“I’ll take one, please,” she said, putting a coin in his pot. “What happened to your fur?” she asked, noticing bare patches on his body where you could see through to the synthetic skin.

“I got brought back as a companion, for a lady in the north of the city. Turned out she was secretly ASL. Liked to lock me in a tiny cupboard for days on end – she said I needed to learn my place.”

“That’s terrible.”

“It near drove me mad being confined like that. I tried desperately to escape, of course, and nearly made it,” he said, glancing down at his skin. “Luckily the Chancellery got me out when they realized. They reassigned me, but now I use my spare time for the cause.”

“You could get it repaired at the factorium, you know.”

“I know. But the marks remind me it’s worth trying.”

“Trying?”

“For better.”

She pinned the badge to her dungaree pocket and made a note to tell Craftsman Primrose on her return. He was sympathetic to personifate rights, and she wanted to make sure the awful person who had done this had been dealt with, so she took the address from the retriever personifate before carrying on her way.

The Gigantrak was waiting for the first journey of the day. Prue bought a ticket from the kiosk, then presented it to the conductor and found a carriage. At Batterthwaite she found an available mechanicart, which was painfully slow after the Gigantrak and the pneumerator. The mechanicart dropped her in North Owlcot at midday, and she began the long walk up Lane’s End towards the farm. She paused on the path. Harvest bales now dotted the golden fields, and the leaves of the oaks were browning. She bent and picked up a fallen acorn and put it in her pocket; it was what she did every autumn when she saw the first, for luck. She had a feeling she might need it.

Especially for when she would see Mum.

Someone was in the top field riding on the mechanimal horse, but she couldn’t quite see if it was Mum or Dad. As she reached the path to the farm she paused, thinking of the moment she’d left and how in one way it felt like years ago and in another way just as if a few moments had passed.