Paradigm (9781909490406) Read Online Free

smiled at them both but they ignored him, already wrapped up each other’s grief.
    Within seconds and without warning, the speed of the Transporter accelerated, swaying the passengers across the carriage, and Carter grabbed onto a support rail above his head. There was a slithering sound that rose to a growl and then, together, the group of returners made their thundering way through the maze of underground Industry tunnels and up and out into the world above ground, a world that Carter, aged fifteen years and thirty-six days, had not seen in a long, long time.

1
    The Storms
87 years earlier
    O n the day the Storms started, Alice Davenport watched the collapse of her world from nine floors above the city, through her living-room window. She had stayed home from school because she was sick. Or at least that was what she decided she would tell her mother—but as a general rule, her mother didn’t bother to ask much. Not since it had been just the two of them.
    The real reason Alice stayed home was Jake Anderson. In the last school it had been Ricky Thornton mocking how Alice’s teeth stuck out and how her skinny peanut-shell-coloured arms were as thin as sticks. Before Ricky, there had been a James, and before him, a Zak—each with their own particular flavour of unkindness. In this version, Jake was making fun of Alice’s mother, which was more difficult to deal with. He ridiculed her cheap, tatty clothes and the way she left a trail of wine in the air when she staggered through the streets in the early morning sunlight as he was doing his paper round. Jake Anderson was a boy to be believed—because Jake had been in the depths of the city with his parents during Hurricane Alison, when Big Ben had toppled. His parents had been crushed but he had survived. His teasing got worse after that.
    By the time Jake had started needling her about her mother, Alice Davenport was fed up of the pattern. There was always a ‘Jake’. And the worst part was that there was always some truth to their cruelty.
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    O n the morning that the Storms started, Alice’s mother had wandered into the flat just after 5:30 a.m.—and fifteen minutes later was asleep, mouth open and eyes shut on the smoky mattress next to Alice. Outside, the gulls squawked with their bleak, morning calls. Alice thought her mother looked peaceful as she slept; the tough lines on her face had relaxed and she looked younger, though never as young as before.
    It was the familiar click and close of the front door and the padding of her mother’s footsteps on the old stairs that had woken her. Still half in the clutches of a dream, Alice curled up tight inside the sleeping bag on the mattress and waited. Like most mornings, her mother stumbled into her room, lifted up the mattress and stuffed a ball of notes underneath. Then, as always, her mother settled herself down on the mattress next to Alice and passed out.
    Her mother’s wet, slicked-back hair leaked thin beads of water across Alice’s side of the pillow, the fronds of her fringe like curled-up water snakes. Alice pulled herself further down the pillow, away from the dampness until she was alongside her mother’s belly. It was an ugly, skinny grey colour, different to her face that was always scraped with a tan and pink blusher accompanied by a ribbon of red lipstick. The gash of pillar-box was still there, even now, smudged a little at the corners but wildly bright against the drabness of the mattress, slung on the floor in the corner of the dingy hole they both called a bedroom.
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    T he bedroom was one of two in the apartment stacked neatly on the top floor of a block of flats, ten layers high above the city. The wallpaper was old and peeled off the walls in places revealing layers of different-coloured patterns, like the skins of a decaying onion. It was a medium-sized authority-owned flat, set over two floors with a tiny staircase inside that wound upwards