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improve Sophie’s prognosis. Jack planned in which direction it would be safe to swerve in case the green Mercedes waiting at the upcoming junction pulled out early. When it didn’t, his eyes moved on to the next car ahead, and then to the mini-roundabout after that.
    “Sophie…”
    “Yeah?”
    “Kicking.”
    “Sorry, Dad.”
    Jack was thirty-two years old, he was an Olympic gold medalist, and he was one of the top five quickest male cyclists in the world.
    He said, “Sophie? If I’m going too fast you just tell me, okay?”
    On the motorway they drove in the slow lane, wedged between lorries. Sophie knew it was to keep her safe. This was the effect she had on people: they drove twenty percent slower, they gripped the handles of boiling saucepans twenty percent harder, they chose their words one fifth more carefully. No one was going to blow a tire and crash her, or spill a pan and scald her, or say the word worry or die .
    She wanted to tell them that it all just made you twenty percent more scared, but she couldn’t do that. They did it to cope with how they felt. She felt bad for making them feel that way.
    Out the side window, she saw normal families cruising past. They were mostly families who weren’t on the good side like the Argalls or on the dark side like the Vaders. They were families who weren’t anything except on their way to the zoo or the shops. Quite often you could see them squabbling as they drove past. Their mouths moved crossly behind the glass. It was like a museum of human families, where the display cases moved past you without labels. Sophie wrote the labels in her head: Mum Bought the Wrong Crisps, or Dad Won’t Let Me and Chloe Listen to the Chart Show .
    When Sophie got bored of watching the other families, she watched Star Wars in her head. She’d seen the films so many times now, she didn’t need the DVDs. She watched the AT-AT Walkers attacking the Rebel base on the ice planet Hoth, to take her mind off how sick she was feeling. She felt so bad today, it was scaring her. Everything hurt. Her head pounded, her vision was blurry, and her bones ached the way they did when it was freezing and you were out on a long walk and the rain just kept getting harder. Waves of nausea rolled over her and gave her the icy chills.
    It was incredible how Skywalker flew his fighter ship. It was because he was a Jedi. There were special cells in your blood, called midichlorians, that made you a Jedi. Sophie knew the changes in her blood that Dr. Hewitt thought were leukemia were actually just the start of midichlorians forming. You couldn’t expect Earth doctors to diagnose it right: they would be lucky to see a single case in a lifetime of medical practice.
    Even so, when she felt as sick as she did today, there were times when she thought she would never become a Jedi. Even at sixty miles per hour, she was uncomfortable. The rumble of the road surface was shaking her up and making her insides hurt. How would she ever be able to fly a ship at hundreds of miles per hour between the feet of an attacking Imperial Walker?
    She swallowed. “It’s okay if you want to go faster,” she said.
    Dad shook his head. “We’re good like this.”
    Sophie looked at Dad’s wiry forearms on the steering wheel, and then she looked at her own. She squeezed her fists to make her muscles bulge.
    “You okay?” said Mum. “What are you doing?”
    “Nothing.”
    The veins in her arms were dark blue and thin and led nowhere, as if someone had taken a biro and drawn the wiring diagram of a useless droid on her body before stretching human skin over it. Her dad’s veins bulged like cables under the skin and made purposeful lines, poweringthe blood back to his heart. Dad was the strongest man in the world, probably. She didn’t understand how Dad could look at her—at the fragile, sickly sight of her—and not be scared. She had to try to seem strong and brave.
    “It’s okay if you swerve a bit,” she said. “I