TEST DRAFT 3 With LLaregub footnotes The Boy Who Shot Flimzy Bubbletrumpett- macbook 2

The palace was complete before TRUDI announced that after carefully searching all the data
that was available on all people currently living, the future president had been found. Some
weeks earlier it had been decided to move TRUDI, along with The Custodian – who
surprisingly raised no objection - from her basement to a specially designed computer room in
The Palace of the Golden Moon. It was there that the announcement was made.
An elite group of six messengers was picked from among the troops currently serving the
United Nations and sent to the palace where they were left alone with TRUDI in the computer
room. Only the six were told by TRUDI the name and whereabouts of the chosen one. Until
the formal inauguration it was to be a closely guarded secret.
Then at last The Six set of to find him…or her.
Chapter 4
Few are the birds that call, Shrill-voiced and seldom seen. Where silence masters all. 19
The path into the wood soon petered out and we found our way blocked by tangled brambles
and waist high clumps of nettles. I stopped, seeing no way through the barrier but Indigo
hissed into my ear, Go on! Push your way through. It gets clearer under the trees.’ So I forced
my way through the briars holding the heavy black bag above my head to prevent it catching
on the hooked thorns. I strode purposefully through the nettles trying to ignore the stinging I
felt on my arms and legs. Indigo was right, the overgrown tangle grew just at the edge of the
forest and as we came through under the spread of the dark spruce and pine the briars faded
away into the shade and soon we stood on open ground where only a few thin anemones 20
flecked the carpet of pine needles with green and white, though the forest floor was more like
the ragged dusty brown underlay left in an abandoned house than carpet. This forest had once
been a plantation, the trees planted in even rows, but after long years of neglect new saplings
had grown up between the rows and high winds had brought down some of the tallest trees
whose roots could not keep a grip in the thin rocky soil. They lay stretched out on the ground
tapering to a disc of twined and twisted roots, some newly fallen and still with the brown
scales of bark and green needles of a living tree, others whose trunks had become so rotted
that all that was left was no more than a narrow bank of moss. Some fallen trees had never
reached the ground, they slanted upwards, as though frozen in mid fall, their weight carried by
thin almost invisible branches caught and held by neighbouring trees,
The path that would ahead could be barely seen, just a scrape on the surface of the pine
needles that could have been scuffed by deer, rooting badgers or other forest animals, but it
was the only possible path so I went ahead twisting my way through the trees. I set off at
almost a run; it was a way of escaping the scratch and sting of the briars and nettles I still felt.
The faster I walked the less aware I was of the hot needling pain in my arms and legs as the
more I had to concentrate on finding the barely visible path, avoiding twisted roots that might
trip me up and scrambling over, or finding my way around fallen trees that lay across the path
and constantly looking out for low branches that threatened to whip across my face. As I
broke into a jog I felt Indigo’s claw like hands grip my shoulder and her reprehensible tail
tighten round my neck.
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