‘Should we request Frida?’ Harlow asked.

‘No,’ Sylvie said. ‘No. I just want you.’

And it was nice to feel him, to see him, even though her suit hadn’t been updated for a while, and there were little glitches — his image lagging, while the sensations moved on. A church bell tolled from the piazza on the other side of the little canal. A boat went past, a man in it was singing.

‘Like this?’ Harlow said, his voice sputtery in her ear.

Like what? she wanted to say. It wasn’t really clear what he was doing.

Then he slipped down between her legs, and she felt the imperfect movements of his fingers cascading through her.

Sylvie lay awake for a long time afterwards, Harlow gone, the SkinSuit dumped at the bottom of the shower. She tried to concentrate on her heartbeat, but that only made things worse. Her heart was the source of the panic. From there, it stretched out into her arms.

Inside the locket was an image of a saint.

She had suddenly remembered this, as she lay beneath Harlow’s heavy avatar.

Joan of Arc probably, or Saint Cecilia preparing to be beheaded. The woman’s eyes cast up to God in her abandonment.

There were a few teenage years there when Sylvie had been as fanatical about martyred saints as other girls were about phones and boys. But why? Something to do with suffering? Her own suffering lifted to a higher realm by association? Maybe. But she had also always just liked the idea of the past, of history. The funny clothes. The way everything must have felt just as real for them, just as non-negotiable, even though they had no internet or proper painkillers. The saints were something Cath had been into. Saints and angels. But what had Sylvie been trying to do up there in the pear tree with saints and angels? She could not remember the impulse that had compelled her. She still hadn’t managed to open the locket, but she remembered pushing it into the little hole in the tree with her thumb. It was the perfect size.

She got up and opened the door of the cabin and stood in the cool air. It was very quiet outside. The old clock-radio read four-thirty in the morning. The hour when most people killed themselves. Or was that three-thirty? Anyway, the clock was probably wrong. She pulled on yesterday’s clothes. Found her black jacket scrunched at the bottom of her bag. Her watch fell to the ground, but she left it where it was, without bothering to confirm the time. She walked out into the night, past her father’s silent bus, past the pear tree and up towards the little cemetery.

It was colder than she had expected. Her feet crunched loudly on the gravel and the air smelt sweet with distant smoke. Now she could hear the ticking of insects, the sound of things living in bushes, a TV. The moon was almost full, the settlement lights at Tycho faintly visible on the lower rim.