There is something different about her, for certain, but Logan cannot place it. Something is missing from her face, but in its absence, he cannot name it. He continues uneasily.

Dr Salmon says the process creates the sensation of being connected to – he reaches for a substitute for the word that makes him squirm – a higher power.

His sense she is about to speak dissolves into a soft curve at the corner of her mouth and Logan realizes she won’t answer a statement.

Well? he asks. What do you think?

April turns to face him.

That’s the question, isn’t it? she says.

What’s the question?

Again, like a head of wheat in an eddy of air, she is nodding. He has the feeling that, even as he is assessing her, she is conducting her own assessment of him.

What I think, she says. What you think.

In what way?

Space is made for him, as though she is the teacher, he the pupil, and he might come up with his own answer given time. But when he fails to so much as chuck a spadeful of conversational earth at the hole, the teenager informs him, Our thoughts are very powerful, Dr Logan. Very powerful.

Our thoughts?

Everything that happens, everything around us, we create with our thoughts.

Logan doesn’t like the direction of her conversation. But at least she is talking.

Not me, April. You didn’t create me with your thoughts. My parents created me, in the usual mechanical way that humans do.

April is having none of it.

But they thought about it first, didn’t they? Thought, Let’s have a baby. Even if you were an accident, Dr Logan.

‘Accident’ triggers Flora’s face in the car, mutating catastrophically into hatred. A muscle just under Logan’s left eye begins to twitch in rebellion.

Someone thinks the thoughts that lead to a child, April continues. One only has to think Sex without thinking Contraception. She skewers him with an intense green eye, as if she knows.

The twitch has spread to his cheek, suggestive of some electrical circuit shorting out. Logan rubs his face, the hard needling of stubble just under the skin, engaging some emergency procedure of masculinity. The steel of emotional control returns to him: the cheek ceases its rebellion.

However it happened, he says, they created me. Not you. You didn’t think me into being, April. I’m real. I exist.

I thought you into my life, she says simply.

Meaning?

She lifts her right foot off the floor and tucks it under her left thigh. Meaning, I thought a whole series of thoughts that have led to my being here in this place. You weren’t in my life, and then you were. I magicked you out of nowhere.

Out of Hampshire.