Chapter 115: Borrowed Walls

What I knew about the boars was mostly footprints.

I’d cut their sign twice on the way over and gone out of my way to read it properly, because you don’t walk past a track that size and decide to be curious later. Stoneback tracks are unmistakable — a cloven print the width of two hands with the plates of the leg pressing a second mark behind it, so it reads like a hoof followed by a slab.

"Level nine to twelve on the ones closest to you," I said. "Four or five animals. They’re crossing the service road twice a day and lying up somewhere south in the afternoon." I looked at the wagon, at the sacks stacked under the tarp beside it. "How much grain?"

Mira didn’t answer immediately. One of the men behind her did.

"Two hundred and forty kilos, near enough." Older, sixties, with the round-shouldered look of a man who has spent his life leaning over machinery. "Plus the preserved. Why?"

"Because that’s why they’re here."

"They’re here because they’re monsters," said the woman by the cook fire, without turning round. She was younger than Mira, sharp-faced, and she had not stopped moving since I appeared. Two children sat on the crate behind her, exactly where she could reach them without looking.

"They’re here because you’ve got a quarter tonne of grain under a tarp and they can smell it from a kilometre off," I said. "Stonebacks aren’t hunting you. They’re animals with plates on and a route, and your food is sitting on their route. That’s better news than the alternative, but it doesn’t make them less heavy."

The older man made a small noise that might have been agreement.

His name was Sefton Grier. He’d repaired combine harvesters and irrigation pumps for forty years in a district that no longer existed, and over the next hour he asked me three questions, all of them about the axle housing on my compound’s dead flatbed and whether the bearing race was the same gauge. Mira asked about my water. The sharp-faced woman, whose name was Nell Abbot, asked nothing at all and watched me the entire time.

The man with the ankle was Otto Rennick. He weighed about as much as two of me and was deeply embarrassed about the crate.

Their shelter had been a converted grain store south of here. They had left it eleven days earlier after the migration came through — not deliberately, Sefton said, just a herd moving and a wall that turned out to be a suggestion — and took the roof off the storage building with the winter food inside.

"You left before you had to," I said.

Mira looked up from the strap she was mending. "We left while we still had a choice about it. There’s a difference, and by spring half the people who don’t understand it will be dead."

I decided I liked her, noted the fact, and set it aside as unhelpful.

❖ ❖ ❖

Otto’s ankle settled it.

Nine adults, four children, one man who could not walk, one wagon that would take Sefton most of a day to make roll. Greyhaven was thirteen kilometres of open service road, the herd was crossing it, and the light was already going long.

"One night," I said. "Behind my fence. Not a place to live, not an arrangement, and nobody owes me anything in the morning."

Mira put the strap down. "No."

Somebody behind her started to object. She raised one finger without turning round and they stopped.

"Not no. Not yet." She stood. "I’ll walk over and look at it first, and you’ll give me your rules standing in your own yard where I can see whether the place matches them. Then I’ll come back and we’ll decide together." Her eyes stayed level on mine. "I’ve seen what a fence looks like from the inside when the man who owns it changes his mind. So has Nell. If you find that insulting, we’ll stay here."

"I’d have thought less of you if you’d said yes."

"Then we’ll get on."

She walked over with me and back inside three hours, and whatever she told them, she told them out of my hearing, which was also correct.

They came in with most of the afternoon still left — wagon on three wheels and a pole, Otto riding it with his boot off — and I opened the pedestrian gate and stood beside it and let thirteen people walk past me into a compound that had held exactly one person since I claimed it.

I have defended that fence. I took it off a hound pack, one animal at a time, over eleven days. I know every weak post in it and I have opinions about all of them.

It stops being a fence when there are thirteen lives behind it. It becomes the thing between them and everything else, and that is a different object entirely, and I felt the change in my chest as they filed past.

❖ ❖ ❖

Intake took an hour and was entirely practical.

Two families in the east block, the single adults in the north, Otto on the ground floor because stairs were not going to happen. Washroom here, water point here, left tap treated and right tap not — and Mira checked both before she let anybody drink. Fires only in the yard pit, never inside, because half these buildings have a paint on the ceiling I wouldn’t want to breathe.

"Rules," I said, in the yard, with all nine adults there. "Five. Nobody steals. No fires except the pit. Nobody opens either gate alone, day or night. Nobody goes into that workshop" — I pointed — "without asking me. And anybody can leave whenever they want, including in the middle of the night, and the only thing I ask is that you wake me so I can shut the gate behind you."

Nell Abbot said, "What about our weapons?"

"They’re yours. Keep them on you if you want."

"That’s it?"

"That’s it. If I ever meet the sort of place that takes your weapons and gives you a number instead, remind me to burn it down."

I got a laugh out of Sefton and a long assessing look out of Mira, and Nell Abbot did not change expression at all, which was fine. She hadn’t come here to like me.

Nobody had to be told to work. That’s the part that surprised me and shouldn’t have. Sefton had the flatbed’s axle housing stripped before the light went, and pronounced the bearing race "near enough, and near enough is a wagon." Nell cooked from their own stores without being asked and without offering me any, which was the correct way round. And Mira walked my water lines end to end with a spanner and a piece of chalk, marking joints, and came back to tell me that my second tank had been slowly emptying into the ground for a month through a coupling nobody had ever tightened.

"How long?" I said.

"Since before you got here, probably." She wiped her hands. "You’d have found it in July when the tank went dry and you’d have blamed the pump. Half the men I’ve met would have replaced the pump."

Don’t get attached to this, I thought. It’s one night.

[Blind Call natural recovery complete.]

[Blind Call Charges: 1/1.]

It arrived late in the afternoon while I was carrying a crate, seventy-two hours after Nyssara returned, and I stopped in the middle of the yard with it.

Full charge. And thirteen strangers inside my perimeter, four of them children, and a roll that could put an armed adult from another world down on the concrete with no warning at all — someone terrified, or furious, or on fire.

I thought about Nyssara arriving with her arm alight and her hall gone.

No.

Nothing stopped me. The System doesn’t have an opinion; it never has. I simply didn’t spend it, and I went on carrying the crate, and that was the first time keeping a charge felt like a decision instead of an absence.

❖ ❖ ❖

An hour before dark I walked the western approach and found what I’d half expected.

Fresh Stoneback sign inside my own perimeter line, three hundred metres out. Two animals, moving slowly, stopping. Turning. The grain was in the yard now, and the wind had been westerly all afternoon.

I moved the sacks into the sealed store and washed down the boards they’d sat on. I ran wire between the western posts at knee height with a dozen tins on it. I re-drove four posts on the weak section behind the storage row and doubled the mesh where the hounds had once come through, and I told the adults exactly what was outside and why, without decorating it.

"Are they coming?" Otto asked, from his chair.

"Probably. Not for you. For the grain."

"Does that help?"

"It helps me," I said. "It means I know where they’ll go."

They went to bed. I put out the yard lamp and sat on the workshop roof with the rifle across my knees and let my eyes adjust.

At twenty past one in the morning, out in the dark to the west, one of my tins made a single soft sound — one note, the note a wire makes when something enormous touches it and stops.

Then nothing.

Then the weight of it moving off, unhurried, along the outside of the fence, working steadily around toward the vehicle gate.