Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Part Two

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT ANGELINE TREVENA

  Signed Paperback Giveaway

  The Smudger

  Angeline Trevena

  Bogus Caller Press

  Copyright © 2018 Angeline Trevena

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.

  Cover art by Oliviaprodesign

  Published by Bogus Caller Press

  www.boguscallerpress.co.uk

  Publisher's note:

  The Smudger is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are the product of the author's imagination, used in fictitious manner. Any resemblances to actual persons, places, locales, events, etc. are purely coincidental.

  Part One

  1

  KIOTO

  I peaked my hand across my forehead and squinted at the wallowing city ahead. I didn’t want to be here. I avoided the cities when I could. I liked the cool, quiet woods, the desolate moors, the vast, empty expanses of land where I could almost believe that I was entirely alone in the world. But, sometimes, venturing into these stinking hell-holes was an unavoidable chore.

  It wasn’t even the city itself that bothered me. In a city I could disappear, I could move around almost completely unseen. People didn’t want to see my kind, and so, they didn’t. They had become so adept at ignoring us that we existed only in blind spots.

  What bothered me was the colonies. Half-built shanty towns that clung to the edges of the cities like unwelcome pustules. So desperate to belong, to be accepted, but they would never be viewed as anything other than blemishes. If it could, the city would have picked them off like leeches and tossed them back to the swamps and marshlands it believed they came from.

  It was in one of these colonies that I had been born, grown up, been educated. Learnt how to be a memory trader; taking people’s unwanted memories to sell onto someone who might make use of them. I knew all the colony ways, and I didn’t want to be a part them. My colony had been torn apart, and I’d never found anywhere else that felt even remotely like a home.

  But the two sausages wrapped in a piece of half-stale bread I’d had for breakfast was the last of my food, and now, already late afternoon, hunger had won out.

  I hitched my bag further onto my back, bowed my head and trudged on towards civilisation.

  I’d barely stepped into the colony before a child slipped a hand into mine. She looked up at me, grinning out from under a mop of curls.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Kioto.” I replied.

  The girl twisted her head around and called out to someone I couldn’t see. “She is! I told you so!”

  She turned her eager eyes back to me. “Are you a trader?”

  I pushed back my hair to show her the traditional scars that marked my face. That and my name were the only things my parents had ever given me, and both of them marked me as what I was.

  Another two children joined us; a girl and a boy.

  “Did you see them?” the boy asked.

  The first girl nodded enthusiastically, her hair bouncing back and forth. “She showed me.” Her chest swelled. I sneered. It was hardly something to be proud of.

  “What colony are you from?”

  I thought for a moment. Where was I from? Okaporo was long gone, and if these children had heard of it, it wouldn’t have been pleasant stories. And I would never claim to be from Kagosaka. They never claimed me as one of their own, so I wasn’t going to extend that courtesy.

  “I don’t belong to a colony,” I replied.

  I watched the look of confusion crease her face. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I don’t belong to a colony. I’m a wandering trader.”

  “But all traders belong to a colony,” said the boy.

  “Why won’t you tell us?” the second girl said. “Is it a secret?”

  “Maybe she’s a spy,” the boy offered.

  “I’m not a spy. I just don’t belong to a colony. You can do that, you know.”

  The questions came thick and fast then, and I soon found myself surrounded by a small crowd of children ranging from toddlers to teenagers.

  “Where do you live?”

  “How do you find jobs?”

  “What do you eat?”

  “Were you banished?”

  “Are you a rogue?”

  “Do the High still watch over you?”

  “Do you still perform the Grace?”

  “Yes, I perform the Grace,” I said, a little too sharply. The children drew back as one. “The High still watch over me, and they always will. No matter where I sleep at night.”

  “And they always know where you are?”

  “Of course they do.” A teenage girl answered that question for me, and the whole group quietened. “They know everything. They see everything. They see right into our souls. There’s no hiding from them.” She slapped the enquirer across the back of the head. “You need to pay more attention in your classes.”

  The boy in question rubbed his cranium. “I do, I know.”

  “Then you’ll also know that the High know she’s abandoned her colony, abandoned the true path, and that her soul will pay for that for all eternity.” She focussed her sharp eyes on me. “Isn’t that right?”

  I shrugged. “If that’s what you believe.”

  “That is the truth. Your colony would never abandon you.”

  I cocked my head. Little did she know. “Then you stick to that. You have your path, and I have mine. Let’s be happy with that.”

  She took hold of my wrist then, and we all stopped walking. “There is only one path,” she said.

  “I suggest you let go of me,” I said, trying to sound as menacing as I could. The truth was, this girl terrified me. Her unfaltering belief, her blinkered self-righteousness, her influence over the others. I suspected the colony’s brood mother was her grandmother, or g