They counted down the days until the next scavenging run, paranoid that they would be moved away before they could claim their jackpot of infected.

  Beth was just as on edge as the others. The Book wasn’t providing any useful hints. It hadn’t mentioned their experiments until it was all over either, but at least then, she hadn’t expected it to. She knew it didn’t change on decisions, only actions.

  There were other updates. A bland statement that Pines would be recalling her to complete her last few days of community service when the new area opened. On reflection, they’d decided not to count the time Beth had spent trapped by the storm as payment enough. Which was petty and mean, and exactly what she should have expected from them. Even more concerning, there was an ominous warning about a far-future check on her inner space skill level that she would have to monitor.

  But nothing about her token harvesting expedition.

  She was starting to suspect she’d misunderstood the mechanism. She’d thought that it battled with the influence of The Book itself, and therefore any resulting actions. It was weird about anything to do with the tokens she’d stolen in the crematorium and the existence of the acceleration skill.

  Now, she feared that it failed to update because it was unable to predict her. Everything different she’d done since she’d first opened The Book. Every way she had become a different person. If it was anything that she was the major driver behind, it just didn’t even seem to try. It only updated when her actions happened to irreversibly change the trajectory of other people.

  That implied that the entire time she’d been stealing from Peter’s office, her checking had been pointless. The update wouldn’t have happened until it was already too late, and someone had noticed her. That was retrospectively terrifying.

  Well, she’d succeeded. She knew better now. She wouldn’t put herself in that position again.

  Beth’s father didn’t seem in a great rush to force her to take the loan, but Beth was still cautious. She couldn’t be pressured into a trip to the bank if she wasn’t home during business hours. Her allotment job took most of her time, and she spent the rest at the High School. Her inner space had a recent stage upgrade that allowed for living plants. She had a vague idea to experiment with time-accelerated seedlings, but she hadn’t figured out where to start.

  Instead, she sat against the courtyard wall behind her allotment, with just her nose and eyes exposed between her scarf and her beanie. An uneven brick pressed into her spine. The discomfort made her shift her weight every few minutes, but it was not quite at the level to persuade her to move. She watched in silence as Gwen walked down the muddy pathway and came to sit beside her.

  “Here to get a head start on staring aimlessly at the ground, then?” asked Gwen.

  “Hiding from my family,” admitted Beth.

  “I see,” said Gwen.

  Beth gave her a look, and Gwen held her hands up in surrender. “I’m not saying anything. See me sitting here with my mouth full of teeth, not saying anything.”

  “It doesn’t help,” said Beth. “I can hear you thinking.”

  “If you can hold both sides of the conversation in your head...”

  Beth sighed. She couldn’t talk about the debt situation, especially not if it involved organised crime the way she suspected it did. She trusted Gwen, but it wasn’t her risk to take. Her father wouldn’t agree in a million years. But that wasn’t the only thing that was upsetting her.

  “Did I ever tell you about my Uncle Alex?” Beth asked.

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “My mother’s brother. He was infected way back when we still hoped people would recover. He went Stage 4 the day before Christmas last year. I never found out exactly when they got round to putting a bullet in his brain, so I decided that would count as the anniversary of his death.”

  “Sounds fair,” said Gwen, sounding carefully neutral.

  “I’ve never needed to explain that. I was going to visit his memorial alone, no matter what day I picked. The rest don’t even know I put up a memorial. My father has never said a word. I mean, why should he? Uncle Alex wasn’t his relation, after all.”

  “Some people would say that as long as it upsets you, luv, then he should care for that reason alone.”

  “I think…” Beth trailed off. “I think I’m done with waiting for my father to support me.”

  She felt a chill and resettled her coat more firmly around her. This felt important. As if saying it aloud had made it real. She should add a black border to this day in her calendar as well. The death of her relationship with her father. Or rather, the death of hope for something that had never existed.

  “The rest of your family?”

  Beth shrugged. “The twins do what they can, but they’re teenagers. They do okay when something happens to remind them, but their world is pretty focused on themselves.”

  All things considered, they were more thoughtful than Beth had been at the same age. And Beth hadn’t had to handle a relocation, the collapse of civilisation, and puberty, all at the same time.

  “And I never had that relationship with Sophie to expect any different,” Beth continued. “She’s only thirteen years older than me, you know? Eight years older than Peter. Peter absolutely refused to accept her as any kind of parental figure, and I went along with him. It’s weird, you know? I’m older now than she was when she arrived.”

  “That sounds like a right hostile household.”

  “She gave up pretty fast, from what I can remember, and our father ignored it entirely. He didn’t want Peter to be upset with him, so he looked the other way when Peter made her life difficult.”

  “That seems…” Gwen trailed off.

  “Yeah, completely unfair to Sophie. But, you know? I don’t think Peter gave my father a free pass either. My father has paid, and paid, and paid again for anything Peter has ever wanted. I mean, yes, Peter is his favourite. But looking back, there’s always been a desperate edge to it. And Peter fans that by playing hot and cold with him in return.”

  Beth heard what she’d just said herself and came to a realisation. “I think Peter hates my father.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Beth. “Two years ago, I would have told you that we were as dedicated as two siblings could be. We didn’t talk often, but that was just circumstances. We were united against the world, the two of us before everyone else. But I suspect that was how things worked in my mind. In his, he was just going through the motions.”

  “Do you know, I was actually asking whether you hate your father?” asked Gwen. “I think it says a lot that your mind jumped immediately to whether Peter hates you.”

  Beth chose to answer the original question without examining her reaction more deeply. She’d had enough startling revelations for one day. “I don’t hate my father. I don’t think he had anything to do with Mum leaving.”

  “But Peter does?”

  “The twins are six years younger than me, and my mum disappeared when I was five. The timeline could go either way. Best case, my father moved on very quickly. I know I was too young to really understand the atmosphere, but still. If my mum found out that my father was having an affair with a teenage girl, she might have walked out, but she would have taken us with her. But I can’t be sure that Peter’s wrong.”

  “You know, luv, an old teacher of mine had a saying. You can’t blame a scared cat for biting, but you don’t have to let it draw blood.”

  “What?” said Beth, attempting humour. She was defensive for reasons that Gwen wouldn’t even be aware of. “Are you going to tell me how I need to put my own oxygen mask on first, or something?”

  “That’s good advice too, isn’t it?”

  “I guess. I mean, I am trying. I’ll work through it.”

  She was. Beth didn’t want anyone to be screwed over when her father inevitably screwed up, including Beth herself.

  Gwen let it go, standing up and giving Beth a hand. Beth leveraged herself up and massaged the sore spot on her back as they walked inside for a hot drink.

  The unspoken conversation she hadn’t had was exactly why it was so important she collect tokens. Tokens were a get-out-of-jail free card for her problems. She was relieved and grateful when they had their chance. It was a rare sunny day, and their inclination was to make the most of it, but they might only have this one opportunity.

  They hiked quickly up the steep sea-cliff to the little community. Helen had good reason to believe it wouldn’t be rediscovered. Even as fit as Beth was, she could feel her thighs burn.

  “This must be it,” said Helen.

  They stood outside a desolate restaurant as the broken front door swayed back and forth, a new scar that joined centuries of others on the sturdy old building.

  “You didn’t go in the first time?” asked Beth.

  “No,” said Helen. “Let me tell you, it was such a fright when I first detected them. I was convinced a zombie was right on top of me. That it had figured out how to teleport or something. I practically ran to get us away. It was only after a bit that I realised it was a whole pack, far away, and not a single one close by.”

  “How much is a whole pack?” asked Beth

  “More than a few, but less than a crowd,” said Helen.

  Beth gave her a look, but Helen was unrepentant. “What? It’s the best I can manage.”

  “Why do you think they’re in a basement?”

  “It was too easy to skirt around them. The distance had to be either up or down, and there’s no skyscrapers.”

  “Do you think that’s how the military missed them?” asked Beth. “Too far down?”

  “I figure whatever sensor they were using was being lazy,” said Helen. “If they were checking only just often enough for full coverage at ground level, this could have slipped between two checks.”

  “Didn’t they promise they’d double-check after the last time someone almost got killed?” asked Seb.

  “I guess more than one person did the bare minimum.”

  They remained standing there for a moment, in silence except for the clattering of the door.

  “We don’t have to do this,” said Beth.

  “Do you want to give up?” asked Seb.

  Beth sighed. “No, I don’t. I just don’t know if that’s my greed overcoming my common sense.”

  “I think we’ll regret it forever if we don’t take the chance,” said Helen.

  With determination, Helen opened the door and walked in. Seb and Beth followed. They did a careful walkthrough. True to Helen’s suspicions, there were no infected above ground. There was no obvious basement door or trapdoor either.

  “We must be missing something,” said Beth. “It can’t be that hard to find. They wouldn’t have been able to cover it over once they were down there.”

  “Unless one of their members voluntarily stayed up top,” replied Seb. “They could have been cleared by a previous scavenging round.”

  The days of keeping careful records of the dead was long since behind them. If an infected had ever been killed here, they’d only know if they encountered remains.

  They went over every inch again, pulling back rugs, crawling under tables and knocking at the thick walls. Unfortunately, none of them turned out to be secret genius detectives.

  “Could the zombies be in some sort of storm drain or sewage pipe?” asked Seb.

  That was an unfortunate thought. They’d have a much harder time harvesting them if that was true.

  Helen shook her head firmly. “No. The military cleared the storm drains separately, and no part of the sewage system is big enough for a whole group of zombies. Besides, they wouldn’t be trapped in place in that case.”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Alright,” said Seb, “But any ideas about what to try next, then?”

  It might not be a storm drain, but the entrance could still be somewhere else entirely. If it was a natural cave only accessible by sea, then they’d have no hope.

  “In movies and games there’s always a convenient clue in a nearby book,” said Beth wistfully.

  “Or they bribe a local,” said Seb. “Unfortunately, all our locals are already zombies. Pity we can’t ask them.”

  “Well, why not?” asked Beth. “They can hear us, right? And they’ll want to get as close as possible. Which means they’ll come up any stairs if we get close enough or from the right angle. Helen, will you be able to tell the difference?”

  “I should,” she said.

  They walked into each room in turn waiting for Helen to check. In the back scullery she came to an abrupt halt. It was an oppressive place. The foot-wide walls and heavy stone floor kept the room dark and cold, and the air was heavy like they were already underground.

  “This is it. They’re closest to us here.”

  There was a saying about feeling like someone was walking over your grave. Beth was feeling the tingle down her spine from walking over someone else’s.

  “Under the island?” asked Seb.

  He gave the metal monstrosity a push. It rolled away from him, and he stumbled a step.

  Definitely under the island, then.

  The island caught against the open door, so Seb closed the door and tried again. This time, he could push it all the way flush with the inner wall. After he let go, it slowly rattled back into its original position, the noise filling the isolated room. After looking around, they found a latch that would keep it in place. With the floor exposed, it wasn’t hard to find the fake stone with a handle set flush into it.

  “Our trapdoor,” said Helen.

  “Someone put a lot of work into this,” said Seb. “This isn’t just hiding out from the infection. This looks more like a real apocalypse bunker.”

  “Maybe some bolthole in a previous war?” suggested Beth. “Or an illicit nightclub? It looks like they used to have a backdoor to the alleyway.”

  She nodded at the far wall. There was a sink in a suspiciously sized nook, in front of a suspiciously modern window.

  “Either way, it failed them,” said Helen.

  Beth said, “Bunkers aren’t much good against infection.”

  Beth winced at how callous that had sounded. She remembered that visceral fear of infected they’d had in the beginning, and she knew how close she’d come to being infected herself. But some responses were more intelligent than others, and this one seemed full of flaws.

  “We do have a problem, though,” said Seb.

  “We do?”

  “We can’t open the trapdoor and have the door open at the same time. Where are we going to construct our lanes?”

  Seb was right. It wasn’t a small room, not for a scullery, but it couldn’t hope to accommodate the full ten meters of her knockback. There was a reason they’d intended to lure the infected outdoors.

  “I’m sure they thought this was a very clever design when they set this up,” said Beth. “Nobody can spy on them going down, even accidentally.”

  “Can you remove the island into your space?” asked Helen.

  “Something of that size and weight? Not a chance.”

  Beth tried anyway, but as she expected, she failed.

  “It should be okay if we handle them one at a time,” said Helen. “The knockback distance doesn’t really matter, does it? We just need to stun it long enough to get a scaffold in place.”

  “Okay,” said Beth. “But how do we get them out one at a time?”

  Seb stared at the trapdoor like it contained the answer to the universe. “I can try periodic repulsions. On the trap door, then on the stairs, maybe.”

  Without a better option, they decided to go with that.

  They moved everything that could be moved to give them the most space possible. It was tight, but manageable. Beth was reminded of being trapped in that alley, all the way back when the infection had just been a rumour. Now they were facing multiple confirmed infected in a much smaller area, and they were as calm as if it was a classroom exercise.

  “We don’t want to just move the trapdoor into Beth’s space, right? Not if we want to close it between zombies.”

  Beth couldn’t see how it mattered, so she just shrugged.

  “That’s fine,” said Seb. “I’ll cast repulsion on the frame, and we can open it manually.”

  They lifted it up and secured it in place. The infected remained back, although the sounds and the distinctive mouldy paper maché odour made Beth’s skin crawl. The team took their positions and Seb lifted the repulsion. No taunt was necessary. The hole was immediately filled with a writhing mass of infected. Beth cast a knockback that forced them down the stairs. Seb reapplied the repulsion.

  “Beth, be ready with knockbacks for a while,” said Seb. “I’m going to try some things.”

  Seb carefully tried applying the repulsion to various elements in turn, the door, the frame, the individual stairs.

  “Nothing I do is breaking them up into smaller groups,” he reported. “It’s working on either all of them or none. The stairs aren’t taking the repulsion at all.”

  Beth wondered if it was because the stairs counted as a single unit and were too large, or because they were stone instead of wood, but she put her curiosity aside.

  “We can’t let them all up,” said Helen.

  Beth looked behind her, even though she knew the only option in that direction was the blocked door. There was nothing to help and no room to step back. Not unless they wanted to perch on the island itself, like rats escaping a flood.

  “Could we knock them back physically?” Beth asked. “I mean, not with my skill. My skill is also all or nothing. Could we drop something on the others as soon as the first has passed?”

  “We don’t want to risk trapping them down there permanently,” said Seb, but his tone was thoughtful. He turned to Helen. “Is there anything you could try with your scaffolding? Drop a block on them, and vanish it later?”

  “Won’t work,” said Helen. “My structures evaporate if they lose their supports. And we proved last time that I can’t construct it too close to an infected. I’m not going to be able to force them apart.”

  “Water,” said Beth. “That’s temporary. Helen, how much water can you produce before you start exhausting yourself? And how quickly?”

  “Like a firehose? I can manage quite a lot of volume, but it just appears. It doesn’t have any force behind it.”

  “That’s fine. We can still drop it. Build a frame high up over the trapdoor. We fill a crate with water and at the right moment, I vanish the crate.”

  A stack of nesting plastic crates had been a serendipitous find a few months prior. Beth had grabbed them so they could easily load and unload her dimensional space, but they had proved useful in all sorts of ways.

  “It’s worth a try,” said Seb.

  Beth pulled the stack from her space, placed one on the new scaffolding, and added a marble. Helen used the marble to fill it with water. They stood carefully in position.

  “Now.”

  Seb released the repulsion and the infected swarmed up. Beth pulled the crate and marble into her space, leaving the water behind. For a second, it fell as an unnatural block before the edges softened and it collided into the infected. The infected did not startle in shock like a living being would, but the weight still worked. Two stumbled backwards, and that was enough to trip the rest.

  Seb had the trapdoor repulsed again in an instant, leaving just the one. They stunned it back into the sink, trapped it, darted it, and removed the token. All in one smooth sequence, as if they’d practiced it a hundred times.

  Seb lifted his hands for a high-five from each of them. Beth obliged, despite how embarrassing it was.

  The practicalities, ironically, took most of the time. After every removal, they had to release the island and drag the body out of the room. Then they had to reset the water trap, separate out one, and remove the token. The process became a blur.

  Suddenly, Helen said, “I think we might need to come back another time for the rest.”

  Beth looked over and was shocked to see how pale Helen had gone. “Will a break help? We have a few hours.”

  “No,” said Helen. “I should have taken a break three zombies ago. I know we might not get another chance, but the water is taking a lot more out of me than I thought it would. We’ve only harvested two thirds of them, but I’ve already pushed past what I’m comfortable with.”

  Seb was very reassuring. “No problem. Safety first. We’ve already killed more zombies than I realised were here in total.”

  After reinforcing the repulsion, he walked over to latch the trapdoor, as he had done half a dozen times. Except this time, it caught on the edge of the frame. He pushed it down, then picked it up and tried to reposition it, unsuccessfully.

  “Problem?”

  “Yeah, I think the last zombie warped the frame coming through.”

  “Leave it as is and just swing the island back over it?” suggested Beth. “We can barricade the door before we leave, just in case they manage to push the kitchen island off somehow.”

  It would make coming back more complex, if they had the chance, but not that much more complex.

  Seb still looked grim and Beth didn’t understand why until he unlatched the island. It failed to roll back into position. With the trapdoor in the way, it didn’t have the clearance. Seb let it roll as far as it could go and tried to open the door.

  They paused there, staring at that too small gap.

  Beth asked to the air, “Can you repair the trapdoor?”

  Seb was the one to answer her. “Maybe, but not while I have repulsion on it. And I’d hate to run out of energy halfway through.”

  Another heavy silence.

  Seb closed the door and relatched the island. “How many zombies did you say were left?”

  “Four, I think,” said Helen.

  “Can we do them in two batches of two?” he asked.

  “I don’t… no. I don’t think I could do any more water at all. Maybe one or two scaffolds.”

  “That’s fine,” said Beth, firmly. “We’ll only need one. All we need is a barrier between them and us. I still have enough energy to stun them. Seb, do you think you can apply and remove the repulsion if they get too close, and still manage the rest?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. Darting doesn’t take much energy.”

  They did end up crawling on top of the kitchen island. Helen and Beth vaulted into place easily, very used to the action from their allotment clearing. They politely pretended not to notice when Seb took longer. Once they had created their new castle walls, they let out all the infected.

  Four turned out to be five, but it was obvious why Helen had made that mistake. One was a girl of seven or eight, and another was a toddler of indeterminate gender.

  “Don’t freeze!” ordered Helen, and Beth hastily cast the knockback and stun. “They’re already dead. We’re not killing them. We’re rescuing their bodies from the aliens.”

  Helen was right. Wasn’t that exactly what she’d decided with Uncle Alex? Besides, it wasn’t as if they had any other choice. She wasn’t as exhausted as Helen, but she wasn’t fresh, either. If something went wrong now, she wouldn’t have two hours of protection. She’d have a handful of minutes and nowhere to escape. She had to kill them to survive herself.

  She teleported a token out of an adult and cast an unnecessary knockback. She didn’t know if it was just her imagination, but her body started to ache. She would have to be wiser about what she cast. She couldn’t risk skill overuse herself.

  Beth knew that, but it still took another two rounds of knockbacks before she could bring herself to teleport out the tokens from the children. She had reached the point of feeling disconnected from her body, although she still wasn’t sure whether that was physical or emotional. The sudden lack of noise as that last tiny infected stopped moving felt like a wound. She took out the tokens and stared at them. They were the same size as any other token Beth had extracted. She had somehow expected that they’d be smaller.

  Helen gave the confirmation that they were safe, and they scrambled down off the table.

  “Children are immune,” said Beth, uselessly. “Children are supposed to be immune.”

  Seb assaulted the trapdoor.

  “Just more immune, I guess,” said Helen. “They won’t get infected from a single scratch, but I guess that’s a lot different from spending months with zombies, day in, day out.”

  “If the military had found them on that first pass through,” said Beth, “then the kids might still have been alive.”

  Too late, Beth realised she was also suggesting that they could have been saved if Helen and Seb had reported it immediately.

  The frame of the trapdoor cracked alarmingly, and Beth winced.

  “And very deeply traumatised,” said Seb. “Even if they’d found them within those first few days. I hope for their sake they were infected sooner rather than later. It would have been a mercy. Can you imagine being trapped in a small space while your parents were like that?”

  “When they realised the adults were infected, do you think the kids couldn’t open the door, or that they chose not to?” asked Helen.

  “Please, don’t—” said Beth, her voice cracking.

  With a final shove, the trapdoor closed fully. Seb rolled the island back and forth to check it had worked.

  “Why don’t you wait outside while Helen and I check if there’s anything usable left?” said Seb.

  “That wouldn’t be fair,” said Beth.

  “It’s fine, Beth,” he said. “Take a minute. We’ve already done the hardest part.”

  “Yeah, my skill is exhausted, but my muscles are fine.”

  Beth supposed she should have protested more, but she took them at their word and escaped. She lay down in the middle of the street, cherishing the heat from the black surface and unconcerned with the dirt. She folded up her scarf as a pillow and shaded her eyes just enough to protect them from the sun. She watched the wispy white clouds interrupting the deep blue sky. She listened to the piping of a Dartford Warbler, supported by a Woodpigeon bassline. She breathed.

  It didn’t help.

  She wasn’t going to cry, she knew. She just wished she would. It was ridiculous. What had she thought happened to all the kids on the mainland? She knew that Pines hadn’t evacuated them back in those early days when it still would have been possible. Had the military even rescued surviving children if they found them? Sebastian was right. Better that they had been infected than that they had slowly starved in darkness and fear.

  Half an hour later, Seb and Helen came out the house with two stacked crates of goodies. Beth sat up to move them into her space.

  And laughed.

  “Are you okay?” asked Helen.

  “I realised something,” Beth said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I couldn’t move the whole kitchen island into my space. But that stuck trapdoor? That would have been easy.”

  They wouldn’t have had to take all those risks. She wouldn’t have had to kill those children.

  “Huh,” said Seb. “Or just taken out the whole door for that matter. You’ve done it before.”

  She had. All of it. All of it, from the very beginning, had been unnecessary. They had just become fixated on that stupid kitchen island. She had no call criticising others for reacting irrationally under pressure.

  “We’ll just have to remember that the next time we almost get ourselves killed.”

  Helen said it like it was a joke, but it really wasn’t. If anything else had gone wrong, anything at all, they would have died. They had used up every single millimetre of safety margin they had. Beth couldn’t help but feel that they didn’t deserve their success.

  “Well,” said Seb. “Someone had to kill them, and we succeeded. It might have ended up worse if we’d tried it another way.”

  Beth’s hesitation could have meant two infected children were left free to threaten everyone else.

  “And we know the kids were infected very quickly,” said Helen. “The supplies were almost entirely untouched.”

  They must have been, for them to scavenge that much after a full year.

  “I think you were right about the nightclub, by the way,” continued Helen. “There were a bunch of old brewing vats down there and benches and tables and stuff.”

  Beth nodded. On another day, she might have been interested in the secret history they’d stumbled across.

  “How many did we end up harvesting?” asked Seb.

  Beth pulled out all the tokens. She could no longer tell which ones were from the children. She’d already lost track.

  “Eleven today, and one from the shed,” she said. “I don’t know how we want to handle the extra ten percent finder’s fee. Shall we convert one to supps now?”

  “No,” said Seb. “Let’s just make it a straight four each. Okay with you, Helen?”

  “Absolutely. This was a group effort.”

  Beth decided to accept, for the time being. A few tokens were much easier to handle and hide than a large amount of supps. She’d find ways to make it up to them later.

  Seb said, “But we don’t flaunt them around. We say nothing about this to anyone. Agreed?”

  The area was officially cleared by the military, so they technically should have been able to claim self-defence. But the kind of wealth that tokens represented had a way of changing the rules.

  “Agreed,” said Helen.

  “Yes,” said Beth.

  “And Helen?” said Seb. “Please, for your own sake, use it to get yourself free. Not to trap yourself even deeper.”

  “Both of you, as well,” said Helen with a look. “It’s not just me.”

  Beth looked away. Helen didn’t know what she was asking of her.

  They were all still keyed up, but they made a decent impression of being normal on the boat trip back. When they reached the pier, their unexpectedly good results were commended. The officer promptly digressed into complaints about how everyone else was being half-hearted and just waiting for the relocation.

  As the rant dragged on, Beth could only thank her exhaustion for concealing her emotional state. It didn’t help that Kenneth the harasser was present with another group, although it was somewhat amusing that he was receiving some rather pointed side-eyes. His sour expression only became more sour when Helen graced him with a sunny smile.

  At home, Beth checked The Book, wondering what ridiculously inadequate description it would give for the day’s activities, and what judgement it would cast on them.

  Updating.

  Oh, no.

  If she was right, that meant that someone else was in the process of changing their actions because of her. She shouldn’t jump to the worst possible conclusion, she told herself firmly. It was probably something positive with Seb or Helen because of their new wealth. She had to hope that, because she didn’t know enough to change anything. She could only wait for the update to finish.