(Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh)

Sunset was mere moments away as the sun nestled in between the two opposing sides of the valley. The slanting rays of sunlight that cut through the distant clouds, refracted by the hot and humid atmosphere, painted the landscape in shades of orange and deep purple. From their vantage point, Mel and Tique could see the entire valley spreading out beneath them. Lush forests grew rampant, making it both extremely difficult to traverse and mostly unexplored.

Their clothes and hair were whipped about so fiercely by the wind that they had to shout to one another to be heard over the noise. All around them fell the twisted, broken, and often burning remnants of what had been their skyship. If she had to guess, Mel suspected it was sabotage.

Mel, who had lived thirty years in her present life, was not afraid of dying. She’d died countless times before. Remembering her past lives was often a comfort but as she looked into Tique’s young and terrified face she was also reminded of how terrifying much of the world could be before you’d regained much of your past experiences. Tique was only seven years old. She’d only just begun to remember. It was those memories that had motivated Mel to try and conceal Tique and why Mel knew their plane exploding midair was not an accident.

Tique’s grip was so strong on Mel’s hands that she probably wouldn’t have been able to let go of her even if she’d wanted to.

“We’re gonna die!” Tique cried out, her tears being blown away from her face as they fell.

“Don’t think about that,” Mel called back. “Look at the sunset, try and focus on that. Or the forest. Can you see those birds?”

Forming positive memories, rather than traumatic ones, would make remembering this moment not only easier but also less stressful later on. It was a lesson that many never really learned and it left a clear impression on their subsequent lives.

“I don’t wanna die!” Tique said without taking her eyes off of Mel. “I’m sorry I said those things and upset those people!”

“It’s not your fault,” Mel told her even though she knew Tique wouldn’t believe her, just as she hadn’t believed her any of the other times that Mel had tried to convince her that none of this had been her fault.

The walls of the valley, once shallow and distant looking, swept up around them and Tique shut her eyes tight against the oncoming ground.

“Remember me!” Mel shouted. “I’ll remember you! I’ll find you, we’ll find each other!”

They crashed into the canopy.

Nis awoke with a start, her heart pounding and cold sweat covering her face. She sat up, turning on the glow lamp beside her bed and pulled out the small journal she kept on the side table. It was always difficult to remember dreams but Nis found that if she recorded them right away that it helped her to retain them. This journal was one of many that she’d kept over the past five years, ever since she was ten years old. Everyone had dreams but Nis felt that hers were different. They felt too real, too much like real memories rather than dreams made up from her imagination.

She paused frequently while she wrote, sometimes closing her eyes as she struggled to remember what she had seen in the dream. Details were often the hardest parts to remember. What had Tique looked like? She was pretty sure that Tique had dark skin, like Nis, but was that really how it had been or was she just putting what she was familiar with into those forgotten details? And what sort of skyship had they been flying in? Most importantly, Nis wanted to remember where they had been heading and why. What was it that Tique remembered that led others to sabotage their skyship?

This was not the first time she’d dreamed about Mel and Nis had a pretty good idea of who she had been. Nis found her a couple years back while reading through some records she’d found in the city archives. Children weren’t usually permitted there but she’d found one elderly archivist who had agreed to let her peruse the records now and again if Nis would do some of the sorting for him when his back was acting up.

The Mel that Nis had read about and was pretty certain that she was one of her past lives, had been something of an explorer and diplomat, charting the Unexplored Wastes and forging new trade routes along the way. The exact dates were always difficult to pin down with many of the records, but it had been at least a couple hundred years ago, back when the Unexplored Wastes had lived up to their names. These days they were almost entirely charted.

So what would Mel have to do with Tique? It made sense that they were out in the middle of nowhere, possibly heading to one of the secret places that Mel had discovered but not yet shared with the rest of the world. Many of the records Nis read about Mel made reference to the fact that Mel was rumored to have several such hideouts, though the reason for her having, or even needing, such hideouts was often painfully absent. Much of her actions seemed to lack explanation. Nis hadn’t found any record yet about how or where Mel died and now she felt she knew why that was.

After she finished writing down as much as she could remember about the dream, Nis pulled out a second, larger notebook. This one had dozens of section dividers in it, each one bearing a name. She flipped the book open to the section labeled ‘Mel’ revealing a series of notations marking the date, journal number, and page where the new dream could be found.

The door to her room opened and the tired face of her dad poked into her room.

“What-?” he began but then stopped when he saw the notebook.

Her parents had found the idea of her dream journals to be amusing at first but over the years they’d grown less and less keen on them. Her parents pretended that they weren’t reading them whenever Nis was out but it was hard to ignore the uncomfortable looks they gave her whenever they’d come across one of the more disturbing dreams.

“I wasn’t making any noise,” Nis said reflexively, stowing her notebook and pulling her blankets back over herself. In the past she had tried to recall conversations by saying them out loud over and over again until she had them right, much to the frustration of her parents.

“No, it’s the light,” her dad waved towards the glow lamp.

“What’s wrong with the light?”

“Your mother saw the glow and thought you were sneaking out again.”

Nis nodded. She’d only done it a couple of times, but all it took was being caught once for her parents to become especially vigilant.

“I’m sorry,” Nis finally said. “I was just writing again.”

“Right,” her dad shrugged. “Well, next time try and wait until morning to write down your…your stuff.”

He stood there, the silence between them growing awkward. Nis braced herself for the question she knew was coming. The question was always on the tips of her parents tongues ever since they caught her sneaking out. It was the question her parents hadn’t yet been able to ask but Nis knew would eventually have to be asked. Her parents, it seemed, were struggling between their present fear over not knowing what Nis had been up to and their fear of finding out what Nis had been up to.

“Nis,” her dad began with uncertainty, “how are things going for you?”

“Everything’s fine,” Nis said.

“We just, your mom and I, we don’t…you never seem to go out with your friends anymore. You spend all your time at the archives or writing in your journals.”

Nis didn’t know how to respond. It was true she didn’t spend time with the other girls her age, but that was because the more that she remembered through her dreams, the less she felt like a fifteen year old and more like an adult, sometimes a very old adult. That was one reason she felt more comfortable at the archives since it was managed by predominately older men and women.

“Your mother and I worry about you, Nis,” he said. “We want you to be happy, to have friends, and…it was just such a shock to us both when you…when we came to check on you and you weren’t here.”

Again, it wasn’t a question but the intent was there.

“I’m sorry for upsetting you,” Nis finally said. She knew she was being childish, dodging the question. It was one of the frustrating aspects of being so young with more mature memories. She could see how foolish she was often behaving but struggled to overcome the immaturity and inexperience of her present life.

Her dad’s mouth formed a thin line. He wasn’t angry. He never seemed to be angry. Instead he looked confused and concerned.

“What…where did you go? “ He asked at last with something like sorrow tugging at his voice.

Nis knew that feeling. She’d been a parent as well, many times over. She knew what it was to feel the betrayal of a child, the worry for their safety, the paralyzing fear that they were making decisions that would take them down a path of disappointments and suffering.

The answer to her dad’s question was straightforward enough, and yet how to fully explain it? She had reoccurring dreams, sometimes, and while most of them didn’t really stand out, there was one that seemed to come to her more often than the others and which would stay with her much longer than her usual dreams.

“I don’t –

“Please,” her dad interrupted, “I don’t care what the answer is, I just want to know.”

Nis hesitated but couldn’t leave her parents to wonder and worry about all the potential things she might have been up to.

“In one of my dreams,” she began, “I’m staring up at the sky at night, watching the stars.”

Her dad shifted his weight uneasily but didn’t interrupt.

“I stand there for hours, and I slowly point from one star to another, and I’m saying the names of the stars and the constellations they form.”

Nis leaned over to the side of her bed and grabbed one of her older journals, the one where she’d mapped out the night sky from that dream. She opened it up to the map of the sky she’d made and held it out for her dad to see. The stars were all labeled as well as the constellations.

Her dad walked over to her and accepted the journal. He looked at the drawing for some time, all the while remaining silent.

“I was trying to find those stars,” Nis told him, albeit not entirely truthful. “But they don’t match the stars we can see.”

“Well, it was just a dream,” her dad said with some slight relief.

Nis kept her expression even. She had long since decided not to argue with her parents over whether or not her dreams were actually memories from past lives or not. She knew neither one would convince the other. How could she explain that it was only when she was dreaming that she ever felt truly awake. It’s there that she could reach out to all her past lives, see their faces, hear their voices, call back to remembrance all of those she once knew. When she was awake, she was left alone with only the one life she was living. Nis felt like a husk, a shadow, of the true person she was.

“I should let you get back to sleep,” her dad said, handing back the journal. “Good night, Nis.”

“Good night, dad.”

He left, closing the door behind himself. Nis turned the glow lamp back off and rolled onto her side. It would probably be a while before her parents would stop worrying about her sneaking out but Nis had no intentions of doing that again. She knew the stars from her dream didn’t match the stars above her home. She’d known it for some time. What she’d actually been doing was studying the stars in order to learn them just as well as she had learned the others from her dream. In the dream, she hadn’t just been pointing out stars and constellations. She’d been navigating by them and Nis was going to learn to do the same thing using the stars here. Nis told herself that she was learning to navigate as a means to connect better with her past but in the back of her mind she knew the truth. She would use that knowledge to navigate to where the stars from her dream had been from: the Unexplored Wastes.

The other detail she left out when explaining to her dad what she’d been up to was the fact that the dream about the stars was one of Mel’s memories.