When Cliff came back home for Casey’s wake, he brought his robot Will, and he also brought a girl.

A woman, Morag corrected herself. Just as she shouldn’t think of Cliff as a boy anymore, even though she couldn’t entirely stop it.

And the woman brought a small pink limping robot dog, a lawn mower painted with racing stripes, a family of psychedelic furry vole-like things that wheeled around the path cheeping excitedly, and two tiny surveillance drones, rotors adorned with streamers and bodies painted with flowers.

Morag put down the bucket of scraps she was taking out to the goats, wiped her hands on her old denim trousers, and went to greet them. Her own robot, Seamus, which had been pulling weeds from a line of beetroot with its grabber arm, put down the plants and swung in beside her.

Morag noticed that Seamus had tucked up its middle pair of legs again and resolved to run another diagnostic check in the evening. And not to worry about it too much.

“It’s good to see you,” Morag said to the young people. Then, to Cliff, “Your room’s free, and you can stay in it if you like. Both of you, I mean.”

“It’s good to see you too,” Cliff said. He took the young woman’s hand. “This is Mandy. These are Galbraith, Devon, John, Michael, and . . . ” he struggled to remember, gesturing at the little psychedelic voles, “Calliope, Clio, Euterpe, Erato, Melpomene, Thalia, Terpsichore, Polyhymnia, and Urania. Did I get them all?”

“You did, and in the right order,” Mandy said, grinning. She put out her hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Good things.”

“Glad to hear it.” Morag took the offered hand. “Because I’ve heard next to nothing about you.” She glowered at Cliff. There’d been hints that he’d been serious about someone on his nomadic route, out Ffestiniog way, but that was all.

Cliff had been a tech-nomad for years, walking a circuit round the valleys with Will, selling plans for machines that anyone can build and offering fix-it services for people who didn’t want to do it themselves. Though Morag knew it was only natural that part of her still thought of him as the rough-edged adolescent she’d taught how to fix up broken drones and robot lawn mowers. And it wasn’t entirely easy on her to think of him as someone who might find a partner and, if not settle down, at least change to a less solitary way of life.

Especially not when she was also saying goodbye to her younger sibling.

Embrace change, Morag told herself fiercely. No time for self-indulgence.

“I’m from Ffestiniog,” Mandy said, as one of the drones landed on her shoulder like a parrot.

“Ffestiniog, eh?” Morag looked at Mandy critically. She was pretty, though in a way that didn’t scream prettiness. She had flyaway dark-blonde hair, a thin face, and a visible scar on her upper lip, but she was managing to make a thick linen shirt, wool neck-gaiter, and worn denim trousers look like a fashion choice rather than the same things everyone wore around here.

“And this must be Seamus.” Mandy held out her hand to the little robot like it was a dog.

“This is Mandy, Seamus. Mandy. A friend,” Morag told the robot. Hopefully a friend, she thought. Whether it would be in the sense of someone she really liked or someone who she liked just because they made Cliff happy was for later judgement.

The little robot, having identified Mandy, had trotted away to push little pieces of glass and twigs into a circular, spiraling mandala pattern. It did that sometimes, and Morag had yet to learn the reason why. Something it had learned back in the past, or else some alchemy of programs clashing and producing unexpected behavior.

“I’m surprised Ffestiniog let you go,” Morag said to Mandy, as they all went into the kitchen, Mandy’s retinue of ridiculous-looking toys following in their wake. “Aren’t they busy with the tea harvest around this time of year?”

Mandy winced. “Long story.”

“Don’t worry,” Cliff said. “It’s the sort of story Morag would understand.”

The tea cooperative at Ffestiniog was a local institution and getting to be more than a local one. Someone, around twenty years ago, had come up with the idea of growing tea on the hills, and, with the climate doing the things it was, it had worked out quite well. According to what Morag had heard, the whole community was tea-focused. Growing, planting, drying, curing, fermenting. People who weren’t directly involved in producing the actual tea were doing things that contributed to the tea: improving the tech so as to get a better flavor from the dried leaves, designing and making the packaging, going around the towns and villages selling it. They’d even begun exporting to Ireland and the south, thanks to an agreement with Glyn in Porthmadog, who liked to sail up and down the coast, and would take cargo and act as broker in exchange for a percentage, trading tea for the goods you couldn’t get so easily up north.

All in all, Ffestiniog sounded like it was happy and prosperous and with a sense of purpose, not the sort of place you’d leave on a whim. But also the sort of place where there was a lot of identity tied up in what you did and what you knew.

“Something to do with tech?” Morag hazarded, as she filled the kettle with water from the barrel, set it on the stove, and stoked the fire under the stovetop. It seemed likely that Cliff would go for someone as tech-focused as himself. And the retinue of toys, currently arranging themselves on Morag’s back shelves like something out of a demented horror parody of a kids’ movie, did speak to some kind of fixing ability. If an unconventional one.

“She’s a very good fixer,” Cliff said defensively. “And innovative.”

“Cliff,” Mandy said warningly.

“No, really. They loved the new tea-drying kilns you developed, with the ceramic tile interiors. Speeds up the process, gives a fresher taste.”

“What’s the problem, then?” The kettle whistled, and Morag took it off the stovetop, filled the pot.

“They don’t like what I do.”

“Those . . . ” Morag didn’t want to say things, in case it wasn’t polite. “Robots?” She gestured at the toys.

Mandy nodded sadly.

Cliff took her hand. “I like them,” he said, defensively. “Not everything has to be practical.”

“It’s not like I ruin working robots,” Mandy said in a way that made Morag think she was responding to something someone else had thrown at her, once. “If it can’t work, but can still be fixed, why not fix it? Devon there—” she indicated to the lawn mower, which had gone into power-saving mode and flipped out its solar panels “—can’t mow, and can’t work as a harvester, but its CPU is just fine, and it wouldn’t be . . . ethical . . . to break it down for spare parts. So why not paint it and teach it to play music?”

Morag was proud of how she was able to keep her face straight.

“The kids ride on it.” Cliff grinned. “I can’t wait for Zeb and Dai’s brood to see it.”

“It’s the same with all of these,” Mandy went on. “I mean, what’s wrong with fixing toys? They make people happy, and isn’t that just as important as keeping people fed?”

“So long as there’s an order of priorities,” Morag said a little dryly. She’d never really had toys as a child. Her early childhood had mostly been spent moving from place to place as a refugee from the climate disasters in Scotland, and, when she, her parents, and sister had finally made it far enough to the southwest and acquired the organic farm where she now lived, they’d all been too busy trying to make a new life to think about much else.

Not that she hadn’t had fun. But her fun had been in fixing things up, building little machines and making them go.

Those times are over now, Morag reminded herself. We’ve got time for learning now, and time for tea-growing, and time for fun. Mandy’s also building little machines, just for different reasons.

Seamus came in from patrolling around the house. Rather than folding up into his usual power-saving mode and flipping out his solar collectors, though, he just knelt down in the corner. Morag frowned but went back to making the tea. She could talk about it with Cliff later.

“What’s wrong with Seamus’ middle legs?” Cliff looked at Seamus in concern.

“I assumed it would use them when it needed to.” Mandy frowned doubtfully. “Like, spares? Does it normally go around on all sixes, like an insect?”

“It’s a fixable problem, I’m sure,” Morag said shortly. “It started when we installed the grabber arm, and I wonder if the grabber-arm software wasn’t meant for a different model. One with four legs rather than six.”

“Could be.” Cliff crouched down to look more closely. “Or it could be something else? We don’t know what it’s picked up over the years.”

“We can have a look together, tonight!” Mandy said brightly. “I’m sure it’s just a matter of patching the software.”

“When’s the wake?” Cliff asked, more seriously.

“Tomorrow evening,” Morag said. “It’ll be here, and I don’t think it’ll be huge. Just Zeb and Dai, and maybe a few others. Casey’s tribe have their own funeral customs. This is just for the family who aren’t nomads, really.”

It was a problem that had been emerging, as people got older and more members of the nomadic tribes that populated the hills succumbed to age, or illness, or accidents. The tribes generally didn’t invite villagers to their funerals, any more than they did to any other of their rituals. But most nomads had friends and family in the villages, and they had to do something.

---

Zeb, Casey’s brother, had suggested a wake. “Just be together and remember who Casey was. Get closure.” Morag hadn’t heard that expression in a long time, but she knew what he meant.

Nonetheless, here they all were. And surprisingly, not just the family. Quite a few of the villagers, including ones like Morag’s next-door neighbor Owen and Tom the Pole, who she hadn’t thought particularly liked Casey. But, well, she’d had her problems with Casey sometimes too. And she supposed most people would want to come to a celebration, whatever it was for.

“They had the life they wanted,” Zeb said. “Joined the Children of Flame at eighteen; at the end, split off and started a tribe of their own.”

“The Cancer Wolves,” Morag said. Who were deliberately seminomadic rather than fully nomadic and had been started because Casey, with the advancing progress of arthritis and, later, actual cancer, hadn’t been able to keep pace with the other Children of Flame.

She ducked first one of Mandy’s drones, then a couple of Zeb and Dai’s kids chasing it and shrieking with delight. Innovation, she thought, comes from unexpected places.

She looked over at Zeb. Running a bit to beardiness and fat, like one might expect from a brewer. Sitting at his ease in an ancient armchair, one of Morag’s cats on his lap and one of his smaller orphan children, Galadriel, sitting on his feet doing something inexplicable with dolls and blocks. His husband was nearby, arguing about something with Naomi the postmistress. Mandy and Cliff were in a little conversational knot with several neighbors and Tom the Pole (who was tall and skinny, and Polish, and carried a staff like a nomad, so no one was ever quite sure how he got the nickname). Children ran around the yard, playing with Mandy and her toys; one of the older kids, Rain, was on the porch, teaching Seamus to play chess.

You couldn’t see Gwydion Manor, or the Big House as locals called it, from Morag’s farm, but she knew it was there. The place where, decades ago, a billionaire had decided to hole up and reinvent the feudal system. He’d brought mercenaries and security systems and hired local young people to make up the numbers, Morag among them. When the food stocks ran low, and the billionaire began talking about taking over local farms, Morag had been the one to take the restraint programming off the robots. Had been the one to watch the billionaire and his allies die in a hail of bullets. Take his children, Zeb and Casey, by the hands, and lead them down into the village to live with her own parents.

But now, the manor was home to a dozen families and single people. The walled garden that the billionaire had turned into a swimming pool was a garden again. The barracks for the squad of armed guards had been repurposed by beekeepers. Zeb had married a brewer, and Casey had a happy, if short, life as a nomad. The last known surviving security robot had an arm, not a gun, now, and patrolled a farm. The wounds might not have healed, but they had scarred over pretty healthily.

“What do you make of Mandy?” she asked Zeb.

“She could be good for Cliff.” Zeb took a pull of his drink and absentmindedly hugged Galadriel, who had crawled up into his lap and displaced the cat. “Take his mind off of serious things, give him more of a purpose.”

Morag laughed shortly. “His work is a purpose.”

“Yes, and he enjoys it. Helps him and other people. But I think he’s getting too focused. His life is just walking his circuit, designing machines, selling the plans, fixing them. Not much time in that for fun.”

“Fun?” Morag said. “We’ve got to survive.”

“We are surviving,” Zeb said. “Look at Dai and me. We get paid in whatever people give us, and so long as we have enough food and clothing for the kids and the house isn’t falling down, we’re okay, and we don’t really want anymore. Well, maybe more kids—” he turned Galadriel upside down, and she shrieked in delight—“but it’s not like there’s a shortage. People keep giving them to us, not sure why.”

Morag thought about this. “What if we have a bad winter? Or someone gets up another feudalist movement, like what happened a few years ago? Or one of the tribes turns on the villages?”

“Then we’ll deal with it, won’t we?” Zeb turned Galadriel upside down again, at her request. “But we’ve dealt with all that before. We have systems. Systems with slack in case the usual answer doesn’t work. Morag, I think it’s not just Cliff that needs to learn to relax.”

A sudden noise made both Morag and Zeb jump. Seamus had leaped up, overturned the chessboard, and rushed off into the night.

Zeb put Galadriel down carefully and ran to the scene. Rain had been knocked over too, but he brushed off his father’s concern. “I’m fine. Really, I’m fine.” He looked out at Seamus’ receding white form. “Sore loser, I guess.”

“That’s not very Seamus,” Zeb said.

“No,” Morag said. “Normally it’s keen to learn new things. I wonder what went wrong?”

Still, the incident worried her, even after the wake was over and the dishes left for the next day and Seamus came trotting back as if it had just been on a normal patrol.

---

As expected, Cliff didn’t set off straight away again after the wake but settled in for a while. Both to do his job, checking in with the villagers to see if any of the machines he’d built needed fixing, or if anyone else had an idea of a machine they wanted him to build, and to help Morag with her own work.

Which meant Seamus.

Morag had put off dealing with it, telling herself the wake was enough for her to handle. Even though it had been one of the easier deaths she’d had to handle from an administrative point of view. When her parents had died, there had been months, even years, of follow-ons: writing letters to tell people who should know, giving away possessions, settling accounts. Trying to contact Morag’s older sister, who had moved south years ago and had seemingly moved on somewhere after that, and the letters came back unanswered, another regret for Morag’s list. Coming to agreements as to which of the children got what (she’d got the farm, Zeb had got the valuables to help support the brewery, and Casey had given them both a stern lecture about materialism that made her smile wryly to remember it). With Casey, there were no possessions, and any legacy they left was the business of the other Cancer Wolves.

And here she was, putting Seamus off again.

“I think this is bigger than just not using the middle legs,” Cliff said, holding out the tablet. “See here? Lots of inactive processes that ought to be activated. And these here, they should be kicking in to replace them, but they’re not.”

“Yes, I know,” Morag admitted. “And that’s what scares me. It’s like Seamus has some kind of internal psychic rot. Which is impossible for a robot.”

“Could the problem be software compatibility?” Cliff asked. “I mean, the grabber arm came off a different sort of robot originally, so it would make sense.”

Morag sighed and sat down heavily on the chair at her workbench in the tech shed. “The problem is, Seamus is a killer,” she said. “Always knew, whatever was on his front wasn’t a grabber arm, it was either a surveillance camera or a gun, and I’ve been increasingly certain it was a gun. It’s just not built for peaceful purposes.”

Cliff shook his head. “That’s not scientific talk,” he said. “Those robots were built for interchangeability. Swap one component for another. And Seamus has been managing quite well as a peacetime robot, hasn’t it? Digging holes, pulling weeds, fetching, and carrying. Playing football.”

Morag chuckled. “Dancing hakas, playing chess, making mandalas. You’re right. It’s not just a killer. But I worry that the killer side is what’s getting in the way of the ability to use both the arm and the legs.”

“Then we get rid of the killer side?”

“Then it wouldn’t be Seamus.” Morag, slowly, opened up the control panel on the little robot’s back, connected the tablet. Scrolled through the software profile. “Its experiences are part of what makes it what it is. I was a killer once myself. I’m not one now, but if you took away what I had been, then I wouldn’t be me.” And like Casey. Maybe Casey would have had a longer life if they hadn’t been a nomad, but she had to respect what they were.

“Seamus could be trying to integrate the arm? Different software systems adjusting to take on the new system. Didn’t you say it usually takes a while when it’s learning a new process? And you can get some unexpected behavior out of it when it does?”

“Not like this, and never for this long. It’s been building up for over a year now. And Seamus went through the usual integration process when I installed the arm, and I thought it had finished, but then things started gradually going off again.” She went over to the shelves, took down a stack of notebooks. “I went to the archive at Portmeirion before you came,” she said. She’d thought about making a detour and visiting the Cancer Wolves at their camp in the former wilderness research station on the way but had decided she couldn’t really spare the time. She’d heard about Casey’s death on her return. And she told herself once again that there was no point in feeling guilty about any of that. “I looked up everything they had on Seamus’ type of robot, which isn’t much, and everything they had on related subjects, which got me more. Also, they had a delegation visiting from Aberystwyth.”

“The Campus?”

“The Campus.”

“So they really are making a go of it.” Cliff shook his head. The Campus had been a utopian community dedicated to the revival of a tech-focused lifestyle. Following an internal coup and a period of silence, it had reemerged as a sort of cooperatively run university, offering to teach anyone with an interest in art and/or science in exchange for doing their share of labor.

Sometimes Morag could imagine a future where people became more settled. Where towns grew, where networks developed, knowledge started to expand again. But at the same time as communities like the Campus and the archive were settling in, more and more people were quietly joining the nomads, or the seminomads, and she could also imagine a future where almost everyone wandered the land.

“They’re making enough of a go of it that they and Portmeirion have a scholar exchange program now,” Morag said. “I’m ambivalent about them. Too easy to fall into the trap they did before, of thinking that tech will save the world. But the ones I spoke with were fine, and really dedicated to the idea of no hierarchies and everyone pitching in. They’re sending a lot of documents up with the next scholar, and they promised to include their files about Seamus’ type of robot.”

“Be good if they did!” Cliff paged through the notebooks. He frowned like he was going to say something he knew Morag wouldn’t like. “Have you thought about showing this to Mandy?”

“Mandy.” The word came out in exactly the wrong tone.

“What’s wrong with Mandy?”

“Oh, Cliff, nothing.” Morag desperately tried to row it back. “She’s very nice, and undoubtedly very talented, but . . . can a toymaker really fix a problem like this?”

“Exactly the sort of person who could,” Cliff said. “She’s always repurposing machines made for one thing into another thing. Those pet drones of hers were surveillance spec.”

He had a point.

“I suppose there’s no harm in her having a go,” Morag said. “I’m just worried that eventually we’ll get to the point where we have to do the obvious thing and initiate a factory reset. Which would undoubtedly fix the problem, but who knows if we’d be able to restore its memories.”

“You keep backups, right?”

“Yes. It’s part of how Seamus works. It’s built with redundant data systems, so it’s constantly backing up its data on its own systems in encrypted files. But as I said, Seamus outstripped the system it was meant to work within a long time ago. I don’t know if a robot restored to factory settings could integrate it all.”

Cliff looked critically at Seamus, whose middle limbs were twitching in an ominously uncontrolled way. “We’ll find something that works. Somehow.”

“Talking of Mandy,” Morag rowed the conversation back a bit. “I’m assuming you two are making some kind of arrangement?”

Cliff sat down on the bench, shrugged. “We haven’t had a long conversation about it, but yes, you could say so.”

Morag sat down with him. “Well?”

“I’d like to keep walking the hills, with Will,” he admitted. “But Mandy’s going to want to settle down somewhere. Her art isn’t exactly portable.”

Morag chuckled. “I can’t see you walking through Children of Flame territory with pink puppies and voles trailing at your heels,” she said, but the look Cliff gave her made her regret that. “Sorry,” she said. “That was snide of me. But no, if she’s going to be fixing things she needs a permanent base, and I gather Ffestiniog isn’t exactly it.”

“Problem is, I don’t want to settle anywhere really.”

“Lots of families have a base and people who roam from it,” Morag said. “Look at Tom the Pole and his wives.”

“Tom walks a shorter circuit. What if we have kids? I couldn’t leave her to care for them on her own.”

“Then walk a shorter circuit. You can do your rounds in a few short trips instead of one long one. And it’s not like she would be on her own.” In Morag’s experience, the entire village rallied round people with children. She’d done her share of child-minding, of running errands, and doing farm work for people stuck at home with a sick little one. “I’m sure your fathers would be all over it. And as for a base, lots of villages don’t have a tech-fixer and need one. So long as she’d be happy mending people’s broken drones and converting lawn mowers into reaping machines, I don’t think anyone would mind if she also made . . . art.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Cliff said.

“And you’re right about Mandy,” Morag admitted. Whatever the girl’s eccentricities, sometimes it took a lateral perspective to solve a problem.

---

Mandy braced her arms on the mass of paper spread across the dining room table. No one had used the dining room for its intended purpose for years, so the table usually wound up holding blueprints and other large documents that Morag needed to consult. Underneath it, Galbraith and the voles were playing some kind of complicated stalking game that Morag tried to ignore.

“Where do we begin looking for a solution?” Morag asked Mandy.

“Here,” Mandy said, pointing to one of the lower documents.

“That’s not about limb functionality.”

“No, but it’s about the algorithmic learning process and how the robots are meant to adapt to the local environment,” Mandy said. “I think that this is a process of adaptation gone wrong. It’s failing to understand its environment and what it needs to work properly in it.”

“How do you know all this?” Cliff frowned.

“I read.” Mandy grinned at him.

“No, that would make sense,” Morag said. “I don’t have the book knowledge. But I do know that the general idea with having the robots be multilegged and with swappable anterior limbs is so that they could be used in a variety of terrains.” She’d seen Seamus go on four legs before, in a different way, using its anterior limbs for defense like a praying mantis. “It could be that it’s misreading the situation, and we need to figure out how to get it to learn properly.”

“That might be why it’s not patrolling anymore, too.” Mandy took a piece of slate and some chalk and began sketching diagrams. “Do you know, I think we might be able to do something about this!”

“Something normal and benign, just running out of control.” The cancer metaphor, Morag thought. But of course, what was also lurking in the back of her mind was that they couldn’t treat cancer in the way that they used to, and also that, even back in the old days, they’d never been able to cure it. “Seamus is changing, like it’s supposed to. Just not in the right direction.”

“But look,” Mandy said. “If we add a new routine here, and another one here, and delete that routine there—”

“Hang on,” Morag said, alarmed. “Nobody’s deleting anything.”

Mandy looked surprised. “We’ll almost certainly have to. Delete some files that aren’t just redundant, they’re getting in the way of proper function.”

Morag knew this, but she was still anxious about it. Under the table, there was a burst of frantic squeaking and a triumphant little chiptune as someone or other scored some kind of victory. “I got word from Saoirse at the archive the other day. The files have come in from Aberystwyth. In particular, she said there was one about limb redundancy systems.”

“This might be affecting the limbs, but I think it’s a memory problem, not a redundancy problem,” Mandy countered.

“Nonetheless. I want to take the time to go up and copy that, and also any other relevant documents, before we start. Just make sure everything’s okay, and we’re not going to delete the wrong thing.”

“Will you be taking Seamus?”

Morag looked at the little robot, who was ignoring the toys’ game and pushing a few pieces of scrap and glass into a spiral shape. Worried that something might go wrong on the trip. “No, it can stay here, and you two can observe it. Note down anything interesting. But no drastic changes till I get back, and you can check them with me. Understood?”

---

After spending a day and a half at the archive hand-copying files, Morag went back down to Porthmadog to pick up a ride with Tom the Pole, to have a long conversation with the local tech-fixer, and to spend some time visiting Glyn.

“Why don’t you crew with me, on my next trip to London?” Glyn said as Morag helped him stow crates of tea on his yacht, the Soolin.

“What would be the point?” Morag said. “I’ve got the farm and things to do around here.”

“The point would be that cities have robot specialists,” Glyn said. “Bristol, Southampton. Robots walking the streets alongside humans, people needing to help them get fixed. If they can’t fix Seamus here, they might be able to do it there.”

“We’ve got an archive and a Campus and an army of village and nomadic tech fixers,” Morag said. “If we can’t fix Seamus here, they can’t do it anywhere.”

“Not all knowledge travels.” Glyn regarded her with his bright blue eyes. Careful, Morag thought. She didn’t need to spend the night in Porthmadog and miss her ride back with Tom. Though perhaps she could get one with the cheesemaker . . . She told herself to focus on business. “And things slip through the cracks. Seamus is unique. But it could be that people down south know things that we don’t. You could go. Get him fixed and then come back here and teach other people how.”

Morag shrugged. Truth be told, the idea of leaving the area took her out of her comfort zone. She hadn’t been farther than Caernarfon in years. Which she knew wasn’t rational of her, and yet, that’s how it was.

“Who’d mind the farm?”

“Ask Cliff to stay put for a few weeks. Might be good for him.”

“It might give him and Mandy a chance to try out living together,” Morag said, considering. At Glyn’s frown, she explained to him about Cliff’s plans and Mandy’s art. Then she wound up telling him more about Mandy as they finished the packing and then wound up in the bar of the Porthmadog Hotel.

“I don’t get it,” she confessed. “She’s smart enough, she had some ideas about fixing Seamus that would never have occurred to me. And the reprogramming job she did on Dev—the lawn mower—is really something impressive.” She’d programmed it to mow grasses into pleasing shapes, like Seamus’ mandalas. Though Morag imagined that might not have gone down too well in Ffestiniog. “She’s a thoroughly professional fixer. So what’s she doing playing around with toys? She’s like a kindergarten teacher.”

“Kindergarten teachers have to be pretty shrewd,” Glyn pointed out. “Having to keep a classroom full of amoral miscreants on the straight and narrow while keeping a smile on your face and singing little songs about baby sheep.”

“Point taken.” Every time she thought something negative about Mandy, Morag could hear the little voice inside her that said she was being sexist, doing things down because they were things that women did for children. Nonetheless, Morag couldn’t get her head around why she wouldn’t want to be a proper tech-fixer.

“It just surprises me that Cliff’s taken to her.” Morag finished her pint but decided to let it settle. “I mean, he’s such a serious fellow, I wouldn’t have thought he would be attracted to someone like her.”

“I wonder if that isn’t the appeal.” Glyn looked critically at the sediment in his mug of ale. “Cliff never had much of a childhood. I wonder if he’s having one now?”

“You might be right.” Morag remembered the other evening, when she’d spotted Cliff and Mandy in the garden behind her house, playing with her toys. Cliff’s face had been laughing, enchanted even, not superior or cynical. And Glyn was right. Cliff had rescued himself from a tech sweatshop at the age of about twelve or thirteen and walked west until Tom the Pole found him and took him to Zeb and Dai. It certainly didn’t leave much room for the softer emotions in life.

“All the same, I mean, it’s not useful. It’s like flower arrangements.”

“Flowers mean fruit later on.”

“That’s all very zen.”

“My offer stands, you know. About coming with me. Seeing something different.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think too long,” Glyn warned. “I’m here for another few days, but I want to sail out while the weather’s still good.”

Morag agreed, reflecting that she never would.

She felt hopeful as she rode back with Tom the Pole. Cliff and Mandy were both smart young people, and if they hadn’t come up with a way of saving Seamus, then they’d at least have some ideas they could play around with.

But as she approached the gate, she could tell with a cold feeling in her guts that something was wrong.

---

The geese scattered and Morag was knocked down by a tangle of six limbs and a grabber arm. Fortunately, years of working with Seamus—and some years before that, of being a soldier in a force that expected attacks from robots—had taught her how to handle things like that. She rolled to the side, gripped a limb, levered herself onto its back, clinging like a cowboy on a bucking horse. She could hear Cliff shouting somewhere distant but tuned that out as noise. She groped around the thrashing oblong body, found a small hatch, thumbnailed it open, pushed, then pushed again in a short but specific sequence.

The robot collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

Morag looked up. Met Cliff’s eyes.

“I left very simple instructions,” she said, simmering with anger.

“I can explain,” Cliff said.

“And where’s Mandy?” Morag pulled herself off the robot, straightened her jacket. The geese milled in confusion, and she ignored them. There was a distinct lack of high-pitched robotic chirps and bright colored small things milling about the place, and, for all they’d annoyed her, Morag felt the absence, like the lights had gone out and the cold darkness was closing in around them.

“Gone.” There was an edge of despair to Cliff’s voice.

“Yes,” Morag said. “I think you’d better. Explain, I mean.”

---

“We weren’t going to do anything, I swear.” Cliff was making tea in the kitchen. Morag had hauled the inert robot into the house, and it currently sat on the table as an accusation. “We just did what we agreed. Worked on digesting the data, developing a repair application. But then Seamus closed down.”

“Closed down?”

“Just went blank. Folded up its legs, didn’t move. Power was going through, the systems were running. But it wasn’t moving. So, I guess, we panicked.”

“You should have waited—”

“I know.” Cliff sat down heavily, and Morag tried to temper her anger. “But we didn’t know when you were coming back, and Mandy was worried that the longer we left it, the more damage would be done to the systems. She suggested it, yes, but the call was mine. So don’t be angry at her. And her fix worked okay, for the first few hours. But then the usual feral robot patrol came through, and Seamus jumped up and ran for them, and it looked like it was trying to use the arm as a gun. And when that didn’t work, it started trying to smash its own arm.”

“Oh.”

“We tried to stop it, but it just ran off into the woods. Started doing its patrols but at double speed. And Mandy went wild too. Said she’d broken it, and you’d never forgive her, and that she broke everything she touched. I got worried she might hurt herself. She went off after the robot, but it came back, and she didn’t.”

“How long has she been gone?”

“About half a day.” Cliff looked miserable. “I wanted to go after her, but I had to keep—Seamus—on the farm, stop it from going after anyone else.”

Morag knew it wouldn’t make a difference to the robot, but she ran her hand over it, like soothing an animal. “She was acting from good intentions.” Though a bit of her did blame Mandy, nonetheless.

She had to show her she didn’t. “Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

“I don’t know.” Cliff flung his hands up. “Truth be told, I don’t entirely not blame her myself. If she hadn’t had the idea we could fix it . . . ”

“Then it would just have deteriorated.” Morag forced herself to face the truth. “I’d like to blame her myself! But it wouldn’t help. I always knew eventually something would happen to Seamus that I couldn’t fix.” Same with everyone, she thought. Same with Casey, with Zeb and Dai, with Tom, Glyn, Owen, Naomi. Her parents, her sister. You just have to face the fact that someday, something will happen to them that can’t be fixed, and you just have to accept it. “We’ve got to get her back before she falls off a cliff or pisses off the wrong nomad or something.”

“How are you going to find her, though?” Cliff retorted. “It’s getting dark, and we don’t know what direction she went in or what road she took.”

“I’ll—” Morag stopped. She had been about to say I’ll take Seamus, which was the usual thing she did. The little robot was—had been—good at finding people; it undoubtedly had infrared sensors and sensitivity in high sonic ranges and other things.

And then, a practical, responsible part of her told her coldly what she needed to do.

I can’t, she thought.

But she could. She needed to. Otherwise, Mandy could die out there on the hillsides, and there was no sense in letting her feelings about Seamus get in the way of saving her.

“Cliff,” she said slowly. “Do we know how to do a factory reset? On Seamus?”

Cliff’s face brightened. “Of course! It could find her—” Then he sobered. “Doing that could wipe out everything it knows.”

Morag nodded grimly, wishing he hadn’t said that part out loud. It was making it harder for her. “It’s a last resort. I wouldn’t do it if I could think of anything else. But if we do, then at least we’ll have a robot that can track people. It doesn’t need to know us, or like us; it just needs to be able to follow instructions.” To be fair, she’d never known in what sense Seamus knew her, or if it liked her, or if that was even a concept for Seamus. She had to face that.

Cliff visibly warred with his emotions, but then he nodded. “I can’t abandon Mandy,” he said. “And with Seamus—” his voice broke “—at least this way something of it might survive. There’s no sense just leaving Seamus like—” he gestured at the inert white oblong—“this.”

Morag’s mouth was a straight, neutral line. She wanted to run out to the lake, to scream, to howl, to cry like a small child. But it wouldn’t have helped. “May as well go for a completely fresh start.”

---

Morag eventually found Mandy, after two hours of searching. The sun had gone down, and sensible people had either retreated into their houses or, if they were nomads, to their campfires and shelters. Mandy was huddled up against a boulder in a clearing, hugging Galbraith to herself, her voles and Devon ranged beside her, vibrating and silent, her drones perched like vultures above. Like a demented, postapocalyptic version of Snow White .

“You should know better, local girl like you,” Morag said as the little robot trotted up to Mandy, identified her, and, satisfied, trotted off to wait at the side of the clearing. “You don’t go running off into the woods. The wolves mostly avoid people, but it’s easy to spook them if you go crashing into their dens by mistake, and the Children of Flame are camping over by the lake right now. And if you avoided both of those, you could have stuck your foot in a mole-hole and broken your leg. And for all those creatures of yours are pretty, I don’t think they’d be much help against any of that.”

Mandy turned her tear-streaked face to the light of Morag’s little solar-battery-powered lantern. “I’m a village girl,” she said. “Never did much camping. Is that . . . ” For a moment, her face held a wild hope.

“Yes and no,” Morag said. She sat down next to Mandy. She’d come as far as the cliff where the woods ended, and Morag remembered herself camping there as a young woman during the brief period she’d spent as a nomad. “We did a factory reset.”

“Oh.”

“I’d’ve done one eventually anyway,” Morag said, probably truthfully. “Having seen the files from Aberystwyth, I’m not sure we were ever going to figure out what was wrong in a way that we could fix.” There, she’d said it. She’d taken copious notes anyway, and let herself hope, but at the back of her mind there was the realization that it was probably all for nothing.

She could have just left the little robot inert until they figured out a way to fix it, like a billionaire having their brain put on ice till they find a cure for whatever disease they’ve got. But, she reminded herself, they might never figure out the problem, and they’d either have to leave Seamus as a garden ornament or do the factory reset.

“And how is it . . . ?”

“Working normally,” Morag said as the little robot stood silently waiting for orders. “See? It’s using the arm and all six legs.” What she didn’t say was that there was something different about the way it moved. She’d known people had body language; she could usually recognize the individual Children of Flame despite the fact that they wore masks to hide their faces. But she’d never thought that robots did too.

Then again, when Seamus went out with the feral robots, she’d always been able to tell which one was him.

And this robot just didn’t feel the same.

“I told it to recognize me, and it does,” she went on. “I told it to find you: we gave it one of your shirts. It tracked you just fine.”

Mandy buried her face in Galbraith’s mangy pelt, and it squeaked in protest.

“Oh come on, don’t do that,” Morag said. “I’m not angry, don’t you understand? Nor is Cliff. Well, he’s a little angry, but I’ve known him longer than you have; he’ll come round if he hasn’t already. We’re not going to throw you out of the house. I know what happened to you at Ffestiniog, but we’re not like that. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Morag screwed up her courage and said, “And I’d like you to work with me. Make more of those toys.”

“What? Work with you? I didn’t think you liked . . . ”

“I don’t.” Morag believed in honesty. “But you’re right. There’s more to the world than weapons and work things. I’m always finding broken machines that I can’t fix, so I discard them. Why not turn them into toys? But that’s something you do, not me.”

Mandy sniffed. “If you’re serious? Then I’d like that. I’d like to stay for a while and make toys with—for—whatever—you.”

“Then we have a deal.”

“But first, you’ve got to come down off the hillside, and we can see what there is in the house to eat.”

That made Mandy laugh. “All right, let’s do that.”

Morag made herself smile. Keep it light, keep it funny. Don’t show her how much of a blow it was.

Casey didn’t want people to mourn for them, she remembered. So I also can’t mourn for Seamus, not in public. But she could grieve both of them, inside.

---

Morag tightened the straps of her old rucksack, the one she’d taken with her as a kid when she’d gone off to be a nomad. She hadn’t been bad at it, all told. She’d survived on her wits, hadn’t minded the cold and the rain. But in the end, she’d realized that finding and fixing old tech was what she was good at, and that had shaped her life after that.

Including finding the little robot up on the spoil heap.

“I always knew it couldn’t be forever,” she said to it, where it hovered in the corner of her bedroom. Seamus would have been out on patrol. She supposed she could teach it to patrol again. Maybe she should. In fact, when she came back, she definitely would.

But first, there was the reason she was packing.

“Mandy said you were planning to leave.” Cliff was suddenly there, in the doorway, arms folded.

“And you want to persuade me not to?”

Cliff’s face crumpled, like a child’s. “Don’t go,” he said.

“I’m not planning to go for good.” Morag left the bag, went over, and sat on the bed. Tapped it for him to join her, which he did, after a moment. “Just for a month or two. One thing I learned from the Aberystwyth files, these robots have got a deep storage routine, meant to preserve important data in the event of a system reset. Meaning that Seamus’ important memories are still there. Might return naturally, might need a bit of help, but if they do, I want to know how.”

“I don’t want to get our hopes up,” Cliff said. “Even if Seamus’ old memories are in there, it might only be a part of them. And not even a part that’s relevant.”

“Nonetheless, I’m going to try. I’m taking Glyn up on his offer. Sailing south, down to the big cities. See if I can find a way to unlock it.”

“And if you can’t?”

“No knowledge is wasted. You know that. I’ll come back with new things I’ve learned. And you and Mandy will gain knowledge of how to run a farm and tech shop. That’s important too.”

“And—” Cliff gestured at the robot.

Morag smiled gently. “If the old Seamus is gone, I’ll just have to get to know them as they are now. Make it part of the family again if it wants to be, find a place for it if it doesn’t.” She looked intently at it. “Hang on, what’s that?”

The little robot had been shuffling randomly with the packing detritus on the floor. Odd shirts, bottles, hairbrushes, anything Morag was leaving behind, pushing and pulling it quietly, without an obvious intention.

They saw the shape of the mandala.