Two years before impact

In Perth the name on Angharad's library cards was Emma Green. She used them every Wednesday, doing the full circuit on her library walk, hitting up first the Maylands library and then the library in Inglewood, before walking back to the flat they rented. At each library she'd get out the maximum number of books allowed and stuff them in her backpack, before continuing on to the next. All up, it usually took two hours.

Even when she finished them all before Wednesday, she liked to wait until Wednesday before going out again to take them back.

She was only Emma Green in these summers, and then when she was almost settled in to the rhythms of the place, they went back up to the Northern Hemisphere to have summer all over again, along with an autumn and a spring.

In that final year a library assistant asked, "Why do you only show up this time every year?"

Angharad mumbled something about a custody arrangement and didn't add any details. She left without any books that time. And when she went home and told her father, it turned out the English office needed them earlier than ever, even though winter lingered there and summer had yet to leave where they were.

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She was Katherine Gold in England and she wanted to be Katherine Gold in California, too.

"It's just easier, right now. Long term identities require all sorts of effort to come up with and I've already invested so much energy into this one," Angharad said.

But her father wasn't sure. "People could get confused if you use the same name for a long time."

"That's not something I worry about. I know who I am," she said.

"You're not the one I worry will get confused," he said.

But she won him over, and Katherine Gold got to stay.