“Well, he said he’d be happy to see me if I came to London, he didn’t say he’d be happy to come to France to pick me up. Besides, same problem. We don’t have the same name, he’s not our guardian.”

In her head, Rat’s running through the possibilities of how to smuggle Morgan onto that ferry.

She thinks of Manu Chao. She realizes this is something clan-destines do every day—secretly infiltrate this salty border, span the sleeve of water beween continental Europe and the British Isles. You see it on the news, ever since they closed the refugee center at Sangatte. Grown men and boys, women and girls now too. They hide in trucks, they stow away in freight trains crossing the tunnel. Every day, a thousand Kurds, Iraqis, sub-Saharan Africans broach that border. Some of them are found asphyxiated in the backs of trucks, many more are turned back, but maybe a couple dozen get across every day. It can’t be that hard. Some crossings are more porous than others. And after all, it’s not as if she and Morgan are illegals, they’re European nationals with proper passports, all they’re missing is some piddling little stamp from the préfecture.

“Let’s go get you a hat,” she says, finally.

Half a kilometer from the ferry terminal, but still within the Zone, there’s a mall. A duty-free mall intended for travelers. There’s a mammoth food court, with a McDonald’s, a string of fake-French croissant shops, and a megasupermarket selling duty-free alcohol.

Rat is ostensibly looking for a sun hat for Morgan, but actually what she’s doing is checking out the prospective passengers, seeing if there is any kindly family she can imagine approaching to ask if they’d be willing to sneak two French children across the border.

It’s mostly middle-aged to elderly British couples, loud and bleached blond and wearing spandex. They are pushing shopping carts full of liquor and cigarettes. Everyone looks bent on his own consumer pastimes. The longer Rat watches, the less she can imagine approaching any of these loudly impervious bargain hunters. For one thing, her English isn’t good enough, and judging from most of these shoppers’ transactions with salespeople and cashiers, they are strictly monolingual.

She finds Morgan a turquoise blue cap for twelve euros that says in English “Enjoy the Spirit of Summer Fun” on its peak.

“It’s completely lame,” protests Morgan.

“So’s sunstroke.”

“I’m not going to wear it.”