Chapter 1

1978. April the eighteenth. Plymouth, England.

Thick white fog poured down over the pale green stream and swallowed the colour out of everything. A cold spring wind came off the hilltop, heavy with damp.

Aurora sat at the end of the little wooden bridge and kicked at the water for a good while. Her long, straight, pale-gold hair hung loose down her back, and only when the damp in the air had soaked it through did she pull her feet out of the stream. She had rolled her double-layered skirt of grey-black linen up to her knees, and she used the hem to rub her feet dry. Then she hopped into her shoes and tapped her toes on the ground to check they were on properly.

It was a new habit. She had picked it up a year ago, on a late autumn evening when she opened her eyes and found herself awake somewhere she had never seen before.

This body was six years old then. She came up out of an endless dark, and every single thing her eyes took in was strange and old. Cobwebs laced the edge of the wooden window frame, faintly bright in the red evening light, like a thin grey cloud hanging there. She stared at them a long time before she believed she wasn't dreaming.

She was awake, and she had no idea where she was. She didn't know who she had been, or what she had done, or why she was here.

But she was certain she was not the original owner of this far-too-young body. All she had was this: deep in an empty, muddled mind, after every memory had crumbled to ash and drifted off, one pair of black eyes stayed. Blurred past all recognition, and still impossible to erase.

As if something sharp had cut them into her, and then long years had worn the cuts down. Faint and deep at once.

Everything after that was a disaster.

A blank memory, a family she had no impression of, surroundings she knew nothing about. Aurora had to start from nothing and learn this country's strange language bit by bit, and settle into a world that left her lost. She never accepted the country doctor's line about the drowning being too great a shock, so she lost her memory. Have you ever heard of amnesia that sets a person's language and whole understanding back by that many years? But she kept quiet about it and didn't argue, as a matter of strategy.

The reason was simple. The mother of this body's first owner had already grieved past what she could bear. Illness had taken most of the poor woman's sight, and after crying herself through fit after fit of grief and regret, she was close to going blind.

If she found out her daughter had been swapped out from the inside, she would die on the spot.

Aurora Rose Field, the name of this body's first owner. Aurora was happy enough to keep it, since she couldn't remember who she used to be or what she had been called. The only trouble was that the girl was so young. In a vague way she remembered she shouldn't be this small.

The body wasn't the only change. A few days later Aurora noticed her own grasp of things had slid badly backwards, to not much better than an ordinary little girl's. A long, hard English sentence that would mean nothing to an ordinary child meant nothing to her either. Her one advantage was that when she couldn't make sense of it she didn't howl about it.

It was a strange business. By rights, if she really had gone back to being a six-year-old, she wouldn't have been able to see it at all. She would have run about and squabbled without a care, spat at every child who ganged up on her and called her a freak, and never once sat there picking at how the change had happened to her.

As she was, she looked like one of those children a twisted household forces to grow up early, still young and unspoiled underneath but carrying a grown-up air that doesn't fit the age. The difference was that Aurora was the other way round. It was the inside of her that was too old.

Even so, the blank past and this weak, badly coordinated body meant that at best she counted as a good child who never gave anyone trouble. Nothing about her came close to seasoned or steady.

Only once in a long while did she remember that perhaps she shouldn't be here, and shouldn't look like this.

Then she found the stream, and she came and sat by it two hours a day.

Three months on, Aurora gave up studying the hard question. Her mind and what she knew really weren't enough to carry that kind of thinking.

Better to work out how to get home without being bothered.

The Peterson triplets were a nightmare. They ambushed her on the one road home, right on schedule, and played tricks on her by every method you could think of and a few you couldn't. Their opening line was far less inventive than the tricks. It never varied, so the moment they opened their mouths Aurora knew what was coming. Freak's child. Your dad's an old freak, your mum's dying, and you're next, you little mongrel.

God knows! Aurora had never laid eyes on this body's father, and she had no idea what grudge stood between him and that family. But going by how the three little devils behaved, she was inclined to think they had it coming.

They were right about one thing, though. There really was something about this body that wasn't like other people's. And it was thanks to them that she found out.

It happened a month after Aurora woke from the drowning. She remembered it as the sorriest state she had ever been in. She was staggering along with a basket of potatoes and cabbages when their pet snake frightened her so badly that she bolted and fell into a muddy pool the rain had left beside the road.

Drenched and running with sweat is a bad way to feel. Her fear of snakes got worse from that day.

So did the triplets' dislike of her. Little freak, little mongrel, the chant ringing out like the bombs that fell on London in the Blitz, whistling on and on until they burst, as if they wanted all of England to hear.

You couldn't blame Aurora for overreacting. Any normal person knocked flat by a yellow python dropping out of the sky would have been frightened out of their wits. And she was only just past six. Lying there, she put out a hand and touched it. The scales were smooth and cold as the flat of a knife, and the bright red tongue was vivid enough to look as if it had just licked blood.

Aurora screamed and cried and thrashed on the ground. At some point she had flung the basket away and everything in it had rolled loose. She swore that in this life or whatever life came before it she had never had such a burst of will to live. She got free of the snake's cold coils, fell into the mud pit, and knocked the thing dizzy with the potatoes and vegetables she had just bought at the market.

The Peterson triplets came tumbling out of the tree one after another.

They looked no less terrified than she did.

Then Aurora saw that she hadn't thrown the vegetables and potatoes at all. They had lifted off by themselves and flown like small cannonballs with eyes in them, straight at the three horrible boys' heads and backsides.

One egg, already cracked all over, went down together with the eldest triplet's trousers and left a bright yellow mark in the middle of them to mark its own heroic end.

One potato was too fat to catch up, so it hopped on the spot as if it had a complaint to make. Then, the instant the python lifted its head and opened its mouth, the fat potato threw itself in and wedged between the fangs.

The python hesitated. It didn't seem to want to swallow the thing, which would do nothing at all for its hibernation.

Aurora burst into proper tears. She didn't even stop for the basket. She ran out of the mud pit filthy and straight home, wrapped herself in a blanket by the fire, and couldn't get out a whole sentence. Her mother felt her way over and found the mud and wet on her, then laid her fingertips slowly against her cheek. The warm tears made her shiver a little. She gathered the shaking girl in tight and kissed her forehead.

It wasn't until the sun went down that Aurora remembered she had lost the next few days' food.

Her mother said again and again that she needn't go back, that the soft bread left in the house would see them through the night. Aurora struggled with it a while, then took the lantern and went back along the road to the mud pit.

No snake. No loathsome triplets. Only a few broken eggs, two filthy cabbages and some scattered potatoes.

Aurora prodded the potatoes with a stick, and once she was sure they weren't going to move again she picked them up with shaking hands.

Over the next few days she watched her mother boil them down with the rest into a thick soup, and her feelings about it were hard to untangle. She drank it with the look of someone facing the gallows.

A blessing, really, that her mother couldn't see well. Aurora had never had any gift for the old and slippery art of making excuses.

Today, to her surprise and her luck, she got home without running into the horrible triplets. In a sense she was the one the town disliked most, so this would keep her in a good mood until tomorrow morning.

In England in April, sunshine is a pure luxury. A soft wind with no warmth in it dried the damp ends of Aurora's hair and carried off the heat she had worked so hard to store up.

To be fair, she wasn't desperate for bright weather. In a place like England you can never count on the sun being generous. So she didn't look forward to spring, and she was even a little sorry to see it come.

Winter was so much better. No insects, no spiders, and best of all no snakes.

Apart from the cold, it was perfect.

She pushed open the door and spent her usual minute playing with Carter, the brown-flecked short-haired dog who always waited outside to greet her. Carter was delighted to see her and kept licking her hand, trying to warm her cold white fingers.

Aurora rubbed his head and fed him the last scrap of smoked dried meat from her pocket. Then she caught sight of a tall figure standing on the open ground behind the house.

He had a thick head of ink-black curls, and his dark grey eyes were deep and bright, like grey crystal with mist settled in it. There were clear scars on his face. He was a handsome boy without question, seventeen or eighteen, right at his best. Provided he changed that coat with the holes in it.

Aurora looked at him a while and couldn't work out what he was looking at. Then she glanced around and began to suspect he was looking at her.

Maybe he was a friend of the real Aurora's? Going by his age, not likely.

Then someone who had known Aurora before? She didn't want to let her mind reach for the word father. The boy was far too young, it wasn't possible.

He stood there for some time, and Aurora held Carter and stared back at him. Before she could decide whether to go over and ask if he needed help, another strange voice spoke up behind her.

"Excuse me, is this the Orlova Field house?" It was a boy, about her own age, with short brown hair sticking up all over in a comic sort of way and warm golden-brown eyes.

"Aurora," she corrected him. Then she turned to look where the odd tall boy had been and found he was gone.

"Oh, sorry." The boy scratched his head, embarrassed at getting her name wrong the first time they met. Aurora looked him over. "Can I help you?"

"We've only just moved in, right across from you." He pointed at the pale timber house opposite, where removal men were still going in and out. "I'm Gerard Vauxelle Chevalier."

"Aurora Rose Field. Pleased to meet you, Master Chevalier."

"Call me Vox, that's what my dad calls me." He brought out the hand he had been holding behind his back, with a box in it and a card stuck on. "Dad asked me to bring it over. Happy neighbours."

As a rule people go by their first name when they aren't being formal. A middle name is rarely used as a nickname, unless there's something particular about it.

"Thank you. Just Aurora is fine." She took the box and asked Vox to wait a moment in the sitting room while she wrapped up some of the wild berry biscuits she had baked the day before, to give in return.

But when she got to the kitchen the sight of it stopped her where she stood.

The table, which should have been bare, was piled with fresh ingredients, all kinds of fruit and vegetables, some meat with good fresh colour to it, a cloth bundle with oiled parchment underneath to keep the wet out, and even a few books that looked brand new.

This had to be a hallucination.

Aurora rubbed her aching stomach. Was she really hungry enough to be seeing things?

She shut her eyes, then opened them. It was all still there. Aurora took a deep breath, turned round and walked out of the kitchen, stood still a moment, then turned back and opened the door again.

Everything on the table sat exactly as it was, nothing missing, piled there in silence and looking almost innocent.

"Is something wrong, Fiel... Aurora?" Vox couldn't see why she had walked out for no reason and walked back in again.

She mumbled a few meaningless syllables, her light brown eyes fixed on the heap in disbelief. Vox looked in out of curiosity and was fairly impressed. "That's a good haul."

"Sorry, but what's the date today?" Aurora finally accepted it wasn't a hallucination, because the boy beside her could see it too, couldn't he?

Please let it be Christmas, or she had no way at all to comfort herself.

"The eighteenth of April." Vox gave her an odd look, as if weighing up the state of her mind.

"Right." Aurora went in, found what she wanted on the cupboard shelf quickly and by habit, wrapped a big packet of wild berry biscuits and pushed it into Vox's hands, smiling brilliantly and with great effort. "Happy neighbours! Shouldn't you be getting home for dinner?"

Vox's mouth twitched at the smile. He took the biscuits and said goodbye without lingering.

So much for happy neighbours. Aurora was quite sure of that.

She looked back at the heap that had appeared out of nowhere, caught up her skirt and ran upstairs to find her mother.

She couldn't say why, but the black-haired boy she had seen on the open ground behind the house flashed through her mind.