Jodi Meadows: Incarnate

What is a soul, but a consciousness born and born again?

With the rise of new technology, we know souls can be measured as a series of vibrations, which Soul Tellers map out on machines. Each sequence is unique. Each sequence is the same as it was in its previous incarnation, no matter how different the body may be. I have been reborn a hundred times, and I remember every generation.

Souls are sentience, an essence born into a new body when the old one dies.

There have always been a million souls, but now we’re a million minus one. Five years ago, the temple flashed dark on the night Ciana died. This evening, when Li gave birth to our daughter, we expected Ciana’s reincarnation. Instead, truths on which we’d built society were irrevocably made uncertain.

Soul Tellers took the newborn’s hand and pressed it on the soul-scanner, and the vibration sequence searched for a match in the database.

There was no match, which means this soul has never been born before. So where did it come from? What happened to Ciana’s soul? Has it been replaced? Might others be replaced?

Is this new soul even real?

— Menehem’s personal diary

I WASN’T REBORN.

I was five when I first realized how different that made me. It was the spring equinox in the Year of Souls: Soul Night, when others traded stories about things they’d done three lifetimes ago. Ten lives. Twenty. Battles against dragons, developing the first laser pistol, and Cris’s four-life quest to grow a perfect blue rose, only for everyone to declare it was purple.

No one bothered talking with me, so I’d never said a word — not ever — but I knew how to listen. They’d all lived before, had memories to share, had lives to look forward to. They danced around the trees and fire, drank until they fell over laughing, and when the time came to sing gratitude for immortality, a few glanced at me and the clearing was so eerie quiet you could hear the waterfall crashing on rocks a league south.

Li took me home, and the next day I collected all the words I knew and made a sentence. Everyone else remembered a hundred lifetimes before this one. I had to know why I couldn’t.

“Who am I?” My first spoken words.

“No one,” she said. “Nosoul.”

I was leaving.

It was my eighteenth birthday, only a few weeks after the turning of the year. Li said, “Safe journey, Ana,” but her expression was stony, and I doubted she meant it with any sincerity.

The Year of Drought had been the worst of my life, filled with accumulated anger and resentment. The Year of Hunger hadn’t started much better, but now it was my birthday and I had a backpack filled with food and supplies, and a mission to find out who I was, why I existed. The chance to escape my mother’s hostile glares was a happy benefit.

I glanced over my shoulder at Purple Rose Cottage, Li standing tall and slender in the doorway, and snow spiraling between us. “Good-bye, Li.” My farewell misted in the frigid air, lingering when I straightened and hitched my backpack. It was time to leave this isolated cottage and meet… everyone. Save the rare visitor, I knew no one but my snake-hearted mother. The rest of the population lived in the city of Heart.

The garden path twisted down the hill, between frost-covered tomato vines and squash. I shivered deeper into my wool coat as I began the march away from the woman who used to starve me for days as punishment for doing chores incorrectly. I wouldn’t complain if this was the last time I ever saw her.

My boots crunched gravel and slivers of ice, which had fallen from trees as morning peeked between mountains. I kept my fists in my pockets, safe in tattered mittens, and clenched my jaw against the cold. Li’s glare stalked me all the way down the hill, sharp as the icicles hanging from the roof. Didn’t matter. I was free now.

At the foot of the hill, I turned toward Heart. I’d find my answers in the city.

“Ana!” From the front step, Li waved a small metal object. “You forgot a compass.”

I heaved a sigh and trudged back up. She wouldn’t bring it to me, and it was no surprise she’d waited until I got all the way down before reminding me. The day I’d gotten my first menstruation, I’d run from the washroom shouting about my insides bleeding out. She’d laughed and laughed until she realized I actually had thought I was dying. That made her guffaw.

“Thank you.” The compass filled my palm, and then my front pocket.

“Heart is four days north. Six in this weather. Try not to get lost, because I won’t go looking for you.” She slammed the door on me, cutting off the flow of warm air from the heater.

Hidden from her sight, I stuck my tongue out at her, then touched the rose carved into the oak door. This was the only home I’d ever known. After I was born, Menehem, Li’s lover, left beyond the borders of Range. He’d been too humiliated about his nosoul daughter to stay, and Li blamed me for… everything. The only reason she’d taken care of me — sort of — was because the Council had made her.

After that, still stinging from Menehem’s disappearance, she’d taken us to Purple Rose Cottage, which had been similarly abandoned and given a mocking name when no one thought Cris’s roses were blue. As soon as I was old enough, I spent hours coaxing the roses back to life so they’d bloom all summer. My hands still bore scars from their thorns, but I knew why they guarded themselves so fiercely.

Again I turned away, tromped down the hill. In Heart, I would beg the Council for time in the great library. There had to be a reason why, after five thousand years of the same souls being reincarnated, I’d been born.

Morning wore on, but the chill hardly eased. Snowdrifts lined the cobblestone road, and my boots flattened the film of white that developed over the day. Every so often, chipmunks and squirrels rustled iced twigs or darted up fir trees, but mostly there was silence. Even the bull elk nosing aside snow didn’t make a sound. I might have been the only person in Range.

I should have left before my quindec, my fifteenth birthday and — for normal people — the day of physical adulthood. Normal people left their parents to celebrate that birthday with friends, but I didn’t have those, and I’d thought I needed more time to learn the skills everyone else had known for thousands of years. Served me right for believing every time Li said how stupid I was.

She’d never have that chance again. When the cottage road ended, I checked my compass and took the fork that led north.

The mountain woods of southern Range were familiar and safe; bears and other large mammals never bothered me, but I didn’t bother them either. I’d spent my youth collecting shiny rocks and shells that had wormed to the surface after centuries. According to books, a thousand years ago, Rangedge Lake flooded this far north in rainy seasons, so now there were always treasures to hunt.

I didn’t break to eat, just nibbled on cellar-wrinkled apples while I walked, leaving a trail of cores for lucky critters to find. Stomach sated, I tugged my shirt collar over my nose, making breath crawl over my lips and cheeks. With my throat and chest full of warm air, I sang nonsense about freedom and nature. My footfalls kept cadence, and an eagle cried harmony.

I’d never had formal music training, but I’d stolen theory books from the cottage library and, a few times, recordings of the most celebrated musician in Range: Dossam. I’d memorized his — sometimes her — songs so I’d have them after Li discovered my theft; the beatings had been worth it.