K A R A

Chapter 1

      Year: 2107

“I’m not him…,” she whispered over and over, her young voice filled with conviction. 

The ten-year-old girl sat huddled in the corner of her bedroom, her knees tucked firmly under her chin and her white nightie pulled over them tightly and secured under her feet.

“…I’m not him I’m not him I’m not him…” It had become her nightly mantra over the past few months; a proclamation of independence. All tended to be well during the daylight hours when there was school and mealtimes and playtimes and a myriad of other things to distract her young mind. But at night, when the last rays of sunlight flickered and died — that was when it started.

A light breeze toyed with the brown curtains, parting them every so often and allowing the fuzzy glow of the moon to enter the otherwise dark room. The moonlight cast its silvery hue over one side of the girl’s small, soft face. 

“…I’m not him I’m not him I’m not him…”

Her large blue eyes blinked as if to reinforce the validity of her affirmation. Or perhaps it was to stave off the tears — tears that had flowed too regularly for a girl her age. She was only ten years old, but since the moment she was born, Kara Reyne had known her past.

Her parents hadn’t believed her when she’d explained it to them as best she could. They had pretended to, but she knew the truth. Kara had waited patiently for two years; waited for the words to come. Her first word had not been mummy or daddy — her first word had been King.

And as the years passed and her speech developed further, Kara had nonchalantly informed her parents how she remembered another life; a life without them in another time and place and how she’d been a boy back then. A boy named Ethan King. But as she had grown up, as her own personality had fought to establish dominance, Kara had struggled to push back the past-life memories and this was the battle she waged each night in the loneliness of her bedroom. She found that the more she attempted to deny those other memories residence in her brain, the more they crept like vines; tangling themselves throughout the intricate crevices of her consciousness and making it more difficult to distinguish Kara from Ethan.

“I’m not him I’m not him I’m not him.” Each repetition merged with the one before and with the one that followed, creating a stream of sound as Kara tried her best to convince herself that she was not Ethan King; that this other person whom she remembered being with such clarity was not who she was now. Perhaps it was a dream she was recalling, or maybe it was all down to her imagination — her school teachers were always telling her parents how she had such a vivid imagination, when what they really meant was that she spent half of the school day lost in a daydream world; a world inside her own head that was, in many ways, more colourful and real than the toneless world around her.

She watched stoically as one of her favourite books, Through the Looking-Glass, rose slowly off her bed, hovered in mid-air for a few seconds and then shot up at great speed, slamming into the ceiling before allowing gravity to return it to the bed. Several of the pages had come loose in the process; they fluttered around the room, blown by the breeze entering through the partially opened window.

Kara stopped her mantra and peered over at the book on the bed from her secure spot in the corner of the room. The spine had broken. She’d gone and broken her favourite book with her stupid abilities. A real book too — made out of paper. She remembered her parents presenting her with it on her seventh birthday. A real book. She’d run her fingers tentatively over the rough, somewhat yellowed pages before lowering her nose to it and inhaling that unique smell; that faint odour of wood pulp mixed with ink and history. She imagined all the other hands that this volume had passed through before it had reached her own. That’s the moment she had fallen in love with old books. She loved to devour stories in any format — mostly downloaded onto her e-scroll — but you couldn’t beat the experience of reading a book on authentic paper.