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case of scarcities and emergencies.
    Some spoke of going back. A mother with a diabetic kid. Folk who found that advancing age wasn’t mixing well with the hard work of farming. A few who just seemed to feel scared without the backing of the government, however remote it was. But others, like Helen’s dad, urged nobody to leave. They all relied on each other. They had put together a spectrum of complementary skills that enabled them to survive if they worked together. They couldn’t let the community they’d built be pulled apart. And so on.
    Reese Henry let it all ramble on, and run down. They broke up without resolution.
    The next morning, however, the sun rose on schedule, the chickens needed feeding and the water needed toting from the well, and somehow life went on.
    Three months later.
    Helen’s sister Katie had quietly brought forward her wedding. She and Harry Bergreen had been planning to wait until the following year, when they were hoping for a proper house-raising. Everybody knew that they were getting married now while Mom was still around to see it.
    Helen was enough of a girly girl that she had grown up dreaming of fairytale-princess weddings. Well, this day turned out to be a pioneers’ wedding. Kind of different, but still fun.
    The guests had started arriving early, but Katie and Harry and their families were ready to meet them. Bride and groom were dressed in informal clothes, no white gowns or morning suits here, but Katie was wearing a small, pretty veil made by sister Helen from the lining of an old hiking jumpsuit.
    As time wore on people showed up from outside Reboot itself, friends and acquaintances from communities like New Scarsdale and even further afield. The guests brought gifts: flowers and food for the day, and practical stuff – cutlery, pots, plates, coffee pots, kettles, frying pans, a hearth set, a boot scraper. Some of this stuff had been made locally, pottery cast on Reboot wheels, or iron gadgets hammered out in Reboot forges. It didn’t look much, piled up before the Greens’ big hearth, but Helen realized it soon amounted to pretty much all a young couple would need to equip their first home.
    Around noon Reese Henry arrived. Wearing a reasonably smart jacket, clean jeans and boots, and a string tie, he scrubbed up well. Helen knew that nobody in Reboot took ‘Mayor Henry’ as seriously as he took himself. But still, you needed one individual in a community with the authority to formalize a marriage – an authority backed by some remote government, or not – and he played the part well. Plus his hair was magnificent.
    And when Harry Bergreen kissed his bride a little after midday and everybody applauded, and the bride’s mother held on to her husband’s arm to make sure she stayed standing for the pictures, even Bill the mailman had tears welling in his eyes.
    That one was a good day, Helen recorded in her journal.
    And three months later:
    ‘2nd baby for Betty Doak Hansen. Hlthy B, 7lb. Mthr ill, ndd stches & bld . . .’
    Helen had been tired. Too tired to write in this damn code in her journal, even if they did have to conserve paper now.
    This latest delivery hadn’t been a bad birth, as they went. Belle Doak and her little team of midwives and helpers, including Helen, were pretty competent at it by now. Although, this morning, it had been a close-run thing. Helen had to run around town asking for blood donors. They were all walking blood banks, for the benefit of their neighbours. But it wasn’t always fast enough. Memo to self, she thought: set up some kind of list of blood types and willing donors.
    Dad had left early this morning, not long after Helen got in. Down at Mom’s grave probably, the stone by the river. Mom had always loved that spot. It was already a month since she’d died of her tumour, and Dad was still racked by guilt over it, as if it were somehow his fault, somehow caused by his bringing her here. It made no sense, especially since as far