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job except growing whatever they can in their backyards. They’re just about ready for your father, I’d say.”
    Later, staring through her window, still trying to get the measure of the place she had been cast out into, Miranda watched the jungle grow dark. From her old room, she had at least been able to look out over the trees on moonlit nights and see the milk-white disc as if sinking into the dark sea of the wildwood canopy. Here, in this new place, the trees were higher and closer and the moon brighter. Before it sank below the tree line, this different moon cast shadows that seemed to have a deep luminosity of their own. Those shadows made Miranda shiver. She felt she might see beyond them if she kept staring, might even be tempted to step out of the window and into those shadows, into the shivery world they beckoned her to enter. That was when she set about trying to turn the scene into no more than a two-dimensional jigsaw, inwardly repeating her father’s words like a charm: ‘We may be out of here sooner than expected.’
    *
    Lissel had left Miranda with a regime of screen-learning to follow and this was reinforced by her father shortly after their arrival. He described to her the terminals present throughout the house they now occupied.
    â€œIt doesn’t matter where you are, Miranda,” he said. “These screens can get you anywhere you want in the world. You can use them to learn about anything you want, in the same way as I can use them to work on anything I want. You remember me changing the lines on the screen back home?”
    As if she didn’t. So powerful had the act seemed that, beyond playing make-believe games with her bricks, Miranda had found herself wondering whether anyone had died after he adjusted the glittering web he contemplated so many hours each day. She had wondered whether anyone had been saved. Nothing had prevented the death of her mother, but that had been before the screen with the glittering lines had appeared on her father’s desk.
    Of course, in reminding her about the lines on the screen, he was only trying to gain her cooperation in his own plans for keeping up her education. But Miranda was willing to play along. Staring into the screens, she imagined herself back in the Land of the Princess, with the images dancing attendance on her every wish. Clothed in their variety and richness, the screen images could crowd around her and keep the world outside safely at bay.
    So it was to the screens that Miranda increasingly turned when she couldn’t sleep or woke early, when all she could see from her window was the harsh moonlight that fell into the open area of the compound and washed over the jungle wildwood, casting amongst the trees shadows she feared she might fall into. And so it was to a screen she turned, waking early one morning with an unpleasant sensation in the pit of her stomach, a sensation that grew as she stared out through her metal-framed window into the darkness beyond.
    She decided to give a program called Wheel of Fortune a turn.
    Wheel of Fortune was popular with parents who wanted to give their children an impression of the awesome fund of information available to them. Selecting at random, it could access any one of several thousand sites set up to be especially interesting and attractive to a curious child or teenager. Miranda watched as the usual entry images came up: a wheel of fortune, then waves of pictures morphing in and out of each other to present an eyeblink overview of the world of knowledge that might be explored by the program.
    Then something odd happened.
    Usually, at this point, you were asked to click the ‘spin’ button to get the wheel turning, but instead a crude fuzz took over the screen. The fuzz resolved itself into a grainy video-picture of a city. Miranda looked carefully, intrigued by the departure from the usual sequence. The picture panned from a dense conglomeration of skyscrapers,