Echoes– by Nikki Broadwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Feirin is a woman who knows nothing apart from her name and when she wakes up one day she has no idea who she is, where she is from, or how she got to, or where she currently is, the only clue is a black stone necklace she is wearing and an indigo tattoo of a crescent moon on her forehead. She is taken in by a group of people and becomes friends with a brother and sister who live with them, they shared their lives, food, drink, beliefs and experiences with her and she learned everything that they had to offer, she also learned a lot from the people who moved through the area as well, but after six months, she knew she had to leave and learn more about herself.

Several years later, Feirin is living the best life she can in the large city she is in, but she is dreaming of things she feels she should remember, memories which are no stronger than echoes in her mind and the frustration she feels trying to remember them. She goes to see her friend with benefits and release some of the tension and some of the boredom of a life subsisting of hard work, eating and sleeping and the non-stop rolling adverts on the IRIS technology implanted in her body. When she wakes up in his bed after another night of passion, he says she is magic, or a witch and that he is under her spell, but what he says disturbs her and so she leaves and tries not to think about it anymore as she heads to work on her Harley Davidson bike. As she is riding, a vision of a beautiful woman and a handsome tattooed man comes to her and hits her and makes her late for work at the building site. It was hard work, but it made her stronger and distracted her from everything else while she was doing it and on her way home she thought about all the homeless she passed on the streets, addled by drink and drugs, as well as the automatons who were a sad blend of diluted humanity and machines, used until spent and then thrown away like garbage. When she gets home she feeds the stray black cat she adopted, poured herself a glass of wine and collapsed on the sofa, until Peyton calls and she goes for another night of passion and while she is there, she has another vision and as she is trying to explain it, she has another one, both vivid but in completely different ways and it scared her, so she opens up to Peyton about it all.

As time passes she has more visions and more unexplainable echoes in her mind, but when she sees Jeremy again and finds out that he might be deported, she heads home and falls asleep only to be woken by Peyton hammering on her door and telling her about the lack of jobs, deportations and blatant racism happening on the streets, she is worries and feels like she is losing control of her life, she doesn’t like it and decides to do something about it, so she goes to the police station to look at her file, from there, she finds out nothing new, but that she doesn’t have a last name, no ID and no license for her bike, things go downhill from there when she is arrested and even though Peyton tries to help her, she is deported from the city and left for dead in the desert surrounding it.

When she bands together with the other deportees and learns from them, she discovers a strength she didn’t know she possessed, but this is only the beginning of her journey, can she survive the unsurvivable desert, find the answers which have been missing from her life and discover her path, or will she die a horrible death, unable to save those she is travelling with? This is a story of discovery, love, passion, heartbreak and danger which grabs you from the start and doesn’t let you go even at the end, it just leaves you wanting more.

Reviewed by @roxsannel

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