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Chapters (68)
  1. Title page
  2. Dedication
  3. Part I
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 20. 20:25 MT.
  30. Part II
  31. Twenty-six
  32. Twenty-seven
  33. Twenty-eight
  34. Twenty-nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-one
  37. Thirty-two
  38. Thirty-three
  39. Thirty-four
  40. Thirty-five
  41. Thirty-six
  42. Thirty-seven
  43. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 22. 20:05 MT.
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine
  46. Forty
  47. Forty-one
  48. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 25. 15:30 MT.
  49. Forty-two
  50. Forty-three
  51. Forty-four
  52. Forty-five
  53. Forty-six
  54. Forty-seven
  55. Forty-eight
  56. Forty-nine
  57. Fifty
  58. Fifty-one
  59. Fifty-two
  60. Fifty-three
  61. Fifty-four
  62. Part III
  63. Fifty-five
  64. Fifty-six
  65. Fifty-seven
  66. Fifty-eight
  67. Also by Chris Beckett
  68. Copyright page

‘I’m finished with you, Angie. I’ve given you two years of my life – two whole years! – and I’m not going to waste any more time on you. But let me tell you one thing before we go our own ways. If you wait to be absolutely certain of a thing before you believe it’s true, you’ll never know anything, you’ll never be with anyone, and you’ll never have a home. That’s how it is with everything in this life, and that’s how it is with Gela. If you want to hear her voice you have to take a risk. You have to be brave enough to take the risk that you might be wrong. You weren’t willing to take that risk in Circle, and now your chance has gone. I just hope that sometime you learn to take it in your own life, or you’ll have no life at all.’

She wouldn’t talk to me after that. She wouldn’t look at me. She walked away, back to where the guards who’d come over with us from Wide Forest were playing chess in the blue light and warmth of a big spiketree, on a board scratched into the dirt.

‘When you’re ready, men, I’m set to go. Angie here isn’t coming with us. It seems she’s too good for us. It seems she’s too good even for Mother Gela.’

And that was it. I tried again to speak to her, but she turned her head and told the guards to keep me away from her.

So then I was alone. Really really alone. I was in Circle Valley where I knew nobody. All the rest of the Davidfolk Ground was on far side of the Dark, and I didn’t know anyone there either. The place I came from was ten miles out in the Pool, and there was no one there any more. They’d all left, and I had no idea where they’d gone.

I had those metal cubes with me that the Kneefolk had given me when I left them. I gave one of them to a trader to let me cross over the Dark with him and his bucks.

Twenty-five

Well, I’d say it was obvious,’ said Trueheart, as we squatted side by side at the edge of Circle Clearing, pretty much exactly in the same spot where Mary had been waiting for me that third time. ‘I’d say it was obvious obvious. She wanted you to fake it, didn’t she? She wanted you to fake it like she did, and she was angry because you weren’t prepared to do it. It made what she did look bad.’