Colony by Hugo Wilcken

Author:Hugo Wilcken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

It’s night. Stars glisten through the rain. He manages to prop himself up against the wall at one point, but that’s the best he can manage. He’s very ill. He wonders whether he’ll be any better in the morning. But it seems unimportant.

A memory comes back to him: months ago he shared a cell with a man nicknamed Lazare. He was quite famous, newspaper articles had been written about him. He’d been condemned to death for the murder of his wife’s lover. His execution was scheduled for dawn one day – he’d been given his last meal, the guillotine had been set up and the guards had even marched him to the place of execution, when a presidential reprieve was announced. He’d been a minute or two from losing his head. Sabir questioned Lazare about the incident and he didn’t seem to mind talking about it. ‘You’re marched out of your cell, aware of every second, every part of every second. The smallest sensations are amazingly intense and somehow more real than usual. And yet at the same time it’s almost as if it’s not happening to you at all. As if you’re watching a scene from afar …’ All night Sabir drifts in and out of sleep, his mind shifting between memories, dreams, fantasies. He remembers how when he first arrived in the Colony, he wrote that letter to his fiancée. How it struck him then that the only way out, the only solution, was to change, become someone else.

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