Read Falling for Free Online

billboard, hung with damp cardboard signs advertising everything from lab-grown piata crystals (Instant Improvement In Karma Is Guaranteed) to certified organic cannabis. In the few gaps between signs and posters, someone had woven stems of lilac, drooping now in the mid-morning sun.
    Inside, every inch of ground between the gate and the Serpentine had been seized by an invading army of stallholders, streetcorner preachers, hawkers, ladybirds, mollys, and every other variety of the great urban unwashed. It sounded like a riot and looked like an explosion in a colour-blind designer’s clothing shop. Jude found herself suddenly terribly sure she didn’t want to go anywhere near it.
    But she was still walking, propelled by fear of embarrassment and the cluster of bodies at her back, and the crowd seemed to be expanding out of the park to meet her in a fog of bad deodorant, ganja smoke and perfume.
    At the gates, a woman dressed as a tearful clown pressed a leaflet into her hand. ‘Official day of mourning for the planet, come and do your part.’
    A sudden surge of escaping children – pickpockets, probably, off to unload their haul – swept them apart. Tiny fingers plucked at her pocket and withdrew, foiled by closures keyed to her fingerprints alone.
    Welcome to the Claustrophobia Express, move right down inside the car please, we’ve plenty more to squeeze aboard.
    Hinke, the short one, pushed his spectacles further down his nose and squinted over them at the crowds. ‘Your Green Urbanites, I presume.’
    â€˜That’s right,’ Schrader chipped in. Jude got the feeling he was setting things straight now, before she could step in and ruin them for him. ‘SoftGreens, the media call them. They advocate anti-technology, back to the land policies, but they’re still quite happy to take government food rations and barter vouchers.’
    â€˜As are most of your people, it seems.’
    â€˜Only those who, for some misguided reason, choose not to participate in the new society we’re building in the Hursts.’ Schrader smiled thinly at the seething crowds, as if pitying them. ‘We continue to provide their basic needs, but we can’t justify providing all life’s little luxuries here, at enormous cost, when a full and meaningful life is available to them in the Hursts, any time they wish it. If they choose to reject that, well, that’s their choice, isn’t it?’
    Beck and Hinke nodded wisely, exactly on cue.
    Jude was thinking of her mother, emerging from yet another benefits office with some browbeaten clerk yelling after her, ‘If you won’t consider the work available, Ms DiMortimer, then you’re deliberately removing yourself from the system. Well, if that’s your choice…’
    â€˜C’mon,’ she said, forcing herself to head directly for the densest concentration of bodies. ‘Let’s party. Do you think they sell candy-floss?’
    Schrader’s furious stare burned into the back of her neck as she walked away.
    Lighten up, tight-arse. Compared to the mess I’m trying to sort out, you don’t even know what a problem is…
    She hadn’t always been scared of crowds. She hadn’t been used to them, growing up in the creeping depopulation of the Bankside, every year another building sliding into disrepair, home to stray cats perpetually locked in single combat with rats half their size. But she hadn’t been scared. Not until the day of the Migration.
    The shift out to the Hursts had happened quite gradually, for obvious reasons. There simply wasn’t enough room on the roads to move sixty-three million people to isolated communities in the middle of nowhere all at once.
    But somewhere along the way, the Government decided it needed a landmark, and designated one Saturday as Migration Day. Pushed the system parameters a little, shifted two million on the one day, mostly from the major