THE FOREVER GENE (THE SCIONS OF EARTH Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

the western hub of the Personet.  She thought that this would give her a better opportunity to find a channel prepared to take her on, but she soon found that the one thing she had little control over, her accent, stood in her way at every turn.  She lost count of the number of interviewers who told her sympathetically that she was an excellent candidate and, as soon as her accent 'improved', she should re-apply.
    For two frustrating years she sustained herself with part-time work as a waitress in restaurants, where a foreign accent was the rule rather than the exception, and as an usher in various museums.  One day, standing at a traffic light in Charing Cross Road on her way to work at the National Portrait Gallery, she felt a powerful urge to go home.  Suddenly the crowds, noise, bustle and traffic of Trafalgar Square felt oppressive, a feeling that surprised her. She found herself longing suddenly for the dusty open spaces in and around Ulan Bator, where as a child she often participated in the ubiquitous horse-riding competitions, holding her own against the boys as a rider.  She had even earned a reputation as a sure shot with a bow, once winning a ribbon at the Naadam festival when she was fourteen.
    By then, it felt like she had been rejected by every Personet channel in London, and she decided to go back to Ulan Bator.  Before she left for Oxford, she had been offered a scholarship by her hometown university's School of Mongolian Studies.  She had rejected it with contempt then but, six sobering years later, she was happy to sign up for an honours degree in Mongolian Literature.
    Needless to say, she gave up on her dream of becoming a reporter and it came as a complete surprise when, towards the end of the first year of her degree, a producer from Mongolia Today contacted her to ask whether she would be interested in a position answering calls and responding to p-mails for the channel.  Towards the end of her time in London she had sent applications to Mongolia Today and UB Post, the only two Personet channels based in Ulan Bator, but had heard nothing from either of them and had been too dispirited by then to follow up.
    At the interview she was told that the channel needed someone who spoke English fluently and that the recorded clip she had sent with her application had impressed the news director.  For once, her accent was not a problem.  After her experiences in London, her expectations had been lowered to the point where she was more than happy to start at the bottom.
    She accepted the position, continuing her studies part-time, and by the end of the following year she was doing English voice-overs on many of the channel's broadcasts.  She impressed the news director sufficiently to earn a screen test, which she passed with flying colours.  She soon became the channel's first choice reporter for any story broadcast in English.
    She completed her honours degree and was surprised to discover that she was content with life.  Her youthful impatience with Ulan Bator had dissipated, cured by her discovery that the grass was not necessarily greener elsewhere.  She bought a small but comfortable house on the outskirts of the city and kept a few horses, which she enjoyed riding regularly.  She even began entering riding competitions again and found that she had lost very little of her skill.
    Her studies gave her a new appreciation of her nation's prominence in world history and she no longer thought of it as somehow inferior to the more glamorous countries she had once dreamed of escaping to.  Having come full circle, and having made peace with herself and her birthplace, it was more than ironic that she found herself in the centre of one of the most startling global events in history.  She could imagine the frustration of the big international channels, none of which had Personet crews stationed permanently in Mongolia. Nothing ever happened there after all, and the vast distances of central Asia meant