When Wren awoke at last, the sun was high. Through her open window came the calls of the fishermen down at the mooring beach, the laughter of children, the steady thud of an axe as Dad chopped wood in the yard outside. There was still a faint taste of chocolate in her mouth. She lay for a moment, enjoying the thought that none of the people she could hear, nobody else in all of Vineland, knew the things she knew. Then she scrambled out of bed and ran to the bathroom to wash. Her reflection peered out at her from the speckled mirror above the sink: a long, narrow, clever face. She hated her beaky nose and the scattering of spots around her too-small mouth, but she liked her eyes: large, wide-set eyes, the irises deep gray. “Mariner’s eyes,” Dad had called them once, and even though Wren wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, she liked the sound of it. She tied back her coppery hair and remembered Gargle calling her pretty. She’d never thought herself pretty before, but she saw now that he was right.

Running downstairs, she found the kitchen empty, Mum’s shirts hanging white on the line outside the window. Mum was oddly vain about her clothes. She dressed like a man, in outfits she had taken from the abandoned shops on the Boreal Arcade, and she was fussy about keeping things washed and ironed and safe from moths, as if wearing good clothes would make people forget her horrible scarred ruin of a face. It was just another example of how sad she was, thought Wren, pouring herself a glass of milk from the jug in the cold store, smearing honey on one of yesterday’s oatcakes. It was all very well, but it made life difficult for Wren, having a mum who looked so weird. Tildy’s dad, old Mr. Smew, was only about three feet tall, but he was an Anchorage man through and through, so nobody really noticed his height anymore. Mum was different. She was unfriendly, so nobody ever forgot that she was hideous, and an outsider, and that sometimes made Wren feel like an outsider too.