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  “What would you want to go to Mars for?” Doug watched Elliott trying to scoop up the thin layer of snow to squeeze the slush into grubby snowballs. They were more soil than snowflakes. “You want to live in a bubble? A glasshouse? Because that’s what Mars is like. You can’t even go outside for a walk, not without a suit.” He gestured at the cloudless blue sky. “And you’d never see a sky like that.”

  “But they’re going to make it like Earth. With proper air.”

  “Terraforming takes a really long time, Elliott. You’ll be older than me by the time it’s ready.” No, it won’t even be in your lifetime. “Why go to Mars when we need to sort out Earth?”

  “China landed there. They’re building houses.”

  “Well, they were.” News was hard to come by, but maybe that was for the best. Good or bad, there was nothing they could do about it here. “But it’s still not Earth, is it?”

  “Maybe there’ll be more lighthuggers. Then we can go to other stars.”

  Where were those generation ships now? The last ones Doug had heard about had left twenty-odd years ago. “That’s even worse,” he said. He didn’t want the boy to latch on to the idea that they’d been abandoned, even if they had. “Imagine spending your whole life cooped up in a spaceship and never reaching your destination. Folks will be born on them and die on them. It’ll be their great-grandchildren who get there.”

  Elliott scuffed at the soil again. “They don’t want ordinary folks like us anyway. They just want scientists and politicians and rich people.”

  “I bet they’re not very happy, though. The rich people are probably a pain in the butt, the politicians are bound to be bossing everyone around, and the scientists... I read that some of them had pretty strange ideas. How much crazier are they going to get without normal folks around to talk some sense into them?”

  “They’ll probably get smashed up by asteroids or something anyway,” Elliott said, dismissively matter-of-fact. “So can we visit the ocean instead, Grandpa?”

  “There’s still miles of contaminated land between us and the coast.”

  “I know. But it won’t stay like that forever, will it? I’m going to cross it one day.”

  Elliott studied the snowballs with a determined frown before lobbing them across the field. What could Doug tell him? There was no disguising that Kill Line and the surrounding county were almost cut off. Ainatio had spent years creating a sterile cordon around the area, a ring of completely bare ground two miles wide in which every plant had been killed to stop cross-pollination. Elliott could see it for himself if he climbed Gorman’s Peak, but Doug couldn’t kill the boy’s hopes. Asia had kept the die-back at bay. There were still places for a boy to dream of exploring.

  “Yes, it’ll all be okay one day,” Doug said. “Ainatio’s going to find a way to grow plants normally again.”

  Elliott nodded sagely. “It’s like the Black Death, except lots of other things went wrong this time. Whole towns died then as well. But things got better in the end. They always do.”

  “Is that what Mrs Alvarez is teaching you?” She seemed to have given the class an upbeat message without avoiding the brutal reality. Doug left the education committee to its own devices. “Well, she’s right. Humans survive disasters.”

  “I asked her why I can’t work at Ainatio when I grow up. She said everything’s possible.”

  It was a kind lie. Ainatio was a closed society in every sense. It had been a secret research centre for more than a hundred years: its personnel had lived behind secure walls and fencing, a separate world for as long as Doug could remember. Apart from the environmental technicians and the supply managers, he saw very few staff, and he wasn’t sure how the company maintained a workforce now that it was impossible to find new people. There had to be people too old to carry on working and even deaths like in any other company, but somehow, Ainatio kept going like an ant farm.

  Yes, scientists were weird. He’d hadn’t really lied to Elliott about that.

  “I saw Col out testing the soil this morning.” Elliott carried on collecting snow, carefully placing the misshapen grey lumps in a pile, then pointed up the hill, squinting against the sun with one eye closed. “Here’s Mr Montello. Can I call him Chris?”

  “No, you may not. Mind your manners.” Doug watched the man walk carefully through the field, rifle slung over one shoulder. It was hard to tell if he was trying not to slip or just worried that he was trampling crops hidden under the snow. He was considerate for a city boy. It didn’t fit somehow. “You’re going to be late back to school. Get moving, buddy.”

  “Is he coming in for coffee?”

  “Not today. Off you go.”

  Elliott abandoned the snowballs and ran off along the furrows, jumping between them as if he was playing hopscotch. Doug took the track around the edge of the field and headed south down the road out of town. By the time he reached the sign, Chris was already waiting for him a few metres outside the unmarked boundary, another reminder for Doug that time hadn’t just caught him up. It had finally overtaken him.

  Chris held up his hand. “Don’t come too close. Did Jared explain?”

  “He said you need the doctor to check out one of your guys.” This was routine. There was no need to start torching the place. “She’ll be with you as soon she’s finished her morning surgery. Give her an hour.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to head out and see if I can find this woman he’s supposed to have met. Just for reassurance.”

  “You really think she’s infected with something serious?”

  “No, but I need to be sure she wasn’t sent ahead to check out our defences.”

  “Oh. Okay. You need any help with the search? Drones? Men?”

  “It’s best if I do it alone with a dog. The fewer people moving around, the better.”

  “I haven’t told Ainatio, by the way,” Doug said. “Seeing as we don’t actually know if we have a situation.”

  “Don’t worry. They only care when it affects their food supply. They’re safe in the Forbidden City.” Chris shrugged, looking awkward, as if he wasn’t sure that making small talk was a good idea. “We’ve all got our own little fantasy territory, haven’t we?”

  Doug wasn’t sure what he meant, but it wasn’t the time to ask. Standing around in the freezing cold wasn’t doing either of them any good. “Is there anything else you need? Got enough coffee? Liquor?”

  Chris looked awkward again. “We’re good, thanks.” He turned to walk back the way he’d come. “See you around.”

  Doug watched him go, still trying to get the measure of him after nearly two years. He was polite and professional, hair and beard always neatly trimmed, leather jacket and boots battered but polished, pants a little frayed but clean and pressed, nothing like the drifters the town had had to see off with shotguns in the past. Doug was still waiting for something to ignite the man and peel back the mask to reveal something feral, a steel core needed to keep the transit camp together, because it sure as hell had to be there. How old was he? Thirty, thirty-five? All Doug knew was that he’d served in the State Defence Force and had led a group of vets and refugees to this relative safety, no easy task with most of them on foot. He’d also given Doug the impression that he’d been in prison but he didn’t say why. Chris wasn’t chatty. Doug didn’t press him.

  Maybe I should try inviting him over again.

  Maybe, though, the depth of conversation that would follow a couple of beers would tell Doug more than he wanted to know about how his boundaries were patrolled and kept safe in a world where the old laws meant nothing. He didn’t need to know exactly what had happened when more refugees had tried to follow them here. He didn’t want a reason to see Chris as anything but a good guy standing between the town and chaos.

  The heads on spikes thing is just a dumb story. Just a rumour to scare off unwelcome visitors. I’ve ne
ver seen anything when I’ve been driving around.

  As Doug headed back into town, the fried food aroma of a very old engine running on recycled cooking oil hung in the air. He was walking in the wake of Bill Dawud’s ancient tractor. Bill was at the side of the road, tinkering with the engine while it idled.

  “Take it out and shoot it, Bill,” Doug teased. “It’s a kindness.”

  Bill wiped his hands on his pants. “It’ll outlive me.”

  “You could have a nice new hydro model from Ainatio.”

  “Sure, but it wouldn’t be my grandma’s, would it?”

  That bucket of bolts had to be a hundred years old, at the very least, and it had so many replacement parts that it was probably more replacement than original. But that was the point. It wasn’t about being frugal. It was about roots, about having an anchor in the past in a world where most of it had vanished. Doug liked to see the tractor as daily proof that things could survive long after everyone thought they should be dead.

  “Is Mariam still coming to the pot luck supper?” Doug asked.

  “You bet. She’s making tepsi baytinijan. When she starts that, a cough isn’t going to stop her.”

  “Give her my best.”

  “Col’s looking for you, by the way.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Doug could navigate through the town by smell alone. After the cooking oil, there was malt, pumped out on the steamy air venting from the brewery. Then there was the almost perfumed sawdust from the mill, then manure, and then baking — sweet pastry, if he wasn’t mistaken. He paused to close his eyes and inhale. It was a smell of permanence, like the town had been here forever and always would be, its people working in trades that his ancestors would have recognised five centuries ago. But Kill Line’s roots weren’t ancient, and they weren’t rural. There was no statue in the town square commemorating a rugged founding pioneer dressed in frontier buckskin. If there’d been one at all, it would have been a scientist in a lab coat. The town was only here because Ainatio was. The company needed an isolated research facility with a secure water supply and food source, so they took over run-down Nanton Park a hundred and thirty years ago and created a community to service it. Even the town’s name was just the location of where the original housing block had once stood — the kill line, the stop-or-I-fire point of the old security perimeter when Ainatio had much bigger grounds.

  But Doug was content. Whatever its name and origin, this was a happy community with a school, a church, a social centre, and a little cable station showing endless reruns because that was all they had, living with the natural rhythm of the seasons. This was how humans were meant to be. What was it that Chris Montello had said? We’ve all got our own little fantasy territory. Well, this was Doug’s. He understood that very well.

  Colin was outside the town hall, scraping yesterday’s refrozen snow from the roof of his Ainatio pick-up. The guy showed up once a week, collected soil, water, and plant samples, and sent a report to the town council. Had any plants been compromised yet? Had the contaminants from all the failed remedies and accidents over the years started to kill everyone slowly? Col’s tests would tell them.

  “Hey, Col.” Doug nodded at him. “Everything okay?”

  Colin gave him a big smile. He’d been coming here for at least ten years, but Doug still couldn’t recall his surname. He had two daughters and a rather miserable wife who’d turned up once at the town fair.

  “Someone with a whiter coat than me needs to check that,” Colin said. “But I found some snowdrops on the western boundary. That’s a first.”

  Doug tried to think where they might be. “My grandad used to rip them up. He was cranky about non-native species. Haven’t seen snowdrops since my school days. Where are they?”

  “You’re not going to root them out, are you? They don’t compete with other plants.”

  “No, I’m just getting old and nostalgic.”

  “Here.” Col held out his personal screen so that Doug could see the map and sync it with his own. “It’s marked as McKinnon’s Farm on the old county survey. Got it?”

  Doug tapped his device. “Thanks.”

  They were just plants, but he felt the need to see them. They wouldn’t be in flower for long and he never counted on still being around in a year’s time himself. He signed out the town council’s truck and drove down to the boundary.

  Hart County — the part that was still safe for habitation — was now reduced to ninety square miles with an outer perimeter that took it to two hundred. That didn’t sound like much, but it was plenty of space to get lost in and more than enough to hide a colony of snowdrops. Doug drove west, keeping an eye on the dosimeter on the dashboard. The road eventually became a winding track through the woods, then a bumpy gap just wide enough for the truck.

  He stopped a couple of times to watch deer browsing in the bare red branches of dogwood trees. Did they have ear tags? Yes. There was no need to panic. If they didn’t have the bright yellow tags that identified them as the local population, they’d be animals that had somehow breached the cordon and could have brought in contaminated plant material. Chris’s patrols were always on the lookout for intruders, regardless of species. Doug mulled over the thought of venison for the freezer, but he didn’t have his rifle with him.

  And we’ve got plenty of meat. Leave them in peace.

  It took him fifteen minutes on foot with a compass to find the McKinnon site. The only signs that a farm had ever been there were the rubble of a long collapsed chimney and a couple of decaying fence posts. He almost missed the snowdrops, but suddenly there they were: white on white, a carpet of green leaves poking up through the thin layer of snow between the trees. Doug pulled out his screen to take a picture, kneeling to get a closer view of the green-streaked blooms, and decided that the woods could spare a few bulbs. He dug up some with his hunting knife, wrapped them carefully in his handkerchief, and got to his feet. His knees hurt like hell. But he had snowdrops, the first for a very long time, and like the leeks, they refused to give in to frost and snow. They were a defiant symbol of the sheer tenacity of life in inhospitable places.

  Joanne would love them.

  She was making bread when he got back, her usual batch of a dozen loaves for their own use and a dozen for the food exchange. She stopped pounding the dough as he held out the bundle of uprooted plants. Her mouth opened slowly.

  “Oh my,” she said. “Where did you get those?”

  “Near the boundary. Col said he’d seen them, so... well, there were hundreds of them, so I thought we might plant some here. Remember they don’t really establish themselves in the first year.”

  “So it’ll be two years before I get a decent display.”

  “Afraid so. Don’t worry, you’ll still be here to see them.”

  “And so will you. Don’t talk like that.”

  Grandad wouldn’t have approved, but Joanne did, and that was all that mattered. After lunch, she went outside to plant them in the shadow of the bushes. Doug climbed the rickety ladder to the attic to see if there were any old photos of the McKinnon farm.

  The Brandt family photos were more of a crate than an album. The collection was a pile of boxes stuffed with envelopes full of paper prints, digital storage, and even physical film, much of it copied and recopied to paper or chip as technologies fell out of use over the years. He’d forgotten that some of it dated back to before his grandad’s time. He rummaged around until he found an envelope marked in his father’s draughtsman hand: HART COUNTY, GENERAL.

  The oldest landscapes in the photos showed the change in vegetation. Views from Gorman’s Peak a hundred years ago were still pasture and woods as far as the eye could see, but it didn’t look that way now. Doug fanned the prints like playing cards, looking for old buildings. An image caught his eye.

  On first glance he thought it was a headstone, but then he s
tudied it and a memory bubbled to the surface. It was a monument, a bronze plaque mounted on stone or concrete. It was hard to tell which, because whoever had taken it had zoomed in to capture the inscription, and there was nothing in the shot to tell him what the plaque was part of, or where it stood. But the inscription was self-explanatory.

  TO THE MEMORY OF THE SHIP’S COMPANY

  OF SURVEY VESSEL CABOT

  LOST WITH ALL HANDS

  WE WALK IN THE UNCHARTED PLACES

  AND ARE NOT AFRAID

  Doug remembered now. The memory was complete and clear, but it had popped up so quickly out of nowhere that he wondered if he’d imagined it. It was an Ainatio mission, the one that had killed their space programme and reduced them to environmental projects at home. They’d sent a manned mission beyond the solar system — he couldn’t even remember where it was heading — but the ship was lost. It wasn’t a tech corporation lighthugger full of crazies, either. It’d had a proper military crew, and they’d been put into cryosuspension for the journey, which everyone said was way too far and too big a risk. But they did it anyway.

  At least the crew would have known nothing when the disaster struck. Doug took some comfort from that.

  Where was this plaque, then? Maybe it wasn’t even around here.

  Joanne appeared in the attic doorway, her nose and cheeks red from working in the cold. “What are you looking for?”

  “Oh, just the McKinnon place.” Doug held out the image to her. “Do you remember this?”

  “Cabot? Wow, yes. How could you forget it? It was all over the news for weeks.”

  “I don’t think I ever saw this memorial.”

  “Me neither. Some honouring we did.” Joanne frowned at the photo. “You’d think they’d have put the crew’s names on it.”