A hush descended as the paramedics emerged with the stretcher. Revived somewhat by water and glucose, Jeremy couldn’t move his head much because he’d been tightly strapped in to keep him safe while he was being manoeuvred through the holes and up the stairs, but he could hear the people out there murmuring to one another, and the crackling voices from the police radios, and the traffic passing on the main road nearby. He raised a tentative hand in greeting and, to his surprise, there was a cheer from the crowd in response.
Cheryl bent over him briefly as the paramedics lifted the stretcher into the ambulance, checking that he knew where he was and what was happening. Her face was kind but puzzled. Hundreds of metres above her, long white clouds, tinged with grey, were blowing by. Two crows were flying beneath them, calling out to one another from time to time as they crossed that immense vault beneath the sky.
About the Author
Chris Beckett is a former university lecturer and social worker living in Cambridge. He is the winner of the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award, 2009, for The Turing Test, the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, 2013, for Dark Eden and was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Novel of the Year Award for Mother of Eden in 2015 and for Daughter of Eden in 2016.
Also by Chris Beckett
The Holy Machine
Marcher
Dark Eden
Mother of Eden
Daughter of Eden
The Turing Test
The Peacock Cloak
Copyright
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2017 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Chris Beckett, 2017
The moral right of Chris Beckett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78 649 0506
E-book ISBN: 9781786490506
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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