He looked at me with a sort of pleasant-but-nasty expression. ‘What won’t, my dear?’

‘I read about lightvine contamination on the crossing from Trevenza Reach. It takes much more than three months to get it out of someone’s system.’

‘I don’t doubt that you are right,’ he said, preparing an injection. ‘But what does three months have to do with anything?’

‘You know exactly what, Doctor. I get to decide my own destiny. In three months I can leave this room, this house, do whatever I like, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ But even this outburst had pulled more out of me than I had to give. ‘Just do whatever you mean to do,’ I said, slumping back onto the pillow.

‘The law is a complicated matter,’ he said, slipping the needle into my arm.

I barely had the energy to question him. ‘What do you mean?’

He withdrew the needle, dabbed at the wound, patted me on the wrist. ‘In flesh and spirit, Arafura, you’re still a child. You have the impulses of a child and the moral compass of a child. That’s to be expected. There are brain connections in your skull that are still not yet fully formed. But soon enough these disturbing factors will lose their hold, and you’ll see that the people around you were only ever showing love and affection.’

He gathered his things and left my room, leaving me certain that something had transpired, but unable to puzzle out the clear shape of it. All I knew was that I didn’t think I’d like it.

Maybe it was my strength creeping back, or just my wits, but I was starting to take in more of the room and I didn’t care for what had happened to it. On shaky legs I got out of the bed and examined the shelves and cupboards that had once been so cluttered and heavy with possibility. Now they were as neat and orderly as you could ask, but only because a lot wasn’t there any more. All the atlases, all the picture books, all the stirring accounts of ships and travel between worlds beyond Mazarile, all the tall tales of high adventure in the Empty, they were all gone. So were our puppet theatres, with their dread pirates and swaggering space captains and proud painted sunjammers. So too were the histories and gazetteers, even the household’s copy of the Book of Worlds, which had always been left on my shelves. What remained were heavy, dull books with titles like A Social History of Mazarile or Banking and Prosperity in the Thirteenth Occupation or even A Child’s Treasury of Economics or The Young Person’s Illustrated Omnibus of Fiscal Prudence.

My rage swelled. I felt the itch in me again. I dragged a nail across my hand, scratching deep enough to draw blood.