HarperVoyager
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Copyright © Peter Newman 2019
Cover illustration © Chris Tulloch McCabe 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Peter Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel 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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Source ISBN: 9780008229030
Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008229054
Version: 2019-05-15
To Andrew For being there to catch me
Contents
She had been elsewhere, between lives, formless and timeless. There was a sense of hanging above angry water, of shapes sliding under the surface, of shadows rising to feed, hungry, yet unable to break through to where she hung. She both feared the shapes and was drawn to them. But when she tried to go down to them, something held her up: unbreakable strands threading around and through her. Where she herself was neither light nor shadow, these strands glowed blue and violet, glimmering like crystal. Together they were a tether connecting her to the world beyond, to a platinum sphere, her anchor. This, she knew.
And so she had watched the shadows swirl and throw themselves against the divide, pressing against it, bending it, but unable to push through. On instinct, she tried to reach out, sure that if she could touch whatever separated them, it would part for her. However, the bands of light that protected her also fixed her in place.
The shadows could not reach her any more than she could reach them, but they could whisper, and the sounds they made walked slow through the non-space, inching their way upwards. Though she had no bones in this place, no flesh, no blood, no limbs, the thing that remained had something of her senses, and she turned towards the whisperers, straining to listen.
Words