"Of course you're welcome to stay," Rose told them as they sat around the table in the aftermath of the conversation. She had placed one hand on Manot's arm, the young woman still hunched over with her face buried in her hands. "We welcome all survivors, whatever they bring. And you have a radio!" This had cheered all the elders. "Our last radio died years ago, and we've had no contact with the outside world at all since. They would occasionally send us things." Her voice trailed off at that – somehow everyone felt that the world outside had hardened itself against them in the last decade, and no one felt any hope that they would receive new shipments.
"Thanks," Manot whispered from between her hands. She sat up, took a deep sigh and dragged the radio set towards herself. "I'm going to search for signals," She announced, half to the room and half to O'Connor. "We had another radio operator on board, maybe he got out with the other set." From folds within the backpack she pulled out a slick-looking liquid crystal device and began fussing around the radio, pushing buttons and flicking her finger across a green and black display. Healey watched with interest as the other elders continued their conversation with O'Connor.
A decade ago they had managed to salvage a radio set from a military vehicle they found in a garage, and with a lot of effort had got it working and set up the radio mast behind the meeting hall. For weeks they had sat with the machine, patiently scanning through channels and bleating pleas for help to the ether until one fateful day someone on a ship had caught their signal, and the thinnest tether of human connection had been established between Tintagel and the mainland. For one blissful year they had received occasional deliveries of supplies, floated into the cove beneath the tower on jury-rigged barges. Solar panels, medicines, clean and fresh surgical supplies, cloth and clothing, a sewing machine, more solar panels, a computer and, most glorious of all, text books on everything they needed to know to make things work. Then, though, they had started begging for a satellite dish, a permanent and reliable means of interacting with the outside world, and the communication had become sporadic, infrequent, finally ended altogether. A year after that something in the radio broke, and no matter how they tried they could not solve the riddle of its circuits. Could you really expect more from a radio that was probably old when the Quickening happened, scavenged 20 years later from a garage somewhere in Cornwall? They had given up on communicating with the outside world, and committed to husbanding the resources they had been sent. They scavenged batteries from cars across the area and set up a shoddy battery array to store electricity from the solar panels, built a rudimentary electricity network among the huts so people could have a little light in the evenings, set up a clinic where the community's midwife and nurse could at least provide basic medical care. Then the Doctor had arrived, and although he was gone now he had set to work training a replacement. There was hope that they could make it another couple of decades until the attitude in the outside changed or the ravagers finally disappeared and they might be offered another chance at salvation. If not for the elders, for their children there might be a hope of seeing the world outside, living in safety.
"They tried to reconnect 28 years ago," O'Connor was telling them. "Before I was born. We get told about it at UNIQA. A beachhead in London, then they were going to move inland. They brought refugees in from Europe. But it went wrong, the virus broke out again, it almost infected France. Then there was an incident when I was in high school, maybe … maybe 10 years ago. A forced landing by a passenger plane. They sent some soldiers to try and rescue people but they disappeared. Everyone. After that they decided no more interventions. Planes don't fly over, civilian boats aren't allowed near, it's a dead zone. And we get told when we sign up, if your ship runs aground you're on your own."
"Why'd you join up then?" Flitters asked him. "Sounds crazy."
"Not much else to do," O'Connor told her. "And the money's good. Everyone thinks it's no risk. No one has tried to leave the island in a boat for years, so you just cruise around being paid danger money to search for nothing. We didn't know you were here, even. And who thinks their boat is gonna run aground? Maybe it wasn't like this for you before the outbreak, but we have complete satellite coverage now, no one runs their boat aground."
"Except you," Rose observed tartly.
"You didn't know we were here because nobody told you," Arthur pointed out quietly. "They knew we were here, because we talked to them a decade ago. And satellites you say? So they've gotta have pictures of this place."
"No point in going over this again, Arthur," Healey interrupted, gripping Arthur by the shoulder as he spoke. "We already guessed all this. But O'Connor here can send his reports back, and maybe we can convince them to send us more stuff. Maybe his reports will help."
"We should take him on a tour," Flitters muttered, and Arthur was about to add to her cynicism when Manot interrupted them.
"I found something," she announced, frowning down at the screen. "There's another radio operator out there," the thin whine of the radio and buzz of static adding gravity to her statement. "Someone's out there."
"Where?" O'Connor asked, leaning forward with an urgent expression. "Where?"
"Not sure," Manot replied tersely, fiddling with the equipment. "Can't seem to get a response."
"Where?" he pressed, but she waved him to silence, frowning and flicking her fingers across the screen. After a few minutes of tense silence she tossed the little tablet aside and spun the map on the table to face her, tracing coordinates and map references across the wrinkled lines of the page. "Here, I think," She said finally, stabbing one finger at a point on the map. They crowded over.
"That's weird," Flitters grunted, when they saw where she was pointing. "It's the other side of the point."
Manot and O'Connor looked at her in confusion, and she leaned over to point to the red X on the map that marked Tintagel. "You're here," she told them, speaking quickly and tapping her finger on the mark. She drew her finger slightly south, along the coast away from Manot's. "Healey says you were found down this way. Which means your ship grounded down here somewhere." She pointed to an area a little south, on the almost perfectly vertical line of coast that dropped away south of Tintagel. "Lots of rocks, small bays, all the way around the point to Newquay, where you definitely don't want to go." The other elders grunted agreement at that. "But Manot thinks the radio's up here." She drew her nail back north to Tintagel, and then further along the coast to the northeast, in the opposite direction. "So if the radio's there they had to walk it two, three times as far as you walked, cross over our whole hunting and gathering range, and get back to the sea without us or any ravagers finding them." She sat back in her chair, waving her hand dismissively. "That's two nights in the wilderness, crossing near the waterfall probably, through forest with no paths. Doubtful."
"We do that when we visit the Coves," Healey pointed out.
"What's the Coves?" O'Connor asked.
"Another group of survivors," Rose told him. "On the south coast. They live in a couple of sheltered beaches. We sometimes exchange stuff. People, goods, ideas. It takes about a week, we do it maybe once a year."
"So it can be done," Manot pointed out. "Maybe they got lost, walked past you in the night. Maybe they were lucky."
"Nobody's lucky out past the Wall of Silence," Rose said quietly. "Out there it's just the quick and the dead. No room for the lucky."
"Beginner's luck?" O'Connor suggested, and everyone laughed. "We should go and find them," He added, sensing a chance in the wake of his joke.
"You don't have to follow orders now," Flitters pointed out to him.
"We can't just let them die out there," Manot pressed, speaking urgently, perhaps worried O'Connor was going to listen to reason.
"Oh yes we can," Arthur replied. "We all have. Loved ones. Children. Family. Everyone you see around you and everyone inside those walls out there has left someone to die."
The air chilled in the aftermath of his pronouncement. Flitters looked down at her hands, shuffled them nervously, and Healey fixed his gaze on the auburn cascade of her hair where it hid her face, trying not to think about his own compromises. Rose, with more horror in her past than any of them, went still.
"They have a radio," Manot pointed out finally, after the silence had stretched. "Maybe more guns. Body armor. With a second radio you could …" She paused, latched onto something. "You could take one to the Coves, and then communicate with them all the time."
"She has a point," Arthur observed after a moment. "And they might have books, or another computer. Who knows. Knowledge of the outside. We need that."
"The ship had a doctor," Manot added, seeing the tide turning. "If she's with them…" She left the thought hanging like bait in a stream.
"Fuck, she's right," Flitters said finally, pounding the cushion behind Rose with an explosion of disgust. "We should send a team."
"I don't like it," Healey told her. "I know we need a radio, but look where it is. We already have this one." He gestured to the radio on the table. "Is it worth the risk?"
"Our last one died because we didn't have spares. A second radio means we can repair the first. Or give it to the Coves like she says." Arthur was on the case now, waving his hand in Manot's direction in recognition of her point. "If they have a doctor or a nurse in their group..."
"We can get all that from their ship," Healey rebutted the suggestion. "We can get to it by boat if it's close. No ravagers. Salvage what we can."
"And if the tide's washed it away?" Rose asked him. "This team will die out there and we won't know where their stuff is lost, and we get nothing."
"They could die out there," Manot pressed. "Don't you care?"
Healey looked across at her, his face blank. "You didn't care when you were floating safe out on the sea," he observed. "And you won't be leaving these walls to do this, will you? Not with your leg broken."
She shrank back before his cold anger, went silent, and he immediately regretted his harshness. She couldn't have seen more than 25 summers, none of them as desperate as even a day in their lives, and he couldn't expect her to even know they existed from out there across the sea. When he was eighteen he had wanted to go back for the already dead as well, and although he had learnt the hard way that to do so was a suicidal error, he should not be harsh on those who had not yet been forced into his grim calculus. She would be spending the rest of her life on this island of hard choices, there was plenty of time for her to learn to see things the way the elders did.
"Sorry Manot," he apologized, sighing and running his hand through his thinning hair as he did so. "That was mean. Okay, I agree, we go." Seeing the sudden light of hope on her and O'Connor's face, he held up a protesting hand. "But I don't like it. Something about this isn't right." He turned to face Rose. "Why did the radio operator think the ship was still out to sea? Who contacted him to say they were near Cardiff? Was it that radio operator?" He pointed at the map. "How did they make it across our range all the way over to Crackington?" And then, saying the words, he drew a sharp breath.
"Fuck," Arthur cursed, breathing out slowly with disgust.
"Oh dear," Rose added. "That does complicate things."
"What's wrong with Crackington?" Manot asked, mispronouncing the word with her French accent.
"It's just outside the Gorgon's territory," Flitters told her, "Which we do not go near. Not ever."
"The what?" O'Connor asked. "Is that like a gang or something?"
Healey shook his head vigorously. "There are no gangs in England, big man. No one here has time or energy to fight other people anymore. The Gorgon's a monster."
"We call them Alphas," Arthur explained. "Some kind of freak ravager. They're bigger and stronger and faster, and smart. Kind of."
"Rat cunning smart," Flitters put in.
"And they organize ravagers," Ruth added. "So we don't go near its turf."
"We could steer around," Arthur mused, running his finger along the coastline. "Stick to the cliffs, stay the night at Bucky's rest, then do a short run along the coast the next day. From Bucky's rest we could get there, do a quick search, and get out before the Gorgon has any clue we're there." Running his finger down from the beach to areas further inland, he added, "Might not even bother to come out to us, if we stick well clear. The forest near the cliffs isn't very thick either."
Healey was listening, but he was watching O'Connor and Manot's reaction as they learnt about one of the many mysteries of their new land, mysteries that the elders had uncovered over years of struggle and pain. The Gorgon, and the other Alphas that ruled the inlands, were just the latest and not even the most horrid of the secrets of the Quickened Earth that they had been forced to come to terms with in the decades of their abandonment. None, perhaps, as grotesque as the things they had discovered about their own and others' humanity in the early weeks and years after the Quickening, when survival had called for terrible compromises and vicious and heinous acts of cruelty, but new layers of horror nonetheless. Both O'Connor and Manot looked shocked at the revelation that the ravagers had begun to form a society, however primitive, but O'Connor finally put on his brave-young-man face, reached to pat his gun leaning against the chair next to him. "It's a good thing I've brought my Gorgon-killer then, ain't it?" He blurted, looking suddenly slightly crestfallen when none of the elders cheered his wonder-weapon.
"Maybe," Arthur conceded. "But let's hope you can get in and out without using it." He looked around, first to Rose and then to Flitters and finally Healey. "Shall we do it?"
They nodded, but Healey felt compelled to add conditions. "I want to go," he told them, raising a hand to silence them as they prepared to object. "With O'Connor here. I want to take Lily, so we can track the Gorgon and his gangs. With a full scouting group, and two Wildlings for messengers." Seeing their frowns and sensing their desire to object, he rushed on. "I don't like the look of this. Why can't Manot get a contact? Why did their contact think they went all the way to Cardiff? Who was on the radio in the morning, from where? How did this radio cross over all our lands without us or the ravagers noticing? Something's wrong, and I want us to go ready and careful. And I think an elder should go, in case decisions need to be made. You all know Lily works best with me."
He raised his chin, ready for one of them to give voice to everyone's doubts about his closeness with the Liminal woman, but nobody spoke. After so many years, perhaps they accepted this failing of his. They nodded, and finally Rose, as the eldest, gave voice to the group's decision. "Okay, go with them and take Lily. You choose your wildling messengers, and take O'Connor. You can instruct him about proper disciplines on the way. If you are not back in five days, we will assume you dead."
He nodded, checked the time, stood up. "Have your lunch, O'Connor," he ordered the big man. "We leave by two."