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Salamonda pursed her lips. “It might be true, but it’s not magic. Someone made those pies that Yute’s been stealing!”

Arpix interjected himself into the conversation. “How long have you been here?”

“Weeks!” one of Neera’s companions said.

“It’s been terrible,” said another.

“Even with Yute and Wentworth there’s not nearly enough to eat. And then—”

“And before that?” Arpix pressed on with his line of questioning.

“Before that was the fire and the running,” Neera said. “The canith took the city...” She looked nervously up at Evar and his siblings.

Meelan laughed behind Arpix. “Weeks?”

Jella took Neera’s hand. “We’ve been outside, on the Dust. For years.”

“Years?” Neera’s confusion furrowed her brow. “How can that be?”

Arpix sighed. “We all stepped forward in time to be here. The portals we used can do that—move us through the years as well as to other places. Yes?”

Neera nodded. “Yute told us we were hundreds of years in the future of our old lives.” She said it with the tone of someone who had yet to truly believe it.

“Well, the door we came through didn’t bring us as far forward as the route you took,” Arpix said. “We’ve had to wait four years for you to appear. I guess we’re just lucky it wasn’t four hundred.”

Neera looked at him with wide, round eyes, wrestling with the concept.

“We need to find Yute,” Arpix said. “Is it far to go?”

—

Yute, and his small band of mainly Livira’s former neighbours from the settlement, had set up temporary camp in the north-west corner. He greeted their arrival with a disturbing degree of relief. Arpix would have preferred the unperturbed confidence of a man playing the long game and in charge of all the variables.

“Well done, Wentworth!” Yute went to one knee to fuss the cat. “Well done!”

The joyous reunions among library employees in Arpix’s party and Yute’s were put on hold by the towering presence of the three canith. All eyes, save Yute’s, were turned their way along with the ’stick held by one ageing library guard whose name escaped Arpix.

Yute stood up from greeting his furry companion to look at the newcomers. He opened his arms and Salamonda barrelled into him, nearly knocking him over. Arpix took the opportunity to introduce the canith to Yute’s group of perhaps a dozen.

“Some of you know me. I’m Arpix. Formerly a librarian. My friends and I have spent four years living on the edge of the Dust, eating beans we grew and whatever Wentworth dropped for us. These three canith are Evar, Kerrol, and Clovis.” He indicated each in turn. “Without them we would still be on the Arthran Plateau and might well be dead. They have spent all of their lives, save the last week or so, trapped in a single chamber of the library. They have not raided settlements in the Dust, or attacked cities, and are no more responsible for the activities of other canith than you are for those of other humans that you’ve never met or heard of. Please treat them with respect.”

Yute disentangled himself from Salamonda and added his own recommendation. “This is where war with the canith has led us and left us. Out there”—he waved his arm towards the centre of the chamber—“our own kind are refusing change, turning inwards on their hunger. Let us embrace a different path. One I have seen trodden before.”

Arpix frowned at the mention of others. “There are more survivors?”

“Can you tell us who?” Meelan asked, and the others chimed in with too many questions for any one of them to receive an answer.

“What are they eating?” Arpix spoke into the pause. “What are you eating, for that matter?”

Yute brightened. “Let me see if I can show you. You look as if you could use a meal. A drink at the least.” He held up a white hand to forestall their excitement. “It won’t be much, I’m afraid.” He reached into the pocket of his robe and kept on reaching as if his pocket had a hole in it and his arm were sliding down his leg, though Arpix couldn’t see the shape of it under the deputy’s robe.

“Just... a... moment.” Yute’s face took on a look of concentration, his eyes not seeing what lay before him. “Here!” And to Arpix’s astonishment he brought out eighteen inches of blood-dark smoke-cured sausage mottled beneath the skin with lumps of pork fat. He handed it to Salamonda. Arpix’s mouth immediately filled with saliva and his stomach growled as if it were independently attempting to speak canith.

Salamonda looked from the sausage to Yute and back at the sausage. “This is mine.”

“Yes, it is,” Yute said. Which seemed obvious. He’d just given it to her. What surprised Arpix almost as much as the mysterious appearance of the food was that Salamonda should lay claim to it so firmly. The word “selfish” was not one that Arpix would ever have associated with the woman.

“No,” Salamonda said. “I mean... it’s mine. I made this.”