“Okay, deal. I accept the terms. Including the wildfire clause. Specifically the wildfire clause.” She settled her head back down against Sawyer’s chest. “I’m going to hold you to the immortality option if it comes to that. I’m morally opposed to time travel on anumber of scientific and philosophical grounds and I’d like that noted for the record.”
“Noted,” Sawyer said mock-gravely.
Mere minutes passed in comfortable silence before Sawyer was running an internal calculation about whether she could subtly rearrange the quilt without disturbing its current architect. She could not. Nellie’s left arm was pinning it.
“I want to add another clause,” she said.
Nellie made a drowsy sound of inquiry.
“Blankets.” Sawyer moved her feet, or tried to, since the movement largely confirmed what her circulatory system had been suggesting for the last twenty minutes. “Specifically, more of them for the future of our planet. My toes are freezing.”
Nellie lifted her head from Sawyer’s chest. She took a single, withering look at Sawyer’s face. Then she took a single, equally withering look at the foot of the bed.
“You,” she said, “are wearing none of the socks.”
“I don’t own socks appropriate for this environment.”
“There is no specific ‘in the forest in a van’ category of sock.”
“There are wool socks, which I don’t own, and there are the socks I own, which are currently failing significantly.”
“You packed fleece pajamas with a monogram,” Nellie said, in a tone of magnificent disbelief, “and no wool socks.”
“The pajama situation was addressed. The sock situation was an oversight.”
Shaking her head, Nellie untangled herself from the arrangement—which was no minor operation given the thoroughness with which they had been assembled—and went rummaging in the storage box under the bed.
She came back with a pair of socks. Thick, cream, bobbled slightly from countless wash cycles. Then she sat at the foot of the bed, took Sawyer’s right foot in both hands as though this were an entirely ordinary thing to do, and pulled the sock onwith a brisk, capable motion that Sawyer found unexpectedly moving.
“There,” Nellie said, starting on the left.
“Thank you.” The glow of the fairy lights caught in the dark mess of Nellie’s hair and lit the concentration on her face as she smoothed the sock over Sawyer’s heel.
“These are mine,” Nellie informed her, giving the finished sock a final pat. “So, I’ll need them back.”
“I’ll add it to the terms.” Sawyer chuckled.
Nellie climbed back up the narrow bed and reinstated the previous arrangement without discussion, her arms going back around Sawyer’s rib cage with the ease of something resumed rather than started.
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE – SAWYER
3years later
The Viking Windfarm’s project director had an alarming enthusiasm for lenticular clouds.
This had become apparent approximately three minutes into Sawyer’s site tour when he’d stopped the jeep at the base of turbine forty-seven, pointed at the sky with a reverence usually reserved for religious experiences, and delivered a four-minute oration on the phenomenon. Sawyer had listened with the patience she’d been steadily cultivating over three years of meetings in which scientists said beautiful things that were technically tangential to the budget line under discussion. The clouds were, admittedly, extraordinary—flat and layered and hovering over the ridge like enormous gray lenses—but the renewable energy investment case she was building for Alburn Systems depended more on capacity factors than atmospheric aesthetics.
She’d gotten what she needed, in the end. She always did. The numbers on wave energy conversion were good. Potentially excellent. The Shetland Islands were not a mild location, which turned out to be precisely the point.
The wind had tried to remove her twice on the walk back to the jeep.
She was prepared to call the day a success, provided her rental car started.
It did. Sawyer pointed it south and drove the single-track road with the careful attention it demanded. It was hedgeless, sheer-dropped on one side, the North Atlantic pressing itself gray and immense against the cliff faces below. The light was extraordinary, even at three in the afternoon. The sky here had a quality she’d been unable to name until yesterday, when she’d spent a long time looking at it and concluded, finally, that it was simply very far from anything. Old light. Light that had not been obligated to bounce off buildings before reaching her.
She pulled up to the rental cottage at half past three and pushed her way through the creaking door, shivering a little as she pushed off her boots. She was focused on filling up the kettle when the kitchen window stole her attention. Not the window itself, exactly, but what was framed in it. Or rather, what was happening outside it, visible through the wavery old glass. The beach here was a narrow strip of dark sand backed by rough grass, and on it, in the horizontal wind, Nellie was throwing a ball.
