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with this . . .” Lily saw how distressed she was becoming, how guilty she felt. “Lil, I’m sorry. I thought you were dead. I had to sort things out.”
    Lily put a hand on her sister’s arm. “Don’t. You did what had to be done.”
    “You can move in here with us. Or we can sell the house and split the money, whatever you want. Although house prices have been flatlining in Fulham since the flooding.”
    “We don’t have to decide that today.”
    They had got some of it out of their systems by the time the front door opened and the kids came barreling in.

5

    L ily hadn’t seen her nephew and niece for a year or more before her abduction, a gap she had had five years to regret. Now here they were, grown like sunflowers, and let out of school early to see their aunt.
    Kristie was still young enough to give her long-lost aunt a hug as instructed. Suddenly eleven years old, she grinned at Lily with a mouthful of steel brace. “You missed the Olympics,” she said.
    Benj, thirteen, with Day-Glo yellow hair, was more diffident, and he had a dreamy expression on his face, as if he didn’t quite see what was going on around him. They both wore brilliantly colored clothes. Kristie had a bright pink backpack on her back, and chunky amber beads around her neck. The children looked like exotic birds, Lily thought, fragile creatures that didn’t belong in the grimy adult world of flood damage and rain.
    “You’re home early from school,” she said. So they were; it wasn’t yet three o’clock.
    Kristie shrugged. “Wet play.”
    Amanda raised an eyebrow. “It’s the rain, the floods. They don’t let them out at break times, or for games. They come home fizzing with energy. Pain in the bum.”
    “The Olympics, though,” Kristie said. “The Olympics were right here in London and you were stuck in Spain! Did you see it?”
    “Well, no,” Lily admitted. Although the captives had thought about the London games. They marked the passing of time by such milestones, grand dates they remembered from the outside world— this must be happening about now, in some other place. “We didn’t have TV. Was it good?”
    “I was there every day of the last week,” Kristie said proudly.
    “That must have cost a lot.”
    “Not really,” said Amanda. “It didn’t go too well. The weather, the drug scandals, the terrorists. In the end they were giving the tickets away to kids and OAPs, anything to fill the stadia. After all these kids will be paying for it for the rest of their lives.”
    Lily asked, “So did you go, Benj?”
    Benj shrugged. “For a couple of days. Wasn’t much. It was years ago.”
    Amanda glared at him. “Are you on that damn Angel? What have I told you about using that thing when we have guests?”
    “Oh, Mum—”
    “I’ve heard of these things,” Lily said. “Why don’t you show me, Benj?”
    He fished in his jacket pocket and produced a gadget as slim as a cigarette. It was heavy in her hand, seamless, warm from his body heat. Benj set it with unconscious skill, Lily couldn’t follow what he did, and a bright, brassy pop tune erupted inside her head: “I love you more than my phone / You’re my Angel, you’re my TV / I love you more than my phone / Put you in my pocket and you sing to me . . .” The Angel beamed its music directly into her sensorium, somehow stimulating the hearing centers remotely, without the need for wires and earpieces.
    “Cor.”
    “That’s ‘Phone,’” Benj said. “This year’s big hit.”
    “I never heard it. Well, I wouldn’t have.”
    Amanda said, “Of course everybody has to have one of these things. It’s a fashion statement, you know? And it’s a pain to be zapped in the street by some kid who thinks you need a headful of drums and bass.”
    Benj nodded wisely. “That’s why they get taken off you at school.”
    “They’re working on a video version. Imagine that!”
    Lily said, “It’s amazing how much is new since I’ve been