Falling Read Online Free PDF

gravel balcony. A face, a voice, a snatch of music from a badly-tuned guitar. A life.
    Warner sat with his back to it, blinds half drawn. He’d probably never even noticed.
    â€™And since when have you been so eager to get me out to a Hurst?’
    Warner shrugged. Casual as you like, but she wasn’t convinced. She’d seen too many casual shrugs from Warner that had turned out to precede suicide missions.
    â€˜We consider it prudent to start shifting our resources away from the cities. No rush, things have been pretty stable so far. But once the infrastructure really begins to give way, gang warfare’s liable to flare up again, there could be an anti-government backlash… Anything might happen. We can’t entirely guarantee the safety of anyone remaining in the city, not over the long term.’
    â€˜That’s not what the Government promised during the Migration, now is it?’
    He must have caught her devil’s advocate tone, because he smiled, a little. ‘We promised that anyone who chose to stay behind was fed and kept safe from full-scale conflicts. But we didn’t promise that for their children and their children’s children. No promise is open-ended. We’re just closing it down a little sooner than people may have expected.’
    â€™You should have gone into politics, Mr Warner. You’re wasted here.’
    â€˜Oh, politics is far too messy for my liking. I’m more the Phantom of the Opera type. Manipulate from behind the scenes.’
    He laughed, to tell anyone who’d bugged the office that he was joking. Jude wasn’t sure whether to be convinced or not.
    â€˜Now you come to mention it,’ she said, after a grimacing swig at the coffee, ‘there is a certain physical resemblance.’
    â€˜Cheek. I paid a fortune for this one. Famous Arctic explorer. Rugged, dependable and quietly sexy, or so the marketing says.’
    Jude shrugged. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know.’
    So far, everything was going just the way it had before.
    Never mind. Plenty of time. The moment would come, and she’d notice it and act.
    â€˜Anyway, the Hursts also need the protection afforded by ReTracers. There have been odd attacks by environmentalists. Banner-waving and sabotage, nothing serious so far – but that’s just luck. Sooner or later, the HardGreens will hit something serious.’
    â€˜Like a reactor, yeah. And do I want to be on duty at one of those when it blows? I think not.’
    Warner laughed. ‘Jude. If you were beside the reactor when it blew, you’d skip back and stop it blowing. Net result: it would never have blown in the first place. That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?’
    â€˜Yes, but…’
    â€˜You are so superstitious.’ He sat back in his leather swivel chair, running a hand through his bushy hair as if to show it off. An old gesture, borrowed from the time when keeping your hair into your fifties was your achievement and not a regening clinic’s.
    â€™So, what’s today’s exciting assignment?’
    He spared her an exasperated look. He seemed to have this idea that she didn’t take her job as a high-level government employee seriously enough. ‘VIP minding. There’s a Green Urbanites bash in the Park, some festival or other. A couple of German businessmen want to take a look at this quaint ritual, and the Government have decided to ensure that they don’t get thrown in the Serpentine or anything.’
    This wasn’t the job she’d received, first time round.
    Not a problem in itself. A lot of things could have changed between living a given day and re-visiting it. Other ReTracers’ actions had a knock-on effect, for a start. Rarely enough to change history, but sometimes enough to shift the details of a conversation, change the routine of a working day. And her own changes to the past, at Club Andro, could have had totally random