from an inconvenient kind of amnesia,’ I say softly. ‘Raphael did something to me — he hid my name so deep inside me that I can’t bear to hear it without going haywire. Any one of the original hundred that fell with Luc could just speak my name and I’d be his again; it would be that simple. Luc would break free of this realm, the holy war would begin, and the universe would become the kind of contested territory this earth has been, for thousands of years. If I stay, everything gets placed in the balance.’

‘I make the mistake of leaving you alone just to take a stupid shower and you come up with all this ?’ Ryan says angrily. ‘Haven’t you sacrificed enough? Can’t the Eight take over for you now? Whatever happened to you and me losing ourselves in the world? When do you get to do what you want for a change? Or me?’ I hear his bitterness. ‘Or maybe you’re trying to let me down gently, and I’m not hearing you. All the signals you’ve been giving out — have I misread those, too?’

‘I owe Them my life, Ryan,’ I say pleadingly. ‘And if I’m not around, the Eight will be able to contain Luc the way he’s always been contained — until now. When he didn’t know where I was, he was … constrained. He’ll be constrained again, thwarted again, if I’m not here to fuel his ambitions. In the end, I can’t take you with me,’ I add with a catch in my voice. ‘And I can’t stay. I can’t see any way around it.’

Ryan’s eyes are so dark with pain they’re almost black.

‘But I told my family about you,’ he says, pushing a button at the base of his phone so the screen flares into life. I see a cascade of small electronic squares in bright colours with cartoon logos.

‘I finally did it. They asked when I was coming home, and I said I couldn’t be sure, that it would depend on what you were doing, because I was with you. They wanted to know how “some girl” could be so important that I’d fly all the way to Australia, then turn around and fly to Milan and Paris and Tokyo, then God knows where else, wasting all this time and effort and money when I should be focusing on college. So I had to tell them why . Why you’re so important to me that I’d drop everything again in a second just to be with you; how we all owe you a debt we’ll never be able to repay. At first, they didn’t believe me — they said I’d been brainwashed, kidnapped by some dangerous cult — until Lauren explained.

‘She’s never told them about any of it, you see. She could never bring herself to talk to them in any detail about what happened; not the real way it played out. But she suddenly opened up, and all she wanted to talk about was you . And now they want to speak to you. They want to thank you themselves. And I was dumb enough to think it might finally be okay to share your existence with the people I love most in the world.’

He braces himself on one elbow and moves his finger across the screen’s smooth surface as if he’s painting. Then I see a word appear there: Lauren . Hear a dial tone. My eyes widen as Lauren’s face is suddenly there. I get a flash of perfect white teeth as she smiles, and I’m astonished at the change in her, how the surface cracks have been so readily papered over. She’s still gaunt, still ragged at the edges, but, like me, she’s a carefully curated collection of props, put together to make her seem like an ordinary girl again. Under the veneer, though, there’s something else entirely.

‘Is she there?’ she asks Ryan eagerly. ‘Can I go get them?’ I get a view of the room Lauren’s in. It’s morning, I can tell by the background light. And I know that room: it’s her bedroom; I recognise the dresser. But it’s changed almost out of sight since I stayed in it when I was Carmen. It’s not a girly room any more. The stretch of wall I can see has been painted a vibrant purple and doesn’t have a single poster on it; and all the photographs and knick-knacks that were on the dresser are gone. It’s as bare as the wall.

I look at Ryan, shake my head quickly, mouth: No. No. Wait.

But Ryan just shoves the phone into my hand, a dangerous expression on his face.

For a second Lauren just stares at me, puzzled. ‘Mercy? Is that you?’

I try to hand the phone back to Ryan and all she gets is a muddled view of the Gulfstream’s softly lit interior.

‘Ryan?’ she says. ‘Are you there? What’s going on?’

‘Tell her,’ Ryan says fiercely, refusing to take the phone I’m holding out to him. We wrestle with it for a moment. ‘Don’t make me look like a crazy on top of everything else. Tell her. No, show her.’ He shoves the screen back in front of my face. ‘ Show her ,’ he commands.

Lauren and I stare at each other in silence.

‘Ryan, can you hear me?’ Lauren says finally.

‘Yes,’ Ryan snaps. ‘I can hear you. She’s doing this on purpose, Lauren, making me look like a liar. Just unbend, damn you. Just do this for me.’

Lauren studies my electronically mediated features for a long time before her frown evens out. ‘Mercy?’ she says tentatively. ‘It is you, isn’t it? You have Carmen’s hair. It was so wild. It’s exactly the same. It’s even the same length. I remember looking at you, uh, Carmen in the hospital and wishing I had hair like that. You always want what you haven’t got, right?’

She falters to a stop, appalled by her own words.

‘You look well,’ I say quietly with my stranger’s mouth, neither confirming nor denying. ‘I’m glad.’

‘Thank you,’ she whispers. ‘This is one of my, um, better days. You just … left, and I had no one to talk to about any of it after Jennifer went home. No one could possibly understand, you see, if they weren’t there …’

‘I’m sorry I didn’t get there sooner,’ I say.

‘At least you got there.’ She looks down momentarily, her voice almost inaudible. ‘I was ready to die.’

Ryan’s still stubbornly refusing to take back his stupid mobile. ‘ Show her ,’ he begs. ‘For me? I want her to see you , the way I do.’

My eyes snap to his and I see how desperately he wants her to understand and, suddenly, I don’t know why I’m fighting him. We’re all of us crying out for proof, aren’t we? So I hold the screen up before me again and shift. Just long enough for Lauren in the middle of God-knows-where, to see me again, the way I truly am. I hear her gasp at my gleaming hair, my gleaming face, everything so different from the girl I was before. I must be shining out from the screen at her like a little sun. Lauren’s hands are over her mouth, as if she’s going to be sick.

‘No trick photography,’ I say quietly, ‘no special effects. Just me. Doing the freaky shit that I do.’

Ryan slips an arm around me, and gently takes back his phone with his free hand. The plane gives a sudden lurch, riding out a pocket of intense turbulence.

‘Keep him safe!’ I hear Lauren plead, as if in prayer.

I turn my face away from the screen, let my human guise fall back into place. I can’t bring myself to answer her — for I live with that specific fear every moment he’s with me.

‘I’ll call you again when I can,’ I hear Ryan murmur. ‘And maybe she’ll let them see her next time, talk to her. It can’t go anywhere beyond us. Love you. Bye.’

It’s his turn to put his arm around me from behind, moulding himself to me, his lips against my hair. But I do not bend, I do not soften into sleep; I just lie there facing the seat back, paralysed by love and fear, until I feel sleep overtake his human physiology the way it always does.