The Destiny of Minou Moonshine by Gita Ralleigh EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Gita Ralleigh
- Language: English
- Genre: Steampunk Science Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The gunshot’s crack and boom woke Minou with a start. She blinked in the
darkness, thinking at first she’d been dreaming. But the air was hazy with
smoke and she could smell the acrid burn of gunpowder. Outside, wildfowl
on the river squawked and beat their wings in alarm and a troop of monkeys
shrieked noisily from the treetops. Minou yawned, pulling herself up out of
her hammock and calling to her grandmother, a dark outline at the entrance
to their houseboat.
‘Dima? What was that noise?’
‘Nothing. Go back to sleep, child.’
Minou collapsed back into her hammock. Dima had most likely scared
off a crocodile again, she decided, her eyes growing heavy with the sway
and dip of the water. If only she’d been awake to see, for it was a rare thing
to see the great muggers in the city. She remembered the last time one of
the armoured beasts had ventured this far, though she’d been tiny. She’d
stood on deck, clinging to her grandmother’s legs and watched its wide
snout drift through black water, like a monster from an old tale. Dima had
told her to cover her ears and then fired her old pistol in the air to scare it
off.
Dima was Minou’s adopted grandmother. She had been a foundling, an
abandoned infant, discovered after the great storm thirteen years ago. Father
Jacob, the Whitetown priest, had found a rowboat washed up on the muddy
bank, Minou a helpless baby bawling inside. Thinking her parents had
surely drowned, he’d taken her to Dima’s floating shack which, though
battered, had miraculously survived. The two of them had lived on the Lally
River ever since.
Next morning, Minou stirred in the stifling heat. She’d overslept. Both
she and Dima usually woke at dawn when the air was cool, disturbed by
noisy parakeets stealing guavas from the trees. She peeled herself out of her
hammock and swung down, crouching over the copper bowl of water to
splash sweat from her face. Today was Sunday and there was no school.
She didn’t want to waste a single moment of freedom.
Minou and Dima’s home, lodged like flotsam at the riverbend, was not
strictly a boat or a house, and houseboat was much too grand a word for it.
Dima had built it herself. The base was wooden planks, nailed together and
tarred to make a deck, the roof an upturned boat, with canvas tacked over r it.
The wooden walls of the cabin were patched with packing cases, gaps
sealed with mud, baked hard by the scorching sun. A rusted metal pipe was
their chimney, and six car tyres roped to the deck kept it afloat. The shack
was firmly anchored and chained to the trees, so it wouldn’t be swept away
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