Read an Excerpt

The morning was too fine for it. Daniel had half hoped for rain, something to match his mood, but the sky over Ashburn was doing exactly what it typically did in early summer, and the light came down soft and golden through the fence line as if it had nowhere else to be.

Ruth had his good shirt folded over her arm, the one she'd mended twice, and she kept smoothing a crease out of it that wasn't there any more. A gust blew across them, and a length of hair worked loose and dragged itself across her face; she pushed it back without seeming to notice, the way she always did.

"You'll want this for the interview," she said. "Not the journey. Something clean, once you arrive."

"I'll keep it clean."

"You never keep anything clean," she said fondly, and pressed the shirt into the top of his pack anyway, tucking it down beside the folded papers – his identification, his letter of introduction, the single sheet confirming he'd been asked for by name. Precious little else. A second change of clothes. A knife suited to little more than buttering bread.

Daniel ran a thumb along his jaw while he watched her fuss over the pack, an old habit from before his recent beard trim. He'd spent some of what would have gone into savings on visiting the barber the day before, getting his second-ever encounter with a sharp blade, in the hope that he would still look reasonably presentable at the end of his imminent journey. His face was tidier now than Ruth had ever known it. His hand hadn't caught up with that yet. It kept going looking for length, instead finding air where there used to be whiskers.

Everything that mattered about him and could be carried was already packed; the rest would have to travel some other way, if it travelled at all.

They stood together by the enclave's main gate – open during daylight hours as usual – not saying what both of them were thinking: that six months was a long time, that his destination was half a world away, and that since they had met, they had never been apart for so long, or by anywhere near so far.

"Say it again," Daniel said. "The reasons. I want to hear you say them."

Ruth looked at him as though she knew exactly what he was doing – making her the one to say it, so the leaving would be hers as much as his – and let him have it anyway.

"Because the wage in Slough is nearly double," she said, "and because a year at that wage is worth three of what you'd make finishing out your days here checking seed-tables for the co-op. Because two licences, properly saved for, will take us into our sixties together, and we will be able to afford them in years rather than decades. Because you were specifically asked for and if you don't go, someone else will. Because opportunities like this rarely come even once in a lifetime." She stopped, and something in her face slipped, just slightly, out from under the recitation. "And because it's Slough. Because if it comes off, it isn't only the money. It's where we'll be living."

He knew what she meant without her needing to finish it. Everybody knew what Slough was. The stories came back distorted by distance and by envy, the way all such stories did, but even allowing for exaggeration, there was no arguing with the plain fact of the place: clean water on tap, working streetlights after dark, food that didn't have to be haggled over at the door of a co-op store. The safest enclave there was, by every account, because it was built around the one thing everybody in the world still needed. If the interview went well, if they wanted him, that was the enclave they'd be building a life inside. Not this one. Not the seed-tables and the co-op roof that leaked and the two of them counting the small amount they were left with at the end of each month to see how much closer their fund had crept to their goal.

"It's a good plan," he said, because it was, and because she needed to hear him believe it as much as he needed to say it.

"It's the only plan." She reached up and straightened his threadbare collar, an unnecessary correction, her hands wanting something to do. Her eyes, when they came back to his, were the same pale, steady grey they always were, the one feature on her that never seemed to belong to whatever mood the rest of her face was in. "You'll write. As soon as there's word, whichever way it goes."

"The first moment I can."

"And if they don't want you—"

"Then I'll come straight home. No delay. No arguments. Home." He'd said it before, more than once, in the weeks since the message came, and he said it again now because it was the part of the plan that let her breathe.

"And if they do want you," she said, "I'll come the moment there's an escort to bring me. I won't wait for a season to turn or a harvest to finish. The first chance I have to join you, I'll take it."

"I know."

"Say you know it properly."

"I know it properly." He caught both her hands then, stilled them, because if he didn't she'd go on finding small imaginary faults in his collar until the cart arrived. "Ruth. We've done the sums a hundred times. We've done them until the sums stopped meaning anything and just started meaning us. I'm not going because I want to be away from you. I'm going because it's the fastest road I can see to never being away from you again, not for lack of money, not for lack of anything. Six months, worst case, and worst case only if it amounts to nothing at all."

She held on to his hands a moment longer than was needed for anything practical.

Then she let go.

"I hate this," she said, quite simply. "I want you to know that I hate this, even while I'm the one who talked you into it."

"You didn't talk me into anything I didn't already want for both of us."

"I know. I still hate it."

The sound of the farm cart reached them before it came round the bend – iron-bound wheels on the hard-packed track, a horse that seemed anything but enthusiastic about its task – and a moment later the whole rig drew to a halt in front of them. The man holding the reins was broader than Daniel had pictured him from the email, weathered in the particular way of someone who'd spent more years outdoors than in, deep creases fanning from the corners of his eyes as though he'd done most of his living squinting at some middle distance.

"Daniel Mercer?" he said. "Ray Tanner. I'll be getting you to Slough, in one piece and roughly on schedule."

"Roughly," Daniel said, and shook the offered hand.

"Roughly's the best anyone honest will promise you, this route." Tanner glanced at the sky, then at the cart, then, briefly and without any particular weight to it, at Ruth, in the manner of a man who had seen a great many partings and had long since stopped finding them any of his business. "We've a fair way to make before dark, if you're ready."

Daniel was not ready, in any sense that mattered, but he said that he was, and shouldered his pack, and turned to Ruth one last time. She had stopped trying to smile. The wind found her hair again and she let it, this time, too busy looking at him to fight it – memorising him, in the way people do when they suspect, wrongly, he told himself, that they might need to.

"Before you know it," he said.

"Before I know it," she agreed.

Then she let him go.

He climbed up beside Tanner, hefting his pack next to something cuboid under some weathered sacking in the otherwise empty cart bed behind him. As soon as he was seated, they lurched into motion. Daniel made himself look forward, along the track and out towards the treeline and whatever lay past Ashburn's edge. He had found, in the goodbyes he'd had to make earlier that week, that looking back never made it easier.