Wren had lost in the end, of course. She had done the washing up, and stomped up to bed as loudly as she could. Ever since, her brain had been hard at work, coming up with hurtful comments that she wished she had made earlier. Mum didn’t have any idea what it was like being fifteen. Mum was so ugly that she probably never had any friends when she was a girl, and certainly not friends like Nate Sastrugi, whom all the girls in Anchorage fancied, and who had told Tildy that he really liked Wren. Probably no boy had ever liked Mum, except for Dad, of course—and what Dad saw in her was one of The Great Unsolved Mysteries of Vineland, in Wren’s opinion.

She rolled over again and tried to stop thinking about it, then gave up and scrambled out of bed. Maybe a walk would clear her head. And if her parents woke and found her gone, and worried that she had drowned herself or run away, well, that would teach Mum not to treat her like a child, wouldn’t it? She pulled on her clothes, her socks and boots, and crept downstairs through the breathing silence of the house.

Mum and Dad had chosen this house for themselves sixteen years before, when Anchorage had only just crawled ashore and Wren was nothing but a little curl of flesh adrift in Mum’s womb. It was family history, a bedtime story Wren remembered from when she was small. Freya Rasmussen had told Mum and Dad that they might take their pick of the empty houses in the upper city They had chosen this one, a merchant’s villa on a street called Dog Star Court, overlooking the air harbor. A good house, snug and well built, with tiled floors and fat ceramic heating ducts, walls paneled in wood and bronze. Over the years, Mum and Dad had filled it with furniture they found among the other empty houses round about, and decorated it with pictures and hangings, with driftwood dragged up from the shore, and with some of the antiques Dad unearthed on his expeditions into the Dead Hills.