Her eyes are grey-green. She has a mole on her left shoulder, which will be dissolved into perfect, silken flesh by her nanos when she is twenty-six, and start to regrow with a tuft of black hairs in the centre of it when she is twenty-nine.

But this is in the future, in the time when the machines are dreaming, and Harmony Meads sleeps.

For now, she reads online guides on how to be beautiful, sexy and successful, and understands that all these things come from within, and isn’t sure if she has it inside her, but is damned if the world is going to find that out.

Chapter 4

Harmony had nanos for as long as she could remember.

Apparently, once, when she was a very small child, she’d got a cold. This had been when her dad was still alive, before the nanos were entirely reliable and the software hadn’t been released to cover some of the harder diseases like TB or influenza. Her parents had rushed her to hospital, transfixed by the horrendous amounts of snot and bright green bogies her tiny body seemed able to produce, and the nurse had tutted and found a box of sky-blue tissues, and had blown Harmony’s tiny, button nose.

They’d injected her with nanos a few months later, and she couldn’t remember either the cold or the day her dad died, hit by the motorbike on the blind corner by the newsagent.

Everyone at school had nanos, except Anna, whose parents had some religious thing, or maybe some hippy healing crystal thing; no one was really sure and Anna didn’t tell. Harmony’s mum covered her standard immunisation package until she was twenty-one for barely £150 a year, and at the secondary school’s recommendation she’d agreed to pay an extra £14.99 a month for an immunoboost that covered HPV, meningitis and whatever flu strain was doing the rounds that year. Harmony had always been good about keeping her nanos up to date, regularly checking the control panel on her phone for any updates to the tiny machines keeping her body in decent working order, and shutting down all streaming or internet browsing within the Wi-Fi zone during the period of an active transfer until installation was complete, as per recommended medical guidelines.

There were other upgrades, of course. A couple of kids at school boasted a few. Jenni, whose parents were notoriously pushy, was put on a dietary and neurological package throughout the entire A-level period at a cost of nearly £70 a week, someone once whispered, and sure, she did OK at exams, but Harmony wasn’t convinced that wasn’t because she studied three hours a day extra during school term and twelve hours a day during revision time.

Clara, who was the only person in the year who seemed both good at and to enjoy sports, was on a muscle-enhancing package, but that wasn’t enough to get her the football scholarship to her first university of choice, though she did make it on to the “Biomechanical Sport Therapy” course in Leeds, which made her perfectly happy.