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Mimi had long since passed the point of tears. The first couple of rest periods in the ill-lit dormitory had taught her that sleep was far more important than grief, and she no longer hesitated in swallowing the lumpy, tasteless food either. Sleep and food – these were the necessities of life. Mourning the past was a luxury.

The judge had been a large woman in a thick, quilted outfit, heating panels glimmering dimly with packed sunshine. She had glared down her pudgy nose at Mimi. "You knew you were stealing," she’d said. "Your behaviour proves it."

One of the men who had caught Mimi had played the video they’d taken, showing her poking her head out of the door and peering cautiously about, then her frantic scrabbling at the frozen pool of sun. ""Well?" the judge had demanded. "What have you to say for yourself?"

Mimi had had to begin speaking twice before the words came. "We had no light or heat in the house," she’d said, "or money to buy any. We needed that sun."

The judge had shaken her head in grim amusement, and pointed at the blue-and-red insignia on the wall. "The sunshine belongs to the Corporation," she’d said. "You were stealing from it. What would happen if everyone stole from the Corporation whenever they stole from it?" She paused, as though expecting an answer. "Well?"

Mimi had said nothing. The judge had glanced around the room and grunted. "The Sunshine Mines," she’d said, and clicked on a keyboard on her desk. "Hard labour for..." she peered at Mimi. "How old are you?"

"Eleven."

"Eleven," the judge had repeated, and looked speculatively at Mimi. "Three years," she’d decided. "That should be enough to teach you a lesson."

Now, Mimi understood why the judge had decided on that sentence. In three years she’d be getting too large to enter the narrow crawlways, yet too small and weak to handle the heavier machinery and tools. Three years wasn’t that long, she’d been told. If she’d been smaller, it might have been a great deal longer. She was lucky.

She didn’t feel lucky. She felt alone and scared and cold and hungry, and her arms ached as she gouged another blocked of fossilised sunshine out of the rock.

As she worked, she wondered if she would ever see the real sun again.

"Here." The word was a scarcely audible murmur. "Quick."

Without looking, Mimi extended her hand, and felt the hard, jagged piece slipped into her palm. It was still frozen, but the surface was already warming slowly, sublimating into light and warmth, so that it felt soapy and slippery to her fingers. Still without looking, she slipped it under the hem of her rough uniform cloak and next to her skin. That was not a good thing to do – the heat of her body would cause it to evaporate quickly – but it was the only way she could hide it until she got it back to the dormitory. Once it was safe in the hiding place she’d found beneath a loose slab of stone, she’d break off fragments whenever she needed. Properly utilised, it might last half a week or more.

"You’ve got it?" The voice murmured, impatient to be gone.

"Yes, just a moment." Mimi fumbled the package of food out from the pocket she’d sewn in the cloak’s lining and pushed it back into the doorway behind her. The brightly lit passage before her was still empty, but at any moment someone might be along. It wouldn’t matter if it were just another worker – nobody sentenced to the mines could have survived without the black market – but if it were a security detail she was dead. At the least she’d get solitary confinement and round the clock supervision for the duration, and that was as good as a death sentence. Without the chance to get hold of smuggled sunshine, she wouldn’t last three months, let alone years.

It was a fine balance, she’d learnt early on – to starve herself of enough food to be able to trade for sunshine, yet not so much as to become too weak to stand the workload. Some of the others traded for a lot more than just sun, and had become quite wealthy in the barter currency of the mine, but Mimi hadn’t the ability or the desire for that. Survival was good enough for her.

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