Chapter 1 Warnings Although the label on the hair shampoo said paris and had a picture of a beautiful girl with the Eiffel Tower behind her bare shoulder, it was forced to tell the truth in tiny print under the picture. Made in New Zealand, it said, Wisdom Laboratories, Paraparaumu. Just for a moment Laura had had a dream of washing her hair and coming out from under the shower to find she was not only marvelously beautiful but also transported to Paris. However, there was no point in washing her hair if she were only going to be moved as far as Paraparaumu. Besides, she knew her hair would not dry in time for school and she would spend half the morning with chilly ears. These were facts of everyday life, and being made in New Zealand was another. You couldn''t really think your way into being another person with a different morning ahead of you, or shampoo yourself into a beautiful city full of artists drinking wine and eating pancakes cooked in brandy. Outside in the kitchen the kettle screamed furiously, begging to be taken off the stove.

Laura, startled, emerged from under the shower only to discover there was no towel on the rail. She could hear Kate, her mother, moving about in the room next door, putting the kettle out of its misery, and tried to shake herself dry as a dog does though she knew it could never work. "There''s no towel, Mum," she called fretfully, but as she spoke she saw a towel in a heap by the door and grabbed it eagerly. "It''s all right! I''ve got one. Oh blast! It''s damp." "First one in gets the driest towel," Kate shouted back from the kitchen. The mirror had been placed in the steamiest part of the bathroom and showed her a blurred ghost. However, its vagueness suited her, for she was uncertain about her reflection and often preferred it misty rather than distinct.

No matter how hard she tried to take her face by surprise, she could never quite manage it, and found it hard to be sure what she looked like when she wasn''t trying, but her body was easy to know about and filled her with a tentative optimism. "You''re beginning to look all right from a distance," her school friend Nicky had told her. "Only seeing you close-up spoils it. You''re too simple. Get your mother to let you have a really trendy haircut, or a blond streak in the front or something." Laura did not want a blond streak. Mostly she was happy being simple and living simply at home with her mother and her little brother, Jacko. Yet sometimes, confronting the mirror, Nicky''s remark came back like a compliment, suggesting that changes were now possible for her if ever she wanted them.

Out in the big room across the narrow hall, it was Kate''s turn to complain. "I can''t have driven home in just one," she was saying. "I''d have noticed every time I changed gear." "Lost shoe!" announced Jacko as Laura, the towel wrapped clammily around her, ran past him into her bedroom. Once through the door she stopped. Just for a moment something had frightened her, though she had seen and heard absolutely nothing special. Yet, even as she stood there, she felt it again, like the vibration of a plucked string. "I''ve looked absolutely everywhere," Kate said, a familiar note of morning panic creeping into her voice.

Laura, shrugging away that inexplicable tremble in her blood, began to scramble into her school uniform--all regulation clothes except for the underpants, because it was a point of honor with all the girls at school never to wear school underpants. It was a stricter rule than any the school could invent. "It''s going to happen," said a voice. "What''s going to happen?" Laura asked before she realized that the voice had spoken inside her, not outside in the room. It''s a warning, Laura thought with a sinking heart. She had had them before, not often, but in such a way that she had never forgotten them. It always seemed to her afterward that, once she had been warned, she should be able to do something to alter things, but the warning always turned out to be beyond her control. The warning was simply so that she could prepare to be strong about something.

"Still no shoe!" said Jacko, standing in the doorway to report progress. Laura picked up her hairbrush, looking into the mirror in her room, the best one in the house because the light from a window fell directly onto it. She stared at herself intently. I don''t look so childish, she thought, turning her attention from the warning, hoping it might give up and go away. But her reflection was treacherous. Looking at it, she became more than uneasy; she became frightened. Sometimes small alterations are more alarming than big ones. If Laura had been asked how she knew this reflection was not hers she could not have pointed out any alien feature.

The hair was hers, and the eyes were hers, hedged around with the sooty lashes of which she was particularly proud. However, for all that, the face was not her face for it knew something that she did not. It looked back at her from some mysterious place alive with fears and pleasures she could not entirely recognize. There was no doubt about it. The future was not only warning her, but enticing her as it did so. "Stop it!" said Laura aloud, for she was frightened and when she was frightened she often grew fierce. She blinked and shook her head, and when she looked back, there she was as usual: woolly brown hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, marked off from her blond mother and brother because her genes were paying a random tribute to the Polynesian warrior among her eight great-great-grandfathers. "Help!" she said, and bolted across the narrow hall into the room her mother shared with Jacko, which looked empty at first because Kate was on her hands and knees scrabbling under the bed, in case the shoe had hidden itself there during the night.

"Mum!" she said. "No fooling! I''ve had a real warning." "What do you mean?" Kate''s irritated voice struggled up through the mattress. "It''s happened again," Laura said.