First published in Great Britain in 2026 by

  The Book Guild Ltd

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  Harrison Road, Market Harborough,

  Leicestershire. LE16 7UL

  Tel: 0116 2792299

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  Copyright © 2026 Vicki Lloyd

  The right of Vicki Lloyd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.

  ISBN 978 1835745 069

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  For Ellie, Ivy, Leo and Charlie.

  Long may you pursue your dreams.

  Contents

  PART I

  PETRICHOR

  1

  The Wall

  2

  Webcrash

  3

  Hercules

  4

  The Code

  5

  The Smell of Rain

  6

  Suyin

  7

  Snakes Entwined

  8

  The Dark Politic

  9

  Doberman Pinscher

  10

  Flight

  11

  Watling Street

  12

  The Tunnel

  13

  The End

  14

  Welcome to Anglia

  15

  A Barren Landscape

  16

  Life as a Cherry

  PART II

  JASMINE

  17

  The Fitzwilliam

  18

  Slug and Greyhound

  19

  Escape

  20

  The Colour of Fireworks

  21

  Stefan’s Journey

  PART III

  PETRICHOR

  22

  Wessex Regained

  23

  Kris’s Story

  24

  The Scent of Butter

  25

  Taken

  26

  Wayland’s Smithy

  27

  Finally

  Acknowledgements

  PART I

  PETRICHOR

  1

  The Wall

  Its surface was sharper than it looked. The textured concrete, a gentle shade of pink like a cat’s tongue, dug into the skin of my palms and my cheek as I leant into it.

  ‘Step away from the wall. Step away from the wall.’

  The voice was metallic, recorded, as if some bored person in an office had pressed a button simply because it was their job. And, obediently, I stepped away, as did the few other people who had been bold enough to walk forwards to touch it. Some guy who was muttering that this was a free nation started arguing with the guide. She had, until then, been supremely calm in her pink and black suit with gold stripes down the side of the sleeve and leg, but now she grew flustered. Her smart uniform became her ally as it seemed to stiffen even more at the angular points of shoulder and elbow, but she had to resort to waving her umbrella in the man’s face before he would back off.

  I did not know why it had taken me so long to come on this tour of the Divide. All my friends had done it, all my colleagues. I had supposed that seeing it on screen was good enough. Not actually seeing it in the flesh made it a bit less real, as though it were some abstract that did not affect me much, was irrelevant to the more important things in life. And now I faced it, I was made breathless by its size. Or was I having a panic attack at the reality? When I avoided going to see the Divide, I imagined that if I wanted, I could simply climb over it, up one side, down the other, and stroll away.

  ‘Step away from the wall.’

  The wall is a problem for other people; it destroyed other people’s lives, not mine, I was thinking as I turned to walk back to the tram. My thoughts were shattered by a cacophony of sounds – an almighty bang, angry shouting, a scream, a whoosh, scraping and running feet all came at once. As I twisted round, I was rugby-tackled to the ground and found my mouth full of dust and gravel. Spitting, I pushed off my assailant, who had softer flesh and weaker muscles than your average flanker.

  ‘Stay down,’ he gasped, squeaky and panicked, ‘something’s going on; we need to stay down! Stay down.’

  ‘Stuff that.’ There’d been too much of this staying-down since the Divide. So many people keeping their heads down when usually there was nothing to see anyway. Now something was actually happening, I wanted to see it – I didn’t want to miss a thing. I jumped to my feet. Our guide with the umbrella was frozen, stuck with her weight forwards on one leg, the opposite arm raised with the finger pointing, her mouth open: a marble statue of an amazon warrior.

  The pointing finger led to a scene of desperation. A man was charging towards the wall, roaring. I’d heard of this – rushing the wall – but I’d never seen it, not even on screen. No drones, no cameras were allowed near the Divide. And now I knew why. This action was so raw, so desperate, that it simply did not accord with the Wessex government’s portrayal of what the Divide meant to us. This wall was supposed to be benign, protective, symbolic, not a serious obstacle.

  He had burst forwards, with no shout, no cry of triumph, no warning. Like a greyhound from the slips came into my head, not just from the speed of him but because of his long, skinny legs and lank, shaggy hair.

  The guide shouted, ‘Stop! What are you doing?’

  The man charged at the Divide.

  ‘I said, stop!’

  Yet the man had hurtled forwards. The guide, pink and black suit rumpling, still with one leg forwards, one arm half raised, was no longer just a bossy know-all; she had turned into something like an old-fashioned police officer – traffic, perhaps. On charged the man. Close to the Divide, he stopped abruptly. He refused to look behind him at the crowd, who were transfixed. I looked round at them. Many had their hands over their mouths or to their cheeks, Scream-style, but what were they thinking? Did they secretly wish him luck? Can it be better on the other side? Is he stupid, reckless and delusional?

  He stripped off his backpack, opened it and yanked something out; I could not see what. Garda were now stumbling in from various directions, like a mismatched pack of hounds roused from their kennels after a big dinner, some pulling on their purple jackets, others buckling their helmets. This really did not happen often. They pushed through the gaping crowd. The man was now almost at the foot of the wall. I realised I was jumping up and down, stifling squeals of excitement with my fist stuffed in my mouth. I tried to make myself stand still. Propriety. That was the word that came to mind.

  I turned away to take a few breaths and that’s when I spotted him, the man’s friend – he had to be. I could see it in his eyes. My fellow tourists from the tram showed nervousness, confusion, maybe a bit of excitement like me, or solidarity. His wide eyes showed terror, fear, hope, love. He wore an identical backpack. He had the same shade of brown skin as his friend, but short hair, it seemed, under a black cap. He was rocking backwards and forwards, one foot stretched in front of the other. Less of a greyhound in the slips, more of a spaniel; eager to follow, but not sure if he had been told to stay or come. Or like a sprinter, desperate to start the race, held back only by the starting pistol.

  Pistols. I turned back to face the way everyone else was facing and saw that the Garda had stopped in a loose semicircle, yards back from the Divide, their stun-pistols out and pointing – but no longer at the ground. The man, the Greyhound, was halfway up the wall already. He mus
t have shot a belay line over the top, as he was dangling from a thin thread, like a spider heading for home. He was more unwieldy than a spider, though. It was a scene by Hieronymus Bosch, trying to scale the height of the wall, like a figure trying to scramble their way out of hell. The Garda roared at him to stop, to come back down. They took aim with the stun-pistols. I still found myself chewing on my fist as I willed him on to make it up and over. Not because I had ever felt the need to try to cross the Divide, obviously. I was chewing my knuckles because, at last, he was there, he had made it. He swung one leg onto the top of the Divide. One final heave and he was lying on it. I heard the collective exhalation as all the tourists who had been staring, transfixed, finally breathed out.

  The man, lying flat on top of the world, turned his face away from us to look over. We all knew what he was seeing; we’ve been shown the dronegraphs often enough. It is a barren gap, five miles wide, sterile, stark and grey. It lacks vegetation, greenery, life, structure. And across it, the other Divide, as high as ours but grey, harsh, studded throughout with shards of broken glass; twisted, rusted pieces of metal; vicious nails that would flail the skin off anyone mad enough to climb it.

  Then the man turned his face back towards us, towards the motley group of fellow sightseers who had climbed out of the tram that morning, chatting and anticipating. Silent now, spread out across the parking area, all staring up, some still with hands to their mouths, mouths still half open in shock or, in my case, both shock and excitement at the daringness of it all. And we were gazing into the face, high, high up on top of the Divide, of the man who has stared into the jaws of hell, who has looked into the abyss and gained a dreadful knowledge that he can never un-know.

  Hang on, though. I felt my hands slide from my face up to my hair. I forced my feet to stop jigging and rooted them into the tarmac so that I could look more carefully. What did I see in that face? Confusion? Excitement? Doubt? Horror, even? Or was it revelation? His round eyes stared beyond us all to one place. I turned and realised he was looking at his friend – his friend who was still rocking backwards and forwards, poised to charge. Should he stay or should he go? In one moment of time, a message passed between them. The friend brought back his front foot to join the other, the man on the Divide half raised his hand, an order was shouted, the Garda fired their stun-pistols, the man rolled back and was gone. Silence.

  At the start of that long, sweltering summer of 2050, I was reasonably content. I believed I understood people; I thought I knew the world around me. I live in Wessex. And I’m proud of it. I said that to myself several times a week. Occasionally I actually meant it. I looked around me at my reasonably trustworthy, reasonably complacent, reasonably caring neighbours and thought, yes, I am lucky. And I loved my job. I worked with old things, Roman and Greek artefacts; in particular, small statues.

  And it was outside the museum that the tram stopped when we got back to Oxford. My head was still buzzing with the escape, or defection; I didn’t know what to call it. Our tour guide, the lady of the pink suit with the go-faster stripe, had hustled us back onto the tram at top speed, and we glided off with Bizet or Ravel or somebody blasting in our ears to prevent, I assumed, any chattering or suppositions amongst the passengers. Looking out over the fields of spring-green crops and calmly lined rows of solar cells, it was hard to believe those few minutes had actually happened. Until, that is, the tram pulled up, and we all piled off. Then I saw him. The man’s friend; the Spaniel. I couldn’t help labelling people in dog breeds – I’ve always done it. He simply stepped out of the emergency exit at the back of the tram while our tour guide, still a bit shell-shocked, ushered me and the rest of the group out through the front door at full speed. I wanted to shout to him to wait, though I realised that was a bad idea. If he was planning to climb the Divide as well, or if he even knew about his friend’s plan, he would be whisked away and ‘vanished’ before you could blink.

  I walked home as the sun set over my home town, the city of perspiring dreams, failing to dislodge from my mind the expression on the face of the climbing man, the Greyhound. This morning might have been a hundred years ago, so far disconnected it seemed from this moment now. At the apartment, I palm-printed the door and stepped inside.

  ‘Hiya!’ called Noah. He was cooking again. He appeared in the doorway, and I could tell from the nervous smile and the way he rubbed his hand round the back of his neck that he had been experimenting. Often I was encouraging; he saved us a lot of money by wrenching flageolet beans into unusual shapes and flavours. ‘So how was your day as a boring tourist?’

  Boring tourist. That’s what I had called myself that morning. Only that morning. We’d had a laugh that I was going to spend my day off joining the swarms of tourists just like the ones I spent most of my working days trying to avoid. I took a breath and the words poured out in a flood of sights, smells, sounds, conjecture, hopes, fears. Noah took the whole volley, as he always does, bless him, without trying to interrupt. He was the elephant to my mouse, the solid rock to my geyser. And yet even as I slowed down towards the end of my account, I realised I had edited as I’d gone along; I had omitted all mention of the Spaniel who had not followed his friend, who had then slipped onto the tram, and of wondering where he had gone now and what he would do.

  The next morning, I had barely stowed my velo outside the museum and made it through the door before my colleagues jumped on me. They were desperate to know if I had seen anything and I revelled in being able to say, yes, I was there right at that moment; yes, I saw the man – actually saw his face. How did he manage to climb so high up the wall before they shot him? Shot him? Now I was confused. Someone had a newspaper. The pictures must have been taken from security cameras at various angles. There was a staccato montage of him running; of the crowd, probably including me; of an older woman sprawled on the ground where, they are saying, the running man pushed her (I did not see that); of a Garda taking slow, steady aim; and of the man lying slumped, stiff and still on top of the wall.

  Did he die? Perhaps I remembered it wrong. Maybe I had made it all up in my head when I saw him looking at his friend before he went over the edge. Maybe, just before he rolled over, a fatal ray had burnt into his face, and I failed to see it. My more vociferous colleagues were still bombarding me with questions: Liv, loud and direct; Aarav, quiet and penetrating; Suyin, birdlike, inquisitive. I stopped answering, though. I no longer knew what to say, let alone what to think. I needed to be with my statues.

  I love my statues. Our collection of European bronzes is one of the most important in the world. Only with them can I slow down. I lay my hands on the cool bronze curves of a horse’s flank or the exquisitely chiselled marble curls on a Greek warrior’s head and it centres me; I am grounded. I had a great deal to do that day since I needed to pack up various small bronzes we had had on loan for their return to Italy. The packaging room in the basement was cool and smelled of ancient dust, though no dust was allowed to remain there.

  I took into my hands my favourite of the moment, a small statue of a horse and rider. The horse was strong and proud, the rider fierce. He was an Avar horseman, one of those whose success in fighting and beating the Romans was down to their aggression, their passion for their horses and the crucial thing on their side, their use of stirrups. These were fierce warriors who pounded in from Bulgaria and clashed with the Roman army. The Romans had not yet discovered stirrups and found, I imagine to their horror, that a mounted fighter with stirrups could control his horse more efficiently, ride much further without tiring and stand up in his stirrups to wield his weapons.