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through the quiet, steaming streets to the gate. The walk left me breathless. Aches and pains that had not been so present when I was a younger woman were
making themselves felt. I leaned against the warming stone of the guard gate for a moment to catch my breath. Pride perhaps, but even in the colony, I didn’t want to show too much
weakness.
    The guard was a woman who was vaguely familiar to me, a squat girl, with stumps where some of her fingers should have been. But she was bright enough: I could see the glimpse of it in her face,
and you learn to recognize that sort of thing here.
    She said, ‘High Counsellor, you’re here.’ She looked relieved; her own responsibility lessened by my arrival. ‘I think there’s another one coming.’
    ‘You think?’
    ‘I’m not sure. I saw something up on the ridge. It was too tall for a carne and it moved in the wrong way.’
    I took her binoculars – more men’s tech, stolen and precious – and peered through them. Up on the heights of the mountains, the light lay heavy and slanted with the sun’s
rise. Beyond the gate, the earth was already smouldering. But up in the mountains it looked pale and bleached and cold – an illusion, I knew, for the summits were baked bare by the long
summer, the earth cracked and arid. Everything was in retreat: water, beasts, plants, sinking down into the earth and crevices of rock until the first of the day-rains. If someone had made it
across, at this time of year, it was a miracle.
    And yet, in the next few minutes, I saw that a miracle had happened. The guard had been right to call me: there was someone there. Impossible to tell whether it was male or female from this
distance, but I chose to believe it was a woman.
    She was stumbling as she walked, weaving from side to side. Illness, lack of water, fatigue, abuse, or perhaps all of these. I knew we were going to have to go out there and bring her in, and it
might already be too late. Not many of them made it as far as the colony: those who did spoke of the corpses, mummified in the dry air, all of them gazing south as if the north was still something
to turn your back on, even in death.
    I should not have offered to go myself. The walk down here had given me warning and I expected to pay for it later, with a night of wheezing and cramps in the chest. But that same old pride bit
back now, making me say, ‘Fetch the land-car and Seliye. I’ll go with you.’
    It took a few minutes for Seliye, roused from sleep, to come down the stairs. After what she’d been through, she could have had a room in the central buildings – I’d offered
her a chamber in the tower – but she preferred to stay here, facing north, watching and waiting. We all knew who for; knew, too, that the daughter she waited for would never come. But Seliye
still held tight to hope, lived quietly and watchful in the guardhouse, was often the first one out whenever a new person was spotted.
    ‘Hunan?’ she said when she saw me. ‘You’re up early.’
    ‘I had good reason to be.’
    She raised an eyebrow, dark against the darkness of her skin, and I realized that the guard had woken her, not told her.
    ‘There’s another,’ I said.
    Seliye grew very still, like a lizard.
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Up on the ridge. She made it over. We saw her fall. We need to hurry.’
    ‘You’re sure it’s a woman?’
    We stared at one another. I did not need to reply.
    She gave a curt nod. ‘We’ll need water, a med kit,’ she said. She was speaking more to herself than to me, I thought. But then she gave me a sharp kind of look, the sort that
told me she had taken in far more than I’d thought.
    ‘You’re coming with us, Hunan? Are you well enough?’
    ‘I’ll manage.’
    She nodded. ‘It’s up to you.’ But I could see from her face that she disapproved.
    At that time of the morning, the compound was quiet. Whirls of dust spun around the land-car as we started it up, the roar of the old engine loud in the