Surfacing

"I always assumed if I came back from the dead, there'd be paperwork involved. Nobody mentioned the part where you wake up floating in a strange lagoon trying to strangle someone."

As my eyelids fluttered, it felt like a Herculean effort to move them even a millimetre.

The muscles—I had muscles—screamed in protest. Every nerve ending fired with the agony of resurrection, of tissue remembering how to function after whatever had happened to it.

But driven by a newfound determination, I willed them to open.

The bright light that pierced my eyes was blinding, forcing me to shut them again quickly.

Pain. Actual, physical pain.

I can feel pain.

The thought was almost joyful. Pain meant sensation. Sensation meant a body. A body meant—

This time, exerting more control, I slowly opened them, allowing the light to trickle in gently.

Shapes resolved from the brightness. Colour bled into the white. Blue and white and something brown at the edges of my vision.

Looking up, I was greeted by the clear, blue sky.

Not a hospital ceiling. Not the interior of a truck. Not the void.

Sky.

Real sky, impossibly blue, stretching from horizon to horizon with a purity I'd never seen in Tasmania's often-grey heavens.

A strange, tingling sensation surged through me, invigorating every cell in my body.

It was like feeling life coursing back into me.

I have a body! I silently rejoiced. I still have a body!

I could feel water beneath me—cool and clear, supporting my weight with gentle pressure. I was floating. In water. Under an unfamiliar sky.

Nothing made sense.

Everything was impossible.

But I was alive.

But then, a dark shadow loomed over me, and I instinctively closed my eyes tight, not yet ready to confront whatever or whoever it was.

The shadow blocked the sun, casting me into sudden coolness.

Something was standing over me. Watching me. Waiting.

You are mine, Joel Gibbons, the same eerie voice from before echoed in my mind. You can't escape me.

The words came from everywhere and nowhere—from the sky above, from the water below, from the very cells of my newly-reclaimed body. Not a threat, exactly. A statement of fact. A reminder of the claim that had already been made.

A surge of determination welled up within me, my veins pulsing with newfound strength.

I have no choice. I have to be ready. I have to confront Clivilius.

Whatever this place was, whatever had brought me here, I couldn't hide from it forever. Couldn't float in this water with my eyes closed until oblivion claimed me again.

I'd spent nineteen years hiding from the truth about my father.

I wouldn't spend whatever came next hiding from this.

Acting on instinct, my hand shot up from the water, gripping the first thing it touched.

A jolt of shock ran through me as I realised I was holding flesh.

Warm. Alive. Human.

Panic set in for a brief moment, but then I pressed harder, my fingernails digging into the skin.

No! I mentally defied. It is you that has need to escape me!

The fear transformed into something else—rage, defiance, the desperate will to survive that I hadn't known I possessed. If something had claimed me, I would claim it back. If something had made me, I would unmake the hold it had over me.

As my eyes snapped open, I found myself staring into the face of a man—a face contorted in sheer terror.

Not Clivilius. Not a monster. Not the voice that had spoken in my skull.

Just a man. Middle-aged. Dark hair. Eyes wide with horror.

His mouth opened, his voice sharp with panic.

"Luke!" he screamed.