Closing the zipper of the body bag did in fact generate the muffled noise like on TV shows. The transporters of the body offered Hannah neither attention nor sympathy. Hannah had stood for a moment in the corridor, looking at the stairs as her father was carried up them. Then she’d packed her things and gone to the playground. There she got from the other children the address of a squatted building. It was on the outskirts of town. Which sounded farther than it really was, because in Rochdale everything was on the outskirts of town. The building itself seemed solid. Thanks to the boarded-up windows. It looked the way you’d imagine a building full of street kids would look if you didn’t take American movies as a guide. A bit squalid. From inside and out the building looked rusted and covered in mold. If there is such a thing, then here it was, and the children who lived in these ruins weren’t cartoon punks, they were just dirty children. The water had been shut off, so barrels in the back garden collected rainwater. Electricity, stolen. And the twenty homeless youth-slash-children were constantly sick, coughing, lying in the corners like dogs, freezing. Children nobody was looking for, nobody missed. Hannah took up residence on the ground floor and stopped going to school for fear of being remanded to an orphanage. In which case a wonderful future among the majority of society would stand at the ready for her. She could sell shoes in a thrift shop. Or get pregnant and go on unemployment. Or die.

Hannah knew that in theory she had no more parents. And that she was supposed to be sad. But there were no feelings. She believed. What was the point of developing feelings which would inevitably end in sadness, when nobody was there to sympathize? Nobody to comfort you. It didn’t make sense even to cry.

Hannah was nearly twelve and looked older because of her build. She had cut her hair to two centimeters in length, her eyes were heavily ringed in black. And of course she’d given herself a few facial piercings; it’s what you did back then.

And outside it was summer.

It was too light out.

Which is why

DON

Saw her brother too clearly. He was sitting at the computer. Either he was in school staring with an open mouth at pornos on his device or he was sitting at home looking at it. Don didn’t care what he did. Her family didn’t matter to her one bit. People didn’t matter. She considered them an aberration. What would be the drawback of the planet flying through space pleasantly decorated with rocks instead of this biomass?

Speaking of which, Don’s mother took sedatives in order to forget that her life had been completely botched.

And as long as we’re talking about the subject of mental illness,

Don’s father