New Henley (eBook)

Christina Mary Cannes (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
100 Seiten
First Edition Design Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5069-0373-6 (ISBN)

Infos

After years of chaos and rioting, powerful businessmen create a society to maximize profit called New Henley. A cardiac surgeon and rising son of New Henley’s elite, Alistair Van Doren desperately wants to escape the shadow of his politician father. When he develops a prescient heart device, he is forced to see it used for darker means—as a natural selector. He becomes aware of the true cost of his success and the nefarious men who rule New Henley, when he meets Mr. Zhao—a patient who teaches him the difference between love and reason. A wild spirit trapped by a world that rewards blood, Ana Arendt is an innocent Eve locked in a false paradise. Forced to serve New Henley’s powerful visitors as a Domatron, she tries desperately to repress her past—but it haunts her at night in veiled dreams. Although she is promised the reward of a happy family life, Ana yearns for the freedom to choose her own destiny. When she meets Alistair, he discovers a past intertwined with powerful enemies. Separated by class and position, Alistair is forced to reconcile his deepest beliefs with the beauty he sees in Ana—Ana must confront her ghosts and challenge the prescribed order. New Henley is a story about the mind and the heart, the science of the soul and two lovers trapped by time and circumstance.

Textauszug

II

 

As consciousness slowly pulled Ana from inside her dream, the heaviness of her body, its form held fast to the earth by gravity, rooted her in reality. She kept her eyes closed, hoping to return to her distorted past for a few moments longer, and pulled the wool blanket over her head to keep out the cold morning air. She tried to slow her breathing, but her heart pounded like a caged animal demanding to be set free.

Strauss’s soliloquy, which had drawn her out of her deep sleep, started like it did each morning in the same soft kiss of sound, tender as a lullaby. As the slow tremolo of the violins in A major mingled with the French horn, she shut her eyes tighter. As the instruments blended into a single sound and wafted into the complete tri-note structure, she pulled the pillow over her head—but the music flowed, the three notes dancing together like water over stones, like the waltz’s namesake, seeping through the pillow foam. Just after the tempo of the ‘Blue Danube’ tightened, and right before the notes formed the thick body of the piece, an earth-shattering tone sounded, smashing through the trickle of music like an underwater explosion.

Ana, still and quiet, busy in her half-wake state, setting her dreams into cement memories, flared like a hooked fish when the sound filled her ears. Despite the same alarm each morning, she screamed, attempting to overpower the disruption with her own voice—but the tone conquered everything. When the music resumed, she threw off the covers and hastily flung open the doors to her wardrobe, hoping that if she and all the others heeded the signal, a second alarm would not be required.

Inside the heavy oak doors of the wardrobe hung three identical white uniforms, neatly pressed and ready for Ana to slide on. The cloth smelled noxious from the disinfectants used to clean it, and, as she pulled one off the hanger, she laid it stiffly on the bed behind her. The thick, canvas fabric, doused in starch to iron out the wrinkles, caused Ana’s skin to rash and itch for the first few hours she wore it. In the morning’s half-light, she slid off her nightshirt, folded the muslin into a square, and placed it neatly inside a drawer beneath the wardrobe.

Once off the hanger, her uniform went on in one zip down the back. The dress, like something a child would wear, covered her knees, ensuring her legs were well hidden. The straight lines of the cut disguised all the curves of Ana’s body until she looped a white apron around her neck and tied its ribbons behind her back. The apron strings breathed life into her young waist, giving her the silhouette of a woman that the dress alone could not.

From the wardrobe, Ana crossed her chamber and gave a cord hanging from the ceiling a quick tug. A single bare bulb threw its light into the centre of the room, its wattage too weak to illuminate the dark corners. From one corner, a small black orb focused its opaque eye in her direction. Ana’s chamber, formerly the building’s attic, was spacious, a luxury in some ways, but without any furniture other than her bed and wardrobe, it was cold and empty. Due to its placement in the eaves, it was stifling hot in the summer and draughty in the winter; but it was habitable and Ana liked having an entire floor to herself.

The plastered walls, a musty white from years of dirt and dust, were bare; large cracks and damp stains served as decorations. For days after it rained, the walls smelled of wet soil and mould, and fostered patches of black spores that could only be removed with foul-smelling bleach. As she crossed the room, small shards of the green tile stuck to the bottoms of her feet as the remnants of her floor disintegrated piece by piece.

Standing before the sink at the other end of her room, she splashed water and soap over her face. She picked up a watch and loosely strapped it around her wrist. The face was frozen; it was forever half past twelve. To Ana, time was a burden. She let the batteries wear out months ago and had no desire to replace them. Every event in her life occurred within a set schedule—spontaneity extinct. She wore the watch as decoration only, a tiny monument to her meagre rebellion. She flipped off the light to her room and descended the stair. The music of the ‘Blue Danube’ was once again torn apart by the sound of the second tone signalling the grand finale of the morning’s serenade. This time, the noise did little to disrupt her—she was far away in her own mind and failed to even notice it.

The dawn’s dew-laden air filled her lungs as she stepped through the front door. She paused in the doorway as a green light flashed over her face to record the time. Pushing open the iron gate in front of the tiny yard, she hopped over the large cracks in the sidewalk. She looked up at the windows of her bedchamber. Dark dormers jutted sombrely from the roof. She expected to see her own face staring down at her in the street. In her present life, Ana was merely a spectator, watching her body move through this unnatural world; her mind and soul purposely separate, her heart frozen. Despite how hard she worked, or how often she tried to erase her past and focus on the future, she doubted coalescence would ever be possible for her.

Below her floor, the lights were on in Jenny’s room. The two windows on the ground floor of the building, coated in mystery like every other day, reflected the street. She and the other girls never knew if their guards were inside or dispatched to police duty. Whenever they looked at these windows, all they saw was their own reflection.

She turned away from her apartment and walked down the rutted sidewalk. She tasted the fog on her tongue; its sweet metallic flavour mingling with her own breath to form a faint steam. Above her, the heavy air surrounded each streetlamp with a yellow halo. The wet air slithered up her legs and under the heavy folds of her dress, biting at her bare skin. She pulled at the shawl wrapped around her shoulders and hummed an old song from childhood to keep her mind off the chill.

The buildings along her street were all similar to her apartment in age, design, construction and disrepair. Most were two storeys, sometimes three, and had porches or large patios along the front façades. Although they still retained most of their original exterior decoration, they had been modified into apartments during New Henley’s re-organization two decades ago and stripped of their formerly gentile interiors. What were at one time family homes, were now disembowelled buildings housing New Henley’s skilled workers with their cheap, mass-produced furniture, and their dreams of upward mobility and promotion.

Formed after years of riots and chaos to function as a safe and productive society, New Henley was divided into distinct socio-economic groups, each with their own geographic area. As a skilled worker, Ana lived in the old city’s inner-suburban neighbourhood and worked inside the Hamlet, an exclusive district for visiting business executives. Once promoted, skilled workers moved into the Fringe and were sent to work inside the Purlieu. Labourers lived and worked further afield in the Borough factories, and the less desirable members of society inhabited the abandoned city centre known as the Core. The affluent members of New Henley lived and worked inside the Purlieu, an outer suburb far from the Core and the surrounding Skilled Worker Zone. Beyond New Henley, the Hinterlands rolled idly towards the mountains in the west.

As Ana neared the corner of her street and its intersection with the Boulevard, the first birdsong of the morning filled the silence. The Boulevard was divided by a long strip of grass down its centre and bisected by a tall metal fence at the southern end. The male skilled workers lived on the other side of this fence in what Ana assumed were similar quarters. On most mornings, she watched the outlines of the bodies of those who, just like her, walked to and from the Hamlet where they all worked as servants.

The sidewalks along the Boulevard were particularly perilous. Trees bordered the street, but after years of neglect, their roots burrowed across the road and sidewalk, lifting large slabs of the cement with their wooden veins. Commercial buildings, forever closed to customers, former shops and offices reduced to shells of brick and cement during the riots, now served as dead memories of businesses long vanished. The paint peeled from the window frames in long strips, and, on more than a few storefronts, huge chunks of the exterior wall had collapsed revealing a skeleton of lath and plaster. As Ana walked, she tried to imagine what these buildings had looked like before their ruination. It was her attempt to ignore the expanding cement wall looming before her, and the gate where the guards would be watching.

The supervisors of the skilled workers referred to this dividing line as a security checkpoint, specifically the male sector or female sector security checkpoint—but Ana failed to see it as such. To Ana, security was a word that inferred safety and sanctuary, and presently, not something applicable to any facet of her life. Heightening Ana’s apprehension were a pair of painted black eyes peering at her from over the top of the wall. She wondered if the painter did this on purpose, if he or she knew that the eyes would watch them all as they walked toward the gate. With each step, the eyes followed her; their oppressive glare reminding Ana that her life, despite what she was told, belonged to this man, New Henley’s Chairman....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.1.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 1-5069-0373-8 / 1506903738
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5069-0373-6 / 9781506903736