The City Community Faith School isn't a reform school; it's a cover for a prison-workhouse in Tim Lott's future catastrophe society. Inside, filthy girls in rags labour at the City's huge laundry. They don't have teachers or lessons. For that matter, they don't have much food either. Taken from their families for petty crimes or for being the children of dissenters, the thousand girls at the school are cruelly dehumanised. They are forbidden to use their real names and are given letters and numbers instead. Privately, they use nicknames for one another but even this is forbidden. One inmate, Little Fearless, refuses to be cowed by the system. She intends to escape and alert the City's residents to their terrible plight. But when she does, nobody will believe her story.