She lifted her head to watch her parents write their names on the doctor’s palm computer, lowered it when they were done. A few clicks and a beep. She felt a warm hand on her back, and didn’t know who it belonged to.

The Amicilli metro had finished construction just before she was born, so her parents said. Layla was always amazed by the new-car scent, the way surfaces around her gleamed. She held her mother’s hand as they bought tickets, watched passengers coming in and out, smiling as the barriers swung open to receive them, clutching her mother’s fingers as they descended on the escalator. The transports themselves were bright silver bullets, more like star-crafts than any track-bound vehicle, and she was thrilled to enter the hissing doors to sit by the large window, elbows leant on the sill. While her parents talked about what the doctor had said and what they had done, Layla watched the tunnel walls race by. The baggage rack shook, and they were rocked from side to side. Layla loved it. She smiled, although it went unseen, her parents too distracted to notice.

Up the escalator, out of the barriers, a short walk home and there they were: Gillie and Marshan, waiting for a ball to return to them from the air, poised, arms open, chins raised, so they didn’t even see her. A duo of open doors glowed from the interior lights of her house, one of many located at the end of short pathways that lined their rectangular block, numbered 375y7. Layla searched her parents’ faces, saying ‘Please, please’, until they smiled and said ‘Of course’, and her mother let go of her hand so she could run to her friends, still waiting for the ball to land, tracking its slow descent, and it only met Gillie’s arms as she reached them. It was all ‘hi’s and hugs after that, Layla cackling upwards, chin raised into the crimson sky above, school friends dancing around her. Layla’s parents looked on, pleased to see her happy, and went inside.

They played ball until the night met fresh terraformed earth. Before they were called inside, the children ran into the woodland beyond their block. Much of Kepler’s forests had been cleared to make way for towns and cities, but some were left standing. They were lucky to have a hectare of untouched land to the west of their street, a forest of 200-feet-tall naadassas, creeping white betullah vines, an army of squat toad lotus as high as their waists flooding the landscape with colours. And all around them roses and lilies and petunias reared from Earth-exported seeds which had grown in abundance. The children ran along paths forged generations before, stopping in a clearing that led to the foot of the largest naadassa, its trunk four times the size of any normal tree, its leaves blocking the artificial light cast by humans.