Daisy dithered. She did that a lot these days—not that the word days really meant anything to her. Every waking hour—and some of the ones she usually reserved for sleeping—was taken up attending all the clubs and socs and groups she’d joined. What had started as a manageable trickle had turned into a deluge of commitments, her phone screen flashing like a social stock exchange.

She could be halfway through a conversation with someone over a cup of tea and her phone would beep to inform her that she should be on the other side of the city attending drinks with the Circus Soc, or that she was supposed to be drawing up a petition for the Campaign in the Arse Association. There were times when such commitments overlapped, and Daisy found herself walking one way, then doubling back, over and over, caught in a frenzy of indecision and obligation, until her phone beeped again with a message asking where she was.

In what could have been three days or thirty, it felt as if she’d gone from being entirely anonymous to almost universally recognized. The Halloween party had been but the tip of an iceberg large enough to sink the Titanic. People kept giving her those little chin-nods of acknowledgment as she passed them on the street, and her phone was crammed with messages from unknown numbers as part of the various group chats she’d been assimilated into.

This was the university dream, wasn’t it? Drinks every night and a friend in every corridor.

Only that wasn’t quite how it felt. Like Jonathan Tremain, Daisy spent most of her time calling people by the wrong name. And shouldn’t she know more about all these new friends than the fact that Adaptation was so-and-so’s favorite Nicolas Cage film or that girl had singed her eyebrows after trying to juggle with fire? She’d had the same conversation about the best cartoon theme tunes so many times that her nightmares were haunted by out-of-tune renditions of the theme song for DuckTales. Daisy felt overloaded with so much inconsequential information that at times she struggled to remember anything significant about herself.

She was floating in a sea of newfound friends, untethered from anything or anyone of significance.

Daisy looked down at the phone in her hand. Something about a missed call . . .

But then two overdue reminders blooped up in quick succession.

Assassins Association said the first—there was a time and a place listed with it.

The second simply said: shopping.