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me with this.” I held up the ankh and they all leaned forwards, as if to look at it more closely. “And a song. For me. He wrote it for me.”
    There in the hall, with the great torches flickering fire over the walls, I sang my song in a little quivery voice, and the shadow before me grew more solid and at the end of the room, the scales shuddered. Slowly, very slowly, the pan that held the feather began to sink, against the weights, until the feather came to rest against the floor and the black weights were no longer visible.
    My dad’s figure wasn’t shadowy any more. It was filled with light and it became brighter and brighter until it was gone, but I could see that he was smiling. There was an opening in the air behind him, a doorway shaped like a cross with a loop at the top, like my ankh. He stepped through it and when he disappeared, the torches began to go out, one by one, and as the last one guttered I was in total darkness. I think I yelled, but the dark swallowed the sound. Then I saw that an eye was staring at me, a huge white eye, and a momentlater I realised that it was the moon. There was no sign of the hall, or the great figures, or the dog-headed man. I was standing in front of the gates, but the sluice looked different. It was much smaller, and made of grey metal like the little sluice further down the canal. I could not see the wheel. I wondered whether the gates opened into other worlds, other lands of the dead, and my dad had gone to the one he loved best. But I knew that whatever the gates looked like, they were not just to hold back the sea.
    If this had been a dream, I suppose this was the point at which I woke up. But it was not a dream. I was stiff and frozen, the reeds crackled with frost, the moon was on fire in the coldness of the sky, and the canal smelled of weed and water. I trudged home along the towpath, and sang my song as I went. The pony whickered to me when I came up the slope of the field. The orchard no longer seemed unfriendly, with things lurking behind the apple trees, and when I lifted the latch on the back door, the sky was already growing brighter in the east. There were flowers of frost on the windowpane. I did not go to bed, but sat in a chair by my bedroom window andwatched the sun come up over the blaze of the world after the darkness of the night.

Flawless
    Frances Hardinge
    When people stay in hotel rooms, they suddenly turn into toddlers. Weird, creative, screwed-up toddlers.
    Let’s smear jam on the wall! Let’s leave apple cores in the drawers! Let’s hide used nappies behind the radiator, so that they fill the whole room with the smell of cooked poo! Hello, whoever cleans this room! I’ve left you a surprise!
    Maybe they think there’s some hidden handle we pull to flush the room clean. But there isn’t. Theonly ‘handles’ are Mum, ‘Occasional Kev’ from the village, and me. Kev’s just Occasional and Mum has everything else to do, so cleaning is mostly my job, particularly during the school holidays.
    Cleaning a room is like being that legend-guy who pushed a rock up a hill again and again. While you’re scrubbing at the gribble, most of the time you can’t even tell if you’re making any difference. Nothing’s ever perfect. Your eye adjusts. The closer you get to perfection, the better your gaze learns to pick out the stains and marks.
    When I’ve finished a room, I always step into the corridor for a moment, taking in the spotted walls, the gingery time-stains on the mock-brass electric chandeliers. Then I enter the room again, and for one moment it
is
perfect. It gleams, like it’s just been taken out of its packaging.
    That never lasts. Next day there will be inexplicable bootmarks on the curtains, and somebody will have tried to cook soup in the kettle.
    I don’t know why they bother. After all, we already have a weird, creative, screwed-up toddler of our own.
    Dill is two