Adric had seen the girl several times during the next few weeks, always whilst keeping a discreet distance from the Riverfruit beds where she worked, or watching from the shadows in the high balconies of the great Midship galley, where the whole Community filed through in their grades at the beginning of each day. She seemed to move in her own sunlight, like an alien creature, like a bird, and time seemed to shift its boundaries when she passed, so that, more than once, Adric had rushed back late for the start of his next lesson in the Learning Labs under the gloomy, despairing gaze of Educator Slake.
At break times and at the evening meals he would see her with his brother, nose to nose, conversing in smiles and whispers, his brother's hands touching her chin and neck and hair, hers feeling for the necklace that she wore, and Adric would squeeze the tangle of thin plastic that he kept tucked away in his jacket pocket, with its treacherous name, and ponder the opportunity for hurt and destruction that it presented to him.
It was an opportunity he never took. The Growing Season had worn on and then the Mists had come and, as Decider Draith had predicted – his last, great prediction as it turned out – with the Mists the giants, and in amongst all the chaos and blood and death that followed the Doctor had turned up, and life had started anew for Adric. A fresh, clean start. Full of hope and prospects. And no ghosts.