Chapters (45)
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Prologue
- 2046
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- About the Author
The creatures swoop down, letting the warm air do the work as they drop closer, and only at the last second do the three realise the danger and burst away in all directions as the flying things glide powerfully overhead and down into a steeper dive towards the valley floor.
Ben runs to the edge to watch them drop with laughter coming from his mouth at the sight of them in mid-air tumbling and rolling for a few seconds before gliding away in opposite directions then coming back together in what can only be a mating ritual of airborne dance.
‘Ben!’ Harry shouts in warning. Ben spins round and locks his two eyes on the hundreds presented by the rugby ball bee as it flies towards him. He spots Harry and Safa going wide to the sides with weapons aimed.
‘Don’t shoot it,’ he calls out softly, taking in every detail of the hairy legs, the bulging saddle bags and the wings beating faster than the eye can see. How it gains flight at such a size is beyond his imagination, but then his mind is constrained by the world in which he lived, and this world is not his world.
It slows down, the buzzing becoming deeper as though it’s changing gear to hold stationary, assessing, scenting, smelling, seeing and then deciding that it doesn’t want whatever pollen Ben might have and round it turns, moving almost lazily to Harry and Safa, who get the star treatment next, and then it’s done. They are not interesting. They are not food, therefore they are dismissed.
A black cloud of reverberating wings suddenly bursts from the ground with a sound like angry whispering that builds to an all-out screaming of beating wings, deafening and thunderous. With no scale at first they simply watch, then the size of the insects hits home. Dragonflies with a double-layered wingspan of over a foot and bodies even longer and there are hundreds of them swarming up and around like a school of fish gathering together and moving almost as one organism. They move closer and yet more rise to join the rest, gradually gaining height so as to evade the three figures coming towards them.
The insects swarm round, their heads dropping and lifting and moving so fast but never colliding into each other. They are thick enough to be substantial but light enough to be easily recognised as insects, with blues and reds glinting from their bodies and faint rainbows showing in their wings, like washed-out butterflies.