The result of the argument was that Linua stormed upstairs, and Grandmother went to lie down in the sitting room, attended by Helged, who brought her a soothing cup of tea and listened patiently to her bewildered complaints.

Linua stood in her bedroom and surveyed her wardrobe. It consisted of neat rows of navy pleated skirts and white shirts, all washed and ironed and hung up by Helged. There was a set of shelves with folded underwear, knee-high navy socks, and some old leggings in a stretchy light blue material that had one been part of a pyjama set. She’d stopped wearing them because they’d been too short.

When she put them on now, they looked like an ordinary pair of skin-tight leggings, which now came to her mid-calf.

She grabbed one of the shirts and stared in hatred at the neat, old-fashioned collar with its white embroidery. That was coming off. She attacked it with a pair of nail scissors.

There was a tap at the door.

“Linua?”

That was Helged. Linua quickly threw the bed covers over the butchered shirt.

“What is it?”

Helged came in with a tray containing a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits. She was one of those people who thought that every problem could be solved with tea.

“I sent the driver away, lovey,” she said, referring to the car service Grandmother had booked to take Linua to the dressmaker. Helged placed the tray down on the side table next to the bed. “I told him to come back after dinner.”

If Grandmother hadn’t thought to countermand this, it meant that Linua was going to the Observatory tonight.

“Thank you,” she said. She still felt angry, but not at Helged. She sat down on the bed and fiddled with one of the biscuits. Helged sat next to her.

“Your grandmother’s very upset, duckie.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Try to see it from her point of view, love. She only wants the best for you.”

“I don’t see how me getting a pair of jeans is going to result in me hanging around on street corners!”

“She’s got very fixed ideas, love. Just be patient with her.”

“She never asks me what I want!” Linua burst out.

Helged put an arm around her.

“I know, lovey, I know. She’s a very strong character, your grandmother. Just try and understand she’s trying her best. It hasn’t been easy on her either.”

Linua sullenly said nothing. She knew everything that Helged was saying was true. Grandmother had engaged in a two-year custody battle over Linua with the Yi family which, as she had often explained, had been stressful and expensive. She had won, but at the cost of leaving her life and her friends behind in Shinboa, and coming to live in smaller, less important Herkow, so that Linua could attend Castle Yi for wushu training, as per the custody agreement.

None of this meant that Linua was going to give up and let Grandmother have her way. She leaned her head on Helged’s shoulder. Helged had nice soft shoulders.

“I’d better go and get supper ready, love. Come down when you’re ready.”

“Yeah okay,” Linua said.

As soon as the door had closed behind Helged, Linua pulled the shirt from its hiding place and continued cutting off the collar. The arms came off next. She shrugged out of the shirt she was wearing and put the altered one on. Then she tied the shirt tails just below her bust, leaving her midriff bare. Now she probably did look like something hanging around on a street corner.

She went to the bathroom and did her balancing act on the bath so that she could see a full body view in the mirror over the sink.

Wow. It almost looked cool, in a trashy, street punk sort of way. She rolled the waistband of the leggings down a little, so that it rode low on her hips. She swivelled back and forth, admiring the effect. Grandmother would go spare if she saw Linua like this.

She modified it before she went down to dinner by untying the shirt tails and leaving the shirt hanging loose to her hips. She also unearthed a pair of flip flops she normally used as indoor house shoes. The chunky, old-fashioned leather school-girl shoes would also have to go.

Helged stopped when she saw the outfit, if it could be called that, and shook her head.

“Oh lovey,” she said. “Your grandmother won’t like that.”

That was the whole point.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Linua wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed that Grandmother didn’t see the outfit before she went to the Observatory for the evening. If she had seen it, would she have forbidden Linua to go?

When Grandmother was Linua’s age she had had a passion for astronomy, and had volunteered at her local Observatory after school. Later, when she had left school, she had continued to volunteer after work. She was a renowned astronomer now, but she had been entirely self-taught. She had wanted Linua to learn those same lessons of hard work and self-discipline, and follow astronomy with the same passion that she had. This was why Linua had been sent to volunteer at the Observatory every evening six days a week for the last five years.

Grandmother was trying to recreate Linua in her own image.

Linua was thinking about this as she got into the car.

“Your grandma okay?” the driver asked, glancing in the rear view mirror.

She stared at him blankly. How did he know about the argument?

“The other lady said she was sick when I came this afternoon. She feeling better now?”

Oh. That must have been the excuse that Helged had given him to send him away before.

“She’s still a bit under the weather,” Linua said.

“Poor lady! Hope she gets better soon.”

Linua hoped so too.

“To the Observatory, right?”

“Yeah.”

The Observatory was situated at the top of a mountain in the next valley, somewhat protected from the light pollution emitted the city of Herkow. It took nearly an hour to drive there from Grandmother’s house, which normally left Linua plenty of time to read her book.

Last year she had joined the Herkow Central Library. She had been given a form and had fully intended to forge her grandmother’s signature in the box for parental consent, but in the end she had chickened out. It was one thing to secretly log on to her grandmother’s computer, but forging a physical signature felt more illegal somehow. It probably was illegal. More so than sending an email to Castle Yi, pretending she was too sick to attend wushu training, anyway, which was something else she had done last year.

So she had asked her grandmother to sign the form, and once they had got past the “What’s wrong with the library at the house?” discussion, Grandmother had provided Linua with a list of books she expected Linua to read. You could have a maximum of four books at any one time. Linua had been borrowing one from Grandmother’s list, and three books of her own choice. She had gradually been going through the Keng Boh Kids series. This was a popular adventure series about four kids with super skills who fought super villains. It had been turned into a TV series which nearly everyone Linua’s age watched.

Linua was now on the final instalment of the series, which involved the Keng Boh Kids infiltrating an undersea facility where one of the main, recurring villains had discovered the tomb of the infamous Deen Tuwa. Deen Tuwa was a real figure from Ancient Kāru, who had been a leader of the Betrayers, the cult that had sabotaged the mothership, the Ḫūlušarri, forcing everyone to evacuate and become stranded on Inanna. Deen Tuwa herself was supposed to have personally assassinated Lord Nimras during Ancient Kāruan times.

The book was very exciting and Linua had been looking forward to reading on her way to the Observatory. She was still too churned up to concentrate on it now, however.

Instead, she tried to distract herself by thinking about her project, and what she would find that evening.

Linua felt nervous walking into the Observatory in her new outfit, but she needn’t have bothered. No-one noticed, or if they did, they didn’t think it was worthy of comment.

Perhaps this was not surprising given that the people at the Observatory that night consisted of Alnan, who was seventy years old and only ever seemed to wear boiler suits, and the astronomers, most of whom didn’t know Linua at all, and probably thought she was a cleaning lady.

She was supposed to be helping the astronomers with their research, and in fact that’s what Grandmother thought she was doing. But some time ago Linua had taken to following Alnan around instead. He had a wry sense of humour, and told fascinating stories.

By this point they had the cleaning of the Observatory down to a fine art, and hardly needed to discuss it, so they tended to talk about other things. Linua was trying to distract herself from the struggle she would have trying to change Grandmother’s mind about clothes, and for some reason found herself thinking of map she and the Astronomy Club had saved from thieves last year. An expedition had been dispatched to investigate the location of the lost Ancient Kāruan facility, the location of which was indicated by the map, but although the Astronomy Club had waited avidly, there had been nothing to announce the outcome.

Alnan had been in the army, who were routinely involved in guarding Ancient Kāruan expeditions. Maybe he would know more about that sort of thing.

“Did you ever go on an archaeological expedition?” she asked him.

“Only by accident,” Alnan replied.

He paused. He was wiry and short, only a little taller than Linua, with a big nose, sticky out ears and an amiable expression that made him look like a mythical household spirit. He always paused before he had a story to tell, so Linua continued cleaning and waited for him to speak.

“My unit commander had hired an outdoor training centre,” Alnan said. “This were so we could go and do some training. Camping and survival stuff like that.” He paused again. “It were called Camp Greenfields, and it were run by an ex-marine. It sounded right nice and idyllic, me and the lads all thought. It’d be like a holiday! Only when we turned up he’d gone and renamed it to Arduous Training. Which didn’t sound nearly so good.”

Linua laughed.

“So at one point during this training me and my squad got turfed out on the moors for three days with nothing but a knife and a live chicken in a sack.” Alnan rubbed his nose. “Supposed to teach us how to live off the land and stuff like that.”

“What did you do?” Linua asked.

“We wandered round all evening until we found an old shepherd woman living in a cottage on the edge of the moor. We traded the chicken for some sandwiches and asked if we could sleep by her fire.”

Linua laughed again.

“She were right pleased with us. Said she got annoyed with the lads that let their chicken go before her asking for food and shelter. Apparently this were a regular occurrence.”

“So nobody actually completed the arduous training?”

“Not that bit of it at least.”

“That doesn’t sound much like an archaeological expedition though.”

Alnan paused again.

“I were coming to that. There was this local, an idiot with a metal detector, who went running around shoving it every place he could get a permit for.”

Linua knew that Eret had found something with a metal detector once, although she had never been told the full story, only that it had caused trouble somehow. She wondered what Alnan would think of that.

“Then,” Alnan went on, “one day he found something. All he could tell was that it was a big metal cylinder, about ten feet across, buried more than six feet down.” He cast a side-eyed glance at Linua. “Remind you of anything?”

Linua sucked in a breath.

“The Kusansee disaster!”