They would tackle speed and endurance events but not urban freestyle, as the last East Carmine resident to try any sort of trick on the Penny-Farthing now repots seedlings in the greenhouse using the fullest extent of their intellect.

“There’ll be others not on my list,” said Dad. “I think once the Prefects knew I wouldn’t flip anyone the Big M, they stopped asking. Villagers will be dropping like flies unless someone intervenes.” “Intervenes?” “Yes, intervenes.” “In what way ‘intervenes’?” “Whatever it takes to stop him. I’m sure we can get him to see reason, once we spell out

Aside from a few dissenters—always Orange—the Munsellian Doctrine was so well entrenched that on trains the residents sorted into the perfect Chromatic Hierarchy without even thinking about it—and not just which carriage, but one’s place in which carriage. Stops on the way usually meant a quick game of “musical chairs” as the carriage rejigged itse

swans suddenly made perfect sense. “Are you—retching cough— an Angel?” asked Jane quite suddenly. “Sent by the Creator to smite us from—cough— on high?” “I hoped not to be that today, but it didn’t work out that way.” “Can we speak to our Creator?” “I think we’re sort of done here,” said Hanson as the town hall shifted and flexed and started to mov

Hanson said nothing and instead tapped the barcode on my index finger. “The drones scan by line of sight only. All specimens on this Reserve work on legacy tech five centuries old. Your barcodes allow us identification data, nothing more, so positional data has to be drone-assessed at twice-daily intervals. Reserve Thirteen to the west of here uses

“Anything. Something I don’t know and never could.” He stared at me for a moment. “You don’t have a name. You’re HE-315-PJ7A-M and generation twenty-four from Time Zero. You popped up on our database twenty years ago and your entire life is eighteen hundred lines of text, almost all of it geographic movements. Have you procreated yet?”

don’t know. It just felt like the right thing to do.” “We call that a vestigial recollection,” said Hanson, “a subconscious window into a small trove of customs and beliefs that you are not currently permitted to access.”

“Nothing,” said Jane. “We’re on an island named Great Britain. Is it still called that?” “No,” he said, “not for a very long time. We call the small group of islands the Albion Archipelago, or Reserves Twelve and Thirteen to be technical. I have a question for you: Subjects don’t bury their dead—why did you bury Jacquie?”

“High Saffron, as you know it, was originally the only go-to option for the disrupters,” he said, “but generalised fears are far more effective these days: fear of swans, lightning, Riffraff and the night keeps everyone pretty much in check. In an ideal world we’d cancel Reboot but we can’t alter the Rulebook, or the experiment would be invalidated