Read Falling for Free Online Page B

of the year, but without any walls or corners to retreat to.
    Schrader grinned down at her as she turned automatically away, and she had to pretend to be admiring the tat on the nearest stall, a scattering of beadwork bracelets and bottles of oils marked DO NOT INGEST.
    â€˜Aura crystals,’ someone yelled, inches away. ‘Guaranteed to see through false exteriors to the soul within. Read the inside, not the false flesh.’
    She wondered about buying one and turning it on Warner. What was going on in there, under the jokes and the gentle hints? How come he kept sending her for those testing programs? She’d been twice as often as most people and he still insisted that names just came up at random.
    Maybe she should have stayed and grilled Warner for a while. Literally, if necessary. Trap his fingers in his damn espresso machine. He was the key to all this. She must have been on an official mission when the, erm, accident happened. If she could only remember what she’d been doing in that building to get her defenestrated…
    An elbow hit her in the back and someone coming from the side caught on her jacket, almost spinning her round. The air was thick with incense from the next stall, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t see, but she had to keep going.
    Twenty yards from the first impassable knot of bodies, a failed contra flow between two stalls groaning with brass candlesticks and lamp-stands, Jude lost her nerve completely, and dived through the flapping canopies of the nearest stall into the quiet space behind it.
    The grass was churned to mud here, and hours of preparation had trodden layers of evidence into the soil: candy wrappers, used rubbers, scraps of metal and paper and plastic. She imagined an archaeologist digging it up in a thousand years time and trying to decide what kind of arcane religious ritual had been performed here. The honouring of the almost-lost gods Gaia and Mammon, often believed implacable enemies, but getting on very well here, thank you very much.
    Even muffled by the stall draperies, the sheer noise of the place shook her. Voices, bells, drums, howling children, sex-noises from the gaudiest tents. She should never have come here, that much was obvious. Maybe she really had made a mistake, corrected the wrong element of today. Maybe she should go back and talk to Warner, or not talk to Warner, or not go into the building –
    The possibilities made her head spin.
    Or maybe that was just the brazier smoke. Whatever they were burning in there was having a weird effect on the customers. Those two necking over there: well, one of them was dressed as a member of the Order of Chastity, and the other was hardly dressed at all.
    And like it or not, she was right in the middle of the festival now. Which meant that whichever route she took out of here, she’d have to walk through a crowd again at some point.
    Peering cautiously out between two stalls, Jude caught a glimpse of the glittering steel curves of the Millennium Bridge, and knew that was her means of escape.
    Over the bridge to the other side of the Serpentine – open lawns, just a scattering of escapees who already found the drugs or the trinkets or the partner they’d come to snap up. Then skirt round the mess, and back to the car. She might even walk back to GenoBond. That would give time to cool down. A substantial change of plan, that was what her present-time crisis needed – a whole new approach to the day.
    She edged along behind the stalls as far as she could, ignoring the curious stares of traders loitering in the gaps between tables. Mud clogged her heels, slowing her. Parted curtains offered glimpses of the heaving mass of bodies, transformed by distance into one amorphous creature, all flailing limbs and laughing, shouting mouths.
    Finally, her channel of safety ran out: blocked by a trio of fortune tellers’ booths, all made up in the same threadbare brown velvet.
    Time to face