With nanos, running was easy.

Without, she can’t imagine ever overcoming this pain, or the shame of being laughed at: pudgy girl trying to run.

She needs to buy new clothes, bigger clothes, and doesn’t want to go to the shops, and doesn’t have the money to get anything that would make her look good.

There is now a definite patch of blue-grey skin on the top of her scalp as her hair attempts to adjust to the failure of the nanos that have for . . . she’s not sure how long . . . years . . . helped sustain that perfect silken growth, product-free. There are still parts of her face that don’t have acne. A few patches on her cheeks, a small area between her eyebrows, but in the morning when she stands in front of the mirror, the skin on her chest and back is beginning to pucker and swell with tiny bumps of rupturing flesh. Her arms ache all the time as fat and fluid, contained for so long within a belt of muscle, begins at last to find freedom, sagging gently down, down, all of her going down.

She tells her friends that she’s busy tonight. Busy, yeah, you know, got other commitments.

When her mum calls, which isn’t very often, doesn’t want to be a fusser, Harmony doesn’t answer the phone.

The day before the landlady changed the locks on the door, Graham sat her down.

“So, Harmony. This office, it’s . . . well, it’s a very specific clientele we deal with, and our people, they’re the brand; they’re . . . There’s a wonderful opportunity just come up; I really think you’d be happier there. It’s the ideal place. You’d fit in perfectly and it’s not much of a cut in pay. The boys in Enfield are great. They’re really . . . ”

“I don’t want to go to Enfield.” She refused to cry. Crying made her more ugly, and she’d known this conversation was coming, got her crying out of the way last night. She was strong. She had been through shit and she had survived. This would not break her. “I can turn this around. This is just a . . . I can turn this around. You know me. You know I can do it.”

“Harmony,” he explained, as gentle as she’d ever seen him, his expression as near to kindness as he could manage through his peaked, tweaked, primed facial upgrades, maybe the George Clooney or Captain America – it was hard to tell. “Let me be very clear. Either you go to Enfield, or you go home.”

She went to Enfield.

A new start, that was what she needed.

A new her.

Chapter 7

This is Harmony Meads, aged twenty-one.

Does she have upgrades? Or is she just young? Is that glow the first flush of excitement, life and hope that makes all people beautiful, a joy that no amount of nanotech can mimic?