On the stroke of midnight, as her 18th birthday clock chimes in the cramped bedroom she’s shared with her younger siblings for a decade, Elara slips out the back door of her family’s terrace house in a forgotten corner of the UK. In her worn rucksack: one change of clothes, a second-hand laptop charged to full, her birth certificate, £200 in cash saved from three years of secret weekend shifts at a laundrette, and a single notebook filled with scribbled business ideas she’d hidden under her mattress.