The Dark Road (51 page)

Meili isn’t smiling any more. The wreck has completely disintegrated, and she’s lying in the water, her long black hair extending behind her like a boat. Slowly, her body sinks below the surface, and her hair sinks too and wriggles about her face like a shoal of fish.

As Mother’s body descends towards the riverbed, the infant spirit breaks free and begins to retrace its long journey backwards through three incarnations, travelling upstream along the many rivers and waterways towards its final place of rest.

Holding his child close to his chest, Kongzi climbs the bank and heads out into a grey expanse of waste that seems to stretch to the horizon. He treads across corroded circuit boards that poke up from the ground like excavated tiles, across graphic cards stripped of their memory chips, and over the copper and silver shells of mobile phones. He crunches over Intel microchips and bullet-shaped audio connectors, then, his legs shaking from exhaustion, he struggles up a hill of stripped scanner motherboards and lifts the motionless child up to the first light of dawn.

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Epub ISBN: 9781448113279

Version 1.0

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Published by Chatto & Windus 2013

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Copyright © Ma Jian 2013

Translation copyright © Flora Drew 2013

Ma Jian has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Chatto & Windus

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

ISBN 9780701187538