“And do you?” Carlisle asks. “Understand our situation?”
“I think so,” Melanie says. “Yes.” Once again she looks at all three of them in turn, as though she’s aware these words might hurt and is solicitous of their feelings. “You’re weak. Barely surviving. This is hard land to live in and even harder land to farm. Your harvest a few weeks ago was the worst since you arrived here. You don’t have enough food left to see more than half of you through to next spring. Plus I’d imagine you’re starting to see cases of scurvy and rickets because there isn’t enough fruit or calcium in your diet. So even if you survive the winter, you’re going to be in an even worse position going forward. Probably your colony has two or maybe three years left. Maybe not so long.”
She stops speaking, and dead silence follows. Foss exchanges a glance with McQueen, and she’s happy to read in his face that they’re on the same page. They’ll let the colonel take the lead on this one, and they know exactly what he’s going to say. He draws in a long breath and lets it out again, steadying himself, finding words that are equal to the moment.
“You won’t take us easily,” he says, “or without great cost to yourselves.” Melanie tries to break in but he goes on, speaking over her. “I won’t bother to deny what you’ve seen with your own eyes. Yes, we’re weak. Our bodies are. But trust me when I tell you that the people who came here were the strongest Beacon had to offer. They walked four hundred miles for the bare chance of a new life. They’ll do more for the chance to keep it.”
Melanie seems flustered, dismayed. “But …” she says. “Colonel—”
“So come when you’re ready,” Carlisle invites her. “You’ll find us ready, too.”
“Colonel, we came here to help you.”
Carlisle is already turning away as she speaks. He’s caught there, on the cusp of the movement. Melanie laughs—in pure embarrassment, as if she can’t believe they were coming at this conversation from such different angles. That things she took as given still needed to be said.
Someone has to play straight man. Foss finds it’s her. “What are you talking about?” she inquires.
Melanie points off down the slope. The rest of her underdressed entourage have advanced a little, and now they’re setting down boxes and crates in a rough and ready cairn. “Food,” she says, “and medicines. The plastic coolers are full of rabbits, freshly caught as we came up. The wooden crates are apples and greengages. You can eat those, yes?”
“Greengages?” McQueen says. It’s hard to read his tone, but Foss’s mouth has filled with saliva just on hearing the word.
“We thought fresh fruit and protein would be your most pressing needs,” Melanie says. “The rest is negotiable. We don’t cultivate grain for ourselves, obviously, but we can grow it for you. You’ll tell us what you need. What we don’t have, we’ll find or make.”
They’re speechless for a moment or two. Then the colonel, who is still standing half-turned away from the girl, asks her the question that’s uppermost in all their minds.
“Why?”
Melanie doesn’t seem to understand, so he asks again. “Why would you do this?”
“Because we can,” she says. She seems genuinely puzzled by the question. “Because we thought you were all gone and we’re so happy that we were wrong. That your people and my people can meet, and talk, and learn from each other. You’d just have been legends to us, otherwise.” She smiles, as though that thought strikes her as funny. “I know how legends work. In a few generations, there’d be a thousand wild stories about you, and the truth … well, the truth would just be a story a little less interesting than the rest. Now that we’ve found you, we’ll keep looking. Not just up here in Scotland, but elsewhere in the world. We’ve already started to equip an expedition to France and Switzerland. I mean, to the places that used to be France and Switzerland. You might not be the only ones after all.”
The crates and boxes are still piling up at the bottom of the slope. It’s starting to look as though there might even be enough to make a difference.
“Thank you,” the colonel says, with awkward formality. “We appreciate your offer of assistance.”
“You’re very welcome, Colonel Carlisle. But we need to ask a favour in return.”
Here it comes, Foss thinks. The catch. There was bound to be one. Your old? Your sick? Your criminally insane? Who do they think we’ll be prepared to throw into the lunchbasket?
“We’re bringing you something else,” Melanie says, and this time her smile is wider. There’s definitely a joke they’re not getting. “Someone else, I should say. And we want you to make her at home. We want that very much. She’s been on her own for a long time.”
The sound of an engine reaches them on the thin, clear air. It’s coming from the road below the ridge, still hidden from sight by a frozen tide of drifted snow, and it’s been twenty years but Foss would know that basso roar anywhere.
“Oh my sweet Jesus!” she exclaims. “Oh no fucking way!”
Rosie crests the ridge like a ship cresting the horizon, with a stranger at the wheel. A dark-skinned woman in torn and faded fatigues, grimacing with effort as she urges the vehicle’s unwieldy mass slantwise up the sliding scree.
It seems to Foss in the lightness and strangeness of that moment as though the past has swung open in front of her like a door. She never stopped being a part of that crew. Rosie is coming to collect her for another tour of duty, one last mission in-country. And something like relief floods through her at the sight of it. Something like joy.
She thinks: all journeys are the same journey, whether you know it or not, whether you’re moving or not. And the things that look like endings are all just stations on the way.
Acknowledgements