Angelique:

Chaz said that I should start writing things down, that it will help me remember my past lives. He says that everybody keeps a journal now—even One-Timers. A secret collection of memories that no one else ever reads. It’s supposed to help me remember what I don’t want to forget. But I’m afraid of the past and the future. And I’m worried about what I might find out about myself.

There was blood on my sheets when I woke up. My hand hurts but I don’t know why, and a heavy pain has settled in my chest, like my lungs are made of rock. We went to a jazz club last night, I think. I ran into a bald man there—his face, his voice—he seemed familiar. But then a fight broke out and in the midst of it, a picture flashed in my head: a stone crypt.

The City of the Dead.

Chaz took me there, but it didn’t help. The picture got louder and heavier, like the pain in my chest. I ran away from him through the misty fog, feet pounding against cement while the mist hung heavy and wet, almost like rain. I thought I heard a howling death, felt white fangs ripping my skin and I knew that I never wanted to fall in love again. Ever. That was when I saw it. The place that had called me. But I was too weak. Too afraid.

I felt the same way now.

I sat down with a stylus and a VR tablet, with trembling hands I began to write down random thoughts and words. Then it started to come back to me. Images. Sounds. Voices. The black holes in my memory dissolved into shocking memories; they thundered awake, sudden, immediate, demanding. My emotions were ripped and shredded.

A familiar face floated before me, a moment of joy and hope.

Then I remembered. It wasn’t clear at first, but after a minute I could see.

My first life…

We lived on a farm in Scotland, William and I, on a parcel of hilly land near the River Esk. During the day we tended our herd of Hampshire sheep, watched as the wind ruffled the long grass, commented on how each blade enticed the sheep to linger, to fill their bellies. In the evenings after dinner we would sit before the fire, I playing my clarsach harp, he singing the old Celtic songs.

We were a strange pair, I know. Both of us willing to give up the modern city life to herd sheep, but you have to remember that the government gave incentives back then, trying so hard to get folks back to the farms. We were the lucky ones, that’s for sure. Got our little piece of property for almost nothing.

He was ten years older than I was, and quite dashing, with his rugged, country-squire looks. Not at all the sort of man I’d hoped to meet when I went off to university in Glasgow. Not the sort of man I’d planned to marry, but there it is. You don’t often end up doing what you have in mind in the first place.

I was going to change the world with my new ideas. I’d wanted to sail across the ocean and marry an American, leave this dull land of brilliant blue skies and emerald hills behind. Wash my hands of it, once and for all. Catherine MacKinnon, I said to myself more than once, you need to break with your clan and make a difference in the world.

Of course, I didn’t know then the things I know today, but I still don’t think I would have lived my life any different. It was time for one of us to stop the madness, to take a bold step into the future.

William never saw it the same way I did. And I don’t know if I can ever forgive him for it.

He was the true love of my life. The love of every life I’ve ever had, and I don’t like the counting of lives anymore. It makes me weary. But this was my first one, so it was different. It was special. It was the time I made my first decision to jump.

We were Catholics, both of us, but I never really took it to heart the way William did. He rose up in the morning and went to bed in the evening with his prayers. Granted, everything around us was changing. The Pope had made some radical changes recently, and the one before him was maybe even more liberal, if that was possible. So what we had wasn’t the same as what our parents before us had.

It all started when the Pope took the ban off resurrection. “It’s not the unpardonable sin,” I think that was how he phrased it in the beginning. It took a few years, but then pretty soon almost everyone I knew got the implant. Even my mom. Two of my sisters, Kelly and Coleen, decided against it, which didn’t surprise me since they made all their bad decisions together.

But my husband, William, he wouldn’t even talk about it. If we were ever divided about anything, this was it.

“One life was all God gave us,” he told me one day when we were herding the sheep into a different pasture. “It’s all I want.”

“But we could be together for almost five hundred years,” I argued. I had calculated it all out, from Life One to Life Nine, carefully reading between the lines of the contract. I knew each of the resurrected lives began in a body about twenty-one years old and that you would live to be about seventy-two. So with no accidents or major illnesses, a person could live to be around four hundred eighty-eight years old.

It wasn’t forever, but it was damn close.

I’ll never forget the look he gave me right then. The sunlight came down through the trees, touched him on the face, set his hair on fire and made his eyes glow. It was like the Almighty had taken residence inside him for a few moments.

“We can be together for all of eternity,” he said. “It doesn’t take a blasted Fresh Start implant to give us what God already promised.”

“But—but that’s not the same,” I said. “This is guaranteed—”

Another stony glance. He looked like Moses just after he stepped down from the mountain, when he had the Shekinah glory of God shining all around him. I wished the sun would set.

“Guaranteed? You don’t think Jesus rising from the dead was a guarantee?” he asked. “Not a promise from God: ‘Look here, this is what I can do for you’?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Since when don’t you know?”

“Since always. I never knew for sure.”

“Catherine, my love, you’re swimming in treacherous waters.” He paused for a long moment. “Are you having doubts about your faith, or are you telling me that you never really believed?”

I took a deep breath, afraid of what I was going to say next.

“What I’ve been trying to tell you—” I stopped to lick my lips nervously. “What I’m telling you is that I got the implant. Yesterday. I just signed up for resurrection.”

“Did you now.”

A silence hung between us then, like the distance between two continents.