It had nothing to do with wanting to. The question was, was I even capable of believing? How could I accept something so far-fetched as the truth? Something for which there was no evidence, besides the word of a person who had told me many times what a good liar he was?
‘If all this is really true’—I hesitated—‘then what has it got to do with you and your friends?’
He closed his eyes. ‘You already know.’
I clenched my teeth, hissing out a single word: ‘No.’
Blake looked down at me. I wished he hadn’t. I didn’t want to see the raw, open look on his face, I didn’t want to see that he was fighting back tears, I didn’t want to see that his whole expression was more intent and honest than ever before. ‘Yes, Mabel,’ he said roughly.
I pulled my hands into my lap, fingernails biting into my skin. I had to feel something to distract me from the pain of this absurd revelation. ‘So, you’re telling me you’re some kind of wandering soul that infests other people’s bodies so you can live forever?’ My voice quivered with the effort of stifling a frantic laugh.
‘We call ourselves soul-jumpers. But yes, that’s essentially the gist of what I am.’
I stared at him. There was no twitch at the corners of his mouth, no trace of amusement or derision. He wasn’t making fun of me, he wasn’t lying. He was telling me something he considered to be true. I didn’t want to believe him, but suddenly I wasn’t sure how not to. What did he stand to gain from telling me this story? It was bonkers, sure, but at the same time it explained so much. Everything I’d been trying to make sense of for weeks. I’d been missing the glue that held together all the things I’d heard and witnessed. Ashton and his friends’ behaviour, June’s death, Paulina jumping after her conversation with Jack, Professor Edwards’s death, my research with Davie, Blake’s hints and attempts to push me away, Zoe’s condition, which was getting worse the more time she spent with Ashton.
If I accepted the idea that the League of Starlings could mess with other people’s energy, it all made sense. But if I accepted that, I had to take the rest of Blake’s story seriously. I had to…believe him. Even if it meant forgetting everything else I thought I knew.
‘How long…’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.
He understood me anyway. ‘There’s only one generation of us. The original ceremony released us from our bodies, and we’ve been using the artefact to jump ever since, but it no longer allows us to make new soul-jumpers. The League of Starlings has consisted of the same members from the very beginning: today there are one hundred and seventy-five.’
My heart was droning in my throat, and I pressed my hand to it. ‘How long?’ I repeated tonelessly.
Blake’s eyes gleamed. ‘The ceremony took place in 1867. I was twenty-three.’
‘So you’re telling me’—I took a deep breath—‘you’re nearly one hundred and eighty years old?’
Blake’s lips twisted. I was still wishing he would burst into a laugh instead. ‘Depends how you look at it. The bodies were never older than twenty-five when I left them again. But if you’re counting by the age of my soul, then yes.’ Again he smiled, a bit more genuinely this time. ‘I don’t think you can measure it in years, though. There are too many other factors involved.’
‘Like what?’
‘Experiences, memories, emotions you’ve gone through. The way you’ve come to know the world, how many layers of life’s meaning you’ve already witnessed. And what you’re like more generally.’ He shrugged. ‘Each individual has a different personality, a different depth to their soul. A totally unique way of thinking, feeling, living. I’ve met eighty-year-olds with the cheery, superficial souls of teenagers. And children who have a way of looking at the world as if they’ve been here for hundreds of years.’ His voice trailed off, as if he were thinking in that moment of the hundreds of people he had met. Over the lastone hundred and eightyyears.
God, it was so… I pressed the heel of my hand to my temple.First get the facts, then interpret them. I pointed at him. ‘So…that’s not your body?’
‘Well, that also depends how you look at it,’ he replied, studying his hands. Or…nothis, actually? ‘But no, it originally belonged to someone else.’
‘Blake Ames,’ I choked out. The words had never caught in my throat like that before. ‘Then, that’s not really your name?’
‘You knew that already, too.’
Yes, I did. I knew because he’d told me the night we met. Our first glimpse behind the curtain had perhaps been the truest of all–at least, until now. ‘Cliff,’ I whispered. ‘Your real name is Cliff.’
His expression relaxed, as it always did when I called him by that name. ‘We’re not supposed to use those names anymore. We’re essentially… actors. When we take on another body, we immerse ourselves into that person’s life. Which means we have to give up our own lives, the ones we had before, time and time again. I’ve played many roles over the decades, but Cliff…’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t been Cliff for a very long time.’
‘And yet it’s the name you gave me when we first met. Why?’
‘I’ve been asking myself the same question. There was no reason, it didn’t even make sense. I was just talking to you, and for the first time in ages, I felt like… myself. A self I had to leave behind an eternity ago. A self I’ve had to disown every day for over a hundred years in order to survive.’ He smiled, and his eyes were almost cautious. ‘There was no reason, Mabel. There was only you.’
At that moment, I realised how right he was. This thing between us had never been logical, it was always about emotion. We had seen each other, really seen each other, from the very first glance. There had been no masks, no front, no attempt to seem better or even merely different from what we truly were. What we had shown each other that first night was the core of our real selves. And despite the walls of lies we’d built up later, we both knew it was true. We both kneweach other. Which must have been why–without reason, with only my heart and every feeling in my body–I decided to believe him. Even though it was far-fetched, even though it went against all the convictions of my rational mind: I believed him.
I drank down the last of the honey milk, trying to wash away the shouts ofcrazy, crazy, crazyechoing in my head. ‘Did you choose this? Did you know what was in store for you?’
‘No.’ Blake was eyeing me warily. Probably he was unsure if I believed him or was just trying to stall. Or he was still expecting me to make a run for it. Which was fair enough, really: after all, he’d just confessed that he was essentially a supernatural being, and also a murderer. One or both of those things should have terrified me, yet somehow I felt safe. I wasn’t afraid of the truth. And I certainly wasn’t afraid of… Cliff.
‘My parents were the ones who initiated the ceremony. They sacrificed themselves to create the artefact.’ He rubbed his eyes, as if trying to erase the pictures behind them.
I wondered if memories were altered when you took them from one body to another. When you left the body that had seen a moment–heard it, smelt it, tasted it, felt it–did you also leave behind gauze-thin layers of its perception? Or was it true what they said, that memories were stored… inside you? In what we called the heart, which was really something else entirely: the soul, perhaps? I would have liked to ask, but I didn’t want to interrupt. I could see it cost him something to keep going.
