“Okay,” Foss agrees. “But I’ll lead, Isaac. You don’t have to come.”
“Yes,” he tells her. “I do.”
So it takes a good long time for them to get out onto the moraine, and after that they slow down more than somewhat. Foss could wish that the colonel had left this in her hands, though she knows why he hasn’t. The people who left Beacon to found this precarious community put their trust in his name and reputation. He carries that responsibility like a physical weight.
All the same, she would have preferred for them to make their stand further down the plateau—if only because it will give the rest of the good citizens of Rosie’s Town more of a head start if the balloon goes up.
A hundred yards down from the north-eastern edge of the moraine, there is a rock shaped a little bit like a squatting rabbit. A small burn cuts in front of its base. McQueen is waiting for them there, and he gives them a nod of greeting as they come up.
“They’re almost here,” he says, with a sidelong flick of his gaze. “I’ve wired the rock with C4 in a couple of places, so we can throw them a decent party if we have to. This is a good enough place to wait.”
Foss agrees. The sentries above will be able to see them clearly, so she doesn’t have to worry about getting the signal out.
They space themselves out to either side of the colonel, rifles at parade rest, while their visitors climb the last few hundred yards up the slope. When McQueen judges that they’re close enough, he waves them to a halt. They understand his gesture and they obey it, which has to count as a good start. Nobody’s ripping anybody’s throat out, or at least not yet a while.
So young, Foss thinks again: and, weirdly, so beautiful. The whites of their eyes are Cordyceps-grey, but their skin is perfect—not dried out and broken with frost, scaly from vitamin B deficiency or ridged with keloid scars. They even look a little tanned, which suggests they may have started their journey a long way further south.
That’s not true of their leader, though. She’s white-blonde and albino-pale, her skin utterly without pigment. Her age is difficult to guess but she’s certainly not the oldest here. She carries herself with an unselfconscious grace, without arrogance, almost without emphasis. Her short-sleeved shirt (it must be twenty below!) is a plain lemon yellow and her trousers—muddy, threadbare—are tucked into battered, well-worn boots. She wears no badge of office. But when she stands forward, the others drop back, deferential, attentive, completely silent.
“I’m Melanie,” she says. “Good morning to you all.”
In polished English, beautifully enunciated. Foss’s scalp prickles. What she has expected, up to now, is a sort of pantomime of grimaces and gesticulations. It never occurred to her that the second-gen hungries would have learned a language, or that if they did it would be this one.
“Isaac Carlisle,” the colonel says.
“Colonel Isaac Carlisle,” Foss corrects.
“And that is Kat Foss, while to my right is Daniel McQueen.”
The woman looks at each of them in turn, takes time to assess them. It’s a close enough examination that Foss tenses a little and starts to measure distances and angles. If Snow White here wants to start something, they’ll meet her halfway.
“We’ve been looking for you for a long time, Colonel Carlisle,” the woman says.
Carlisle says nothing, but McQueen rises to the bait and Foss is not surprised. “Really?” he says. “And why’s that?”
The woman—Melanie—holds her arms out from her sides, palms open. “We didn’t think there were any of you left,” she says. “It seemed too much to hope for. But we didn’t want to give up the search while there was still a chance.”
Is it Foss’s imagination, or did one of the guys further back just lick his lips? “There are plenty of us left,” she says. “Up here, and in lots of other places besides.”
“No.” The word is flat, unemphatic. Melanie shakes her head. “The world is poison to you now. Apart from this one place, apparently. Beacon and the junker tribes died out at the same time, and then there was just us. Or so we thought.”
“That’s a cute little euphemism,” McQueen observes. “Died out. You mean they were eaten, right?”
“No.” Melanie looks cast down for a moment. Guilty, almost. “The Cordyceps pathogen became airborne. All humans everywhere became hungries, all at once. Except for you.”
Foss is stunned by the words. Not because they come as a surprise. Nobody who has left the mountain has ever come back, in more than a decade, or else they came back changed, rabid, whether they had bite marks on them or not. It’s been plain for a long time that the plateau is an island in an invisible but toxic ocean. But still, to hear it said fills her, in a few moments, with a decade’s worth of fear and grieving. It’s one thing to be an exile and another thing to know it. She hadn’t even realised she was lying to herself until she feels the tears freezing on her cheeks.
“Then how did you know to look for us?” Carlisle demands. Mild, not confrontational, not acknowledging the hopelessness of their position.
Melanie’s face creases with earnestness. “We didn’t,” she says. “I told you. It was just that we wanted to do everything we could before we finally, officially gave up the search. Some friends of mine looked at old records from before the Breakdown, and drew up a list of places where extreme weather patterns or unusual microclimates might offer some …” she chooses the word with care “ … protection for you. I’ve had teams searching those areas for years now, whenever they could be spared from other work. And finally, last year, they found you. Everyone was really excited when they brought the news back.”
“Yeah,” McQueen says, deadpan. “I bet. Nothing like varying the menu.”
Melanie’s five companions bridle at this. They try to keep up their expressions of disciplined impassivity, but anger shows itself momentarily, here and there, in the twitch of a mouth or the narrowing of an eye—like small sparks struck off grey stone. One of the five clenches his fists, then slowly relaxes them again as Melanie goes on in the same even tone.
“We didn’t announce ourselves at once, because we wanted to be sure we understood your situation. We’ve been watching from a distance, as discreetly as we could. Building up a picture.”