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don’t mind.”
    Dad looked at her in the rearview mirror. “And why would I do that?”
    “There’s actually a TIE fighter chasing us.”
    In the front passenger seat, Zoe looked serious. “Right. Divert maximum power to the aft deflector shields please, Sophie.”
    Sophie grinned and pressed the button on the side of the child seat that executed Zoe’s order.
    “Fire the turbolasers!” said Zoe, and Sophie did.
    “Make sure you lock on to their coordinates!”
    Sophie was amazed that Zoe was so good at this. When the TIE fighter was destroyed, and they were all safe again, she relaxed in her seat. “Thanks, Han!”
    Zoe turned and there were tears in her eyes, which was something that Sophie didn’t get. She hadn’t complained and she’d tried really hard not to look ill, and it made her a bit angry and sad if people felt sorry for her.
    She made sure to keep smiling.
    “It’s okay,” she told Zoe. “I actually feel great!”
Beetham Tower, 301 Deansgate, Manchester
     
    Zoe got out of the car. As it drove off she waved the Argalls away and watched Sophie’s new-moon face watching her back, through the rear window. The child’s eyes fastened unself-consciously on her own, the way her brother Adam’s used to, and the fact that there was no reproach in them only made her feel worse.
    She realized she was actually trembling. She’d hardly slept, and thenthe Death Star had upset her, and the car journey back had been worse. Sophie really looked as if she was on her way out, and Kate was in denial, and Jack… well, she couldn’t decide what Jack thought.
    A single day with that family had felt like the whole of her life. She didn’t know how they could bear it. There was an insane amount of emotion, but nothing sufficiently concentrated to cry about at any particular second. It was impossible.
    She decided she would go up to her apartment and drink coffee. That seemed a reasonable thing to do. She could easily imagine a woman with more manageable emotions than she had at this moment saying to herself, You know what? I think I’ll grab an espresso . This was the best she could hope for today: to do the things that ordinary people did, and to hope that by some kind of sympathetic magic their ordinary sense of well-being would accrue to her.
    The early April rain was falling. The pavement in front of the Beetham Tower’s lobby was cordoned off with tall orange cones and red-and-white safety barriers. A yellow crane was hoisting olive trees up into the sky, one by one. Zoe stopped to watch. There were a dozen trees waiting to go up. They were eight feet high, with their trunks swathed in bubble wrap and their roots balled into orange sacks. In the vortices of wind that spun around the foot of the high tower, the undersides of the olive leaves flashed as they turned, all at once, as if at an unseen signal, like shoals of silver fish.
    Zoe wrinkled her eyes against the rain and watched a tree spinning on its halter, mirrored in the windows of the tower as it rose up into the slate-gray sky. The lift had been going on for two days now. The trees were going up to the penthouse, one floor above her own apartment. Management was making a “green space,” with birds and plants and a water feature. It would be nice up there—a souvenir of Earth.
    Zoe wanted to watch the trees going up but she couldn’t stay too long out on the street before people would begin to recognize her. Over the road from the tower there was a ninety-six-sheet backlit billboard.It showed an image of her own face, twenty feet high, her big green eyes framed with green hair and green lipstick. Her hand, the nails painted green, was holding a bottle of Perrier dripping with condensate. Best served cold, said the text on the advertisement. Across the right-hand third of the billboard, as tall as her face, were the Olympic rings glazed with a frosting of ice.
    She looked up, to where the looming orange shape of a wrapped tree was disappearing