Imagining was better than looking anyway, because the battery lamp wasn’t switched on. It was hard not to open her eyes and look at the person opposite, so she amused herself by imagining what she would see: tanned sure hands on the notebook, head bent over it, the fringe pinned up waiting for haircut day. The pencil obligingly scribbled its way across the page. “It’s the picture face.” The sketch they’d made for her, the one locked in the secret drawer where they put all the really interesting things, like cigarettes and the fake identification cards and all the money they said wasn’t legal tender and couldn’t be used. The pencil scratched loudly on the paper. “They’re the things around me-maybe they’re my hands.” The water goes over my head and it’s in my mouth. I’m in the safe water-I’m lying down, I think. She squeezed her eyes shut and began in a practised hurry: LATE IN THE YEAR of nobody she really thought about that much in particular, the person who looked after her pushed the button on the recorder and said, “Start.” It’s hard to think of anyone more inventive, more audacious―more fun!―who is writing science fiction now CHAPTER 1 If you don’t know Muir’s characters and worlds yet, then, my god, I envy you. If you’ve read the first two books in this trilogy, I don’t need to say anything to persuade you to pick up Nona the Ninth.
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