The Race E-Book

Nina Allan

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A child is kidnapped with consequences that extend across worlds… A writer reaches into the past to discover the truth about a possible murder… Far away a young woman prepares for her mysterious future…The Race weaves together story threads and realities to take us on a gripping and spellbinding journey.

Leseprobe

Also by Nina Allan and available from Titan Books

the RIFT (July 2017)

for Chris

The RacePrint edition ISBN: 9781785650369E-book edition ISBN: 9781785650383

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: July 20161 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2016 by Nina Allan. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Contents

Cover

Also by Nina Allan

Title Page

Dedication

Copyright

oneJENNA

twoCHRISTY

threeALEX

fourMAREE

appendixBROCK ISLAND

Acknowledgements

About the Author

one

JENNA

There have been Hoolmans living in Sapphire for hundreds of years. Like so many of the town’s old families, we are broken and divided, our instincts as selfish and our minds as hard-bitten as the sick land we live on. We have long memories though, and fierce allegiances. We cannot seem to be free of one another, no matter if we wish to be or not.

My mother, Anne Allerton, walked out on the town and on our family when I was fifteen. After she left, my brother Del, whose nickname is Yellow, went a little bit crazy. He was crazy before, most likely – it was just that our mother leaving made his madness more obvious. I was scared of Del then, for a while, not because of anything he did especially but because of the thoughts he had. I could sense those thoughts in him, burrowing away beneath the surface of his mind like venomous worms. I swear Del sometimes thought of killing me, not because he wanted me dead but because he was desperate to find out what killing felt like.

I think the only reason he never went through with it was that he knew deep down that if he killed me, there would be no one left on the planet who really gave a shit about him.

Del and I are still close, in spite of everything.

It’s easy to blame Mum for the way Del turned out, but then it’s always easier to pin the blame on someone else when things go mental. If I’m honest, I’d say that Del was troubled because he was a Hoolman, simple as that. The legends say the Hools have always been wanderers and that restlessness is in their blood. When the Hools first sought refuge in England, they were persecuted for being curse-givers, though of course that was centuries ago. I was sometimes teased at school because of my surname but most kids soon got bored of it and moved on to something more interesting. It wasn’t even as if I looked Hoolish, not like Del with his gorsefire hair and beanpole legs, but no one in class was going to risk kidding him about it, not if they wanted their head and body to remain part of the same organism.

If it hadn’t been for the dogs, I seriously think Del would have ended up in jail. Del cared about his smartdog Limlasker more than he cared about anyone, including his wife Claudia, including me.

The one exception was his daughter, Luz Maree, who everyone called Lumey. Del loved Lumey as if a fever was raging inside him, and he didn’t care who knew it.

When Lumey went missing, Del became even crazier. He swore he’d find his girl and bring her home, no matter the cost.

I think he’ll go on looking for Lumey till the day he dies.

* * *

I’ve seen photos of Sapphire from when it was a holiday resort, before they drained the marshes, before the fracking. The colours look brighter in those old photographs, which is the opposite of what you’d normally expect.

Sapphire in the old days was a kind of island, cut off from London and the rest of the country by the Romney Marshes. If you look at the old maps you’ll see that most of the land between Folkestone and Tonbridge was more or less empty, just a scattering of fenland villages and the network of inland waterways called the Settles. People who lived in the Settles got about mainly by canal boat: massive steel-bellied barges known as sleds that lumbered along at three miles an hour maximum if you were lucky. Whole families lived on them, passing down the barge through the generations the same way ordinary land-lubbers pass down their bricks and mortar. When the marshes were drained the parliament set up a rehoming plan for the sledders, which basically meant they were forced to abandon their barges and go into social housing.

The sledders fought back at first. There was even a rogue parliament for a while, based at Lydd, which was always the unofficial capital of the Settles. There was a huge demonstration, with people flooding in from all over the southern counties just to show their solidarity. The protest ended in street riots, and sometime during the night the hundreds of barges that had gathered to support the demonstrators were set on fire from the air.

More than five hundred people died, including children.

If you take the tramway up to London you can still see dozens of sleds, marooned in the bone-dry runnels that were once canals, their huge, stove-like bodies coated in rust, some of them split right open like the carcasses of the marsh cows that once roamed freely over Romney but are now long gone.

Most of the sledders ended up in Sapphire, buried away in crap housing estates like Mallon Way and Hawthorne. There are those who say there are still people living on board some of the abandoned barges, the decayed descendants of those original families who refused to leave and who now scratch out a basic living in what’s left of the marshes. There’s a part of me that would like to believe those stories, because it would mean the sledders who fought so hard at the Lydd demo didn’t die in vain, but really I think they’re just fairy tales, the kind that get passed around after sundown to scare little children. Because I don’t see how anyone could survive out there now. Most of the marshland is still toxic. Del says that in some places even the air is toxic, that it’s not safe to breathe.