Didn’t one of her mother’s stories have the Clever Tailor traveling to a land filled with the ghosts of children? The boys around her seem solid enough, but maybe they’re really ghosts. Maybe that’s why they don’t need to eat the way she does. She wishes she could remember how the Tailor in the story tried to set the children free. Then she could help the boys, send them home. Surely they ache for their own mothers and fathers as much as she misses hers.

Peter keeps telling her she’s here to be their mother. That must mean there are no other mothers here, no sisters, or fathers, or aunts, or uncles either, she supposes. Only her and the boys. Which means there’s no one here to help her, or tell her how to get home.

She surveys the camp. The last embers of the fire glow dark orange, threads of smoke whispering away from the ash. There was smoke earlier, wasn’t there? She peers up, but sees nothing but a full moon shining over the trees, unnaturally bright. In fact, there’s nothing natural about it at all. It’s a smooth, silvery disc, like a coin hanging in the sky, or a hole cut in the paper-dark with a bright light shining through, nothing at all like the real moon.

The thought rips through her, and just like that, she’s crying. She’s furious with herself; it’s such a silly thing, but she misses her moon, seen through her window.

Her grandfather took her on a trip to the Royal Observatory on her last birthday. She’d felt very special and very grown up, particularly when he’d arranged for one of his friends there—a proper scientist just like she’ll be one day—to let her look through a telescope at the moon. She remembers how big and close and impossible it seemed—all the shadows and dips and craters not visible without the special lenses the telescope had.

How is it she can remember that moment so clearly, but her own name keeps slipping away from her? It’s as though someone has pulled a curtain over part of her mind; she’s aware there are things there, hidden from view, but they’re gauzy and distorted. If she doesn’t concentrate, they start to vanish. Worse than that, at times she’s found herself not minding the forgetting at all.