Two children sit perilously close to the Mesh. It shouldn't be here, but it is. It wasn't here when they scurried in three days ago, out of sight of blackbird drone, but somehow it has shifted and it is here now. Not that they know. She is fifteen and he might be ten. There are no records, and, if there is some place where they exist, it is not here. Not in their ragged pockets. Not in her rotting leather bag. Not on a stone-dusted shelf in what remains of a bombed-out basement. Rats fill the corners, a broken sewer oozes effluent into the lower end of the tilted cellar, and feet shuffle by up at street level.
Her brain is ridden with red mist, having run the gauntlet of the other inmates in the prison hospital, where her father has permanent residence. On the way back, she clambered over the remains of a shattered house, once grand, lying among its broken trees, to fetch a few rotting windfalls. These, she thought at the time, could be their food for the next few days. It was while she was watching the street for hovering militia and carefully picking her way among the blackberry thorns, crackling electricity cables and steaming plumbing that a grenade landed a few feet away. Instinctively falling down behind an upturned bath had saved her life.
So relieved to get back to their basement, she flew into a fit of anger when David let the apple roll down the sloping floor into the sewage.
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