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Back Daughter of Eden
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

Clare got to her first.

‘Hey, hey,’ she soothed, taking Suzie from Flame and laying her gently on the ground. ‘It’s not so bad. It’s not so bad. She’s been lucky, look. The arrow just grazed her shoulder. We just need to stop the bleeding and she’ll be fine.’

I had a little bit of fakeskin that I carried for things like this – it’s much better than buckskin – so I knelt beside the little screaming child and pressed it firmly against the wound.

‘There, you see.’ Clare seemed to have forgotten for a moment that she was angry with Flame, and she put one arm round the shoulder of Tom’s other shelterwoman. Truth was, Flame was younger than five six of Clare’s own kids. ‘She’ll be fine, look, she’ll be fine. Angie will stop that bleeding and she’ll be fine.’

Tom was boiling over with rage. He looked round him to find Trueheart.

‘So what do you say to that, eh?’ he demanded of her. ‘What do you say about your friends the Johnfolk now? That’s your little sister there, in case you’d forgotten! That little child there that couldn’t harm anyone! What kind of man shoots an arrow at a tiny baby?’

Trueheart turned away from him and wouldn’t answer, though her eyes were shining with angry tears. She was standing under a whitelantern tree, and you could still just see the fading bruise next to one eye from that last time he’d beaten her.

We stopped to sleep less than halfway up, and then it was another whole waking after that before we reached the place where the trees started to get thinner and smaller, so that the light was much dimmer and the air much cooler than it was down in Wide Forest. There were monkeys up there, those weird creatures that have six arms sticking out from their body in all directions, with hands on the end of each, so it’s hard to say sometimes which is top or bottom, or which is front or back. We’d seen them sometimes in cages in Veeklehouse but this was the first time most of our group had ever seen one moving freely. We managed to shoot a couple of them to cook over the fire we made, after much puffing and blowing, with the embers we’d brought with us from Davidstand.