‘Ah,’ said a voice, and then belched. ‘That’s the stuff to give the troops! Bromide? That’s what you think! Laugh? I nearly brought a tractor!’

Guilty hopped up onto the trolley.

Mrs Tachyon reached up and adjusted the headphones under her bobble hat.

She scratched at a surgical dressing. Dratted thing. She’d have to get someone to take it off her, but she knew a decent nurse over in 1917.

Then she scrabbled in her pockets and fished out the sixpence the sergeant had given her. She remembered him giving it to her. Mrs Tachyon remembered everything, and had long ago given up wondering whether the things she remembered had already happened or not. Take life as it was going to come was her motto. And if it didn’t come, go and fetch it.

The past and the future were all the same, but you could get a good feed off of a sixpence, if you knew the right way to do it.

She squinted at it in the grey light of dawn. It was a bit old and grubby, but the date was quite clear. It said: 1903.

‘Tea and buns? That’s what you think, Mr Copper!’

And she went back to 1903 and spent it on fish and chips. And still had change.

Read On

If you enjoyed JOHNNY AND THE BOMB, you’ll love THE AMAZING MAURICE AND HIS EDUCATED RODENTS, winner of the Carnegie Medal.

Here’s the first chapter to get you started . . .

Chapter 1

– From Mr Bunnsy Has An Adventure

RATS!

They chased the dogs and bit the cats, they—

But there was more to it than that. As the amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.

But Malicia Grim said it was a story about stories.

It began – part of it began – on the mail coach that came over the mountains from the distant cities of the plain.

This was the part of the journey that the driver didn’t like. The way wound through forests and around mountains on crumbling roads. There were deep shadows between the trees. Sometimes he thought things were following the coach, keeping just out of sight. It gave him the willies.

And on this journey, the really big willie was that he could hear voices. He was sure of it. They were coming from behind him, from the top of the coach, and there was nothing there but the big oilcloth mail-sacks and the young man’s luggage. There was certainly nothing big enough for a person to hide inside. But occasionally he was sure he heard squeaky voices, whispering.

There was only one passenger at this point. He was a fair-haired young man, sitting all by himself inside the rocking coach, reading a book. He was reading slowly, and aloud, moving his finger over the words.