Neil, who had abruptly shut up the moment he'd realised what Alice was saying, despite all his frequent loud proud claims to be the biggest arsehole in all Scotland had the decency to look utterly mortified.

"You can go to your room," Ian told him, and as Neil took a sharp exit in the opposite direction to which their guest had taken, the whole crew of them lapsed into a heartfelt silence that lasted until Elf eventually stood up.

"I'm going to have a wee word with my eejit of a brother," she said. "Why don't you lot go and see if this Alice girl's okay?"

"Probably a good idea," Nick said with a nod, rising to his feet - he, Mackie, Brigid, and trailing them having paused to collect a rifle Nat, went trooping outside.

Alice had not gone far - she was in the southwestern corner of the house's garden when they found her, leaning on a fence and staring at the view out over Loch Allen towards the Atlantic and in turn being contemplated by a cud-chewing cow and attentively watched by the Macbanes' sheepdogs, when they found her.

"Sorry about that twat of a brother of mine," Nick said, and she straightened up.

-/-/-/-/-/-

In truth, Alice had been expecting someone to look for her - the way she'd lost control of herself and had to split it out of there had basically made it inevitable, which wasn't to say she was particularly looking forwards to it.

At least, as she turned round, she found there was no sign of Neil, who had for varied reasons recently become one of her least favourite people. Nick was visibly worried, Brigid had an utterly unreadable expression on her face, Mackie wore a look of almost exaggerated concern, and Nat - who was for some reason carting a gun - looked just as worried as his elder brother.

"I probably overreacted," Alice said.

"Myself am thinking yourself was being pretty restrained given Neil still has all his sensitive pieces of anatomy," said Mackie, "Yourself didnae even try to peel that giant caterpillar off of his lip."

"Neilan Macbane, owner of the world's most self-demonstrating arseholestache," said Nick. "You should've clouted him, he'd well earned it."

"I don't know if punching someone's son when you've known them five minutes," Alice started, but Nat cut her off with a loud rude noise.

"Are you having me on, Dad's kent Neil for sixteen years, Dad was about that far away from clouting Neil himself before you managed to wallop Neil straight in the sense of common decency he likes to pretend he doesnae have."

"Aye," said Mackie. "It's been a while since myself's seen someone shut Neil up that effectively."

"Oh aye, when was that?" Nick asked.

"Well myself was nae in any state to really appreciate it at the time, but in hindsight when Murdo-Alec was telling Neil before Neil was keeping on at me, 'big baby', himself would no mind seeing Neil have his dad stomped into a paste by a bull haggis and no start greeting," Neil said. Nick visibly flinched.

"Oh to fuck with Neil, you should've telt me man, I'd have been giving that bloody brother of mine something to be greeting about himself,"

"Myself was at my father's bloody funeral man, myself had some very important greeting to be getting on with," Mackie said with a shrug. "And there's been a fair bit of water under the bridge since then and all."

"What were you doing in college?" Nat asked Alice, who gratefully accepted the change in subject.

"Archaeology," she said. "The field type."

"Cool," said Nat.

"Not that that means I know a ton about it, yet, I was like two months into first year," Alice continued. "I was going to try to specialise in the neolithic era - there's all sorts of incredibly exciting stuff going on up in the Orkneys,"

"In Orkney," said Mackie.

"That's what I said,"

"No, you said 'the Orkneys'," said Nat. "Orkney's no 'the Orkneys', Orkney's Orkney singular. Same rule goes for Shetland, its like how nobody's calling Britain 'the Britains' only with a wee bittie less land involved."

"Whatever Mr Pedantic, there's this place called the Ness of Brodgar, it's a spur of land directly between the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar - a few years ago this immense complex of just huge neolithic structures was discovered, basically the entire spur of land between the two lochs there is made out of this huge neolithic settlement full of structures bigger and substantially more complex than anything of that era anywhere in northern Europe, just last year they found a carved stone ball - you know what those are, don't you? - they found one actually in its original context within the overall Neolithic structure, they've been working on the place every summer for years now and there's years left, you could spend most of a lifetime investigating just that one site. I..." She drew in a deep breath, then blew it out. "I hoped to get a place on that dig in a few years."

"Wait, wait, wait, the Ness of Brodgar, aye, between Steness and the… Myself am no remembering that one," Mackie said with a frown.

"Well it's not like anyone knows every site by heart," Alice said.

"No, but myself was reading about the stone age ruins up on Orkney just this week past, it's no like there's all that many of them," Mackie said, then caught Alice's expression.

"Um, actually there is a crap of a lot of remnants of that sort of age on the- on Orkney," Alice told Mackie. "It's just an absolute sea of archaeological remains, I've heard it said you can't dig up a square metre of Orkney without finding some sort of historic artefact, whether it's Neolithic, Iron Age, Viking Age… It's not like with the rest of the country, apart from that whole thing with one of the stones at Stenness getting blown up there hasn't been... what's that expression about?"

Mackie took a deep breath, and said, "Myself am having to be thinking that whole thing Neil's been on about, different universes, that it's the truth of it. It's fitting with everything we've been seeing and hearing - myself am assuring you, Alice, there's no stone ever been blown up at Stenness and there's no more than a dozen stone age ruins ever been found in Orkney - hell, there's no a great deal of archaeology been done up north at all, with the land wars and all," and he shrugged. "There's only been maybe three attempts at a dig that were no starting with the Sassenach bastard in charge trying to have families thrown off of their land, and if there's a better way to be getting dead in Orkney than that myself am am no knowing it."

"I have to wonder if," and Alice took a deep breath, only to receive a most unexpected interruption from approximately the last person she'd wanted to hear at that moment.

"Bollocks," said Neil, "You're far from crazy."

"Neil," Nick started, a note of warning in his voice, but the freshly-arrived middle Macbane brother ploughed on.

"You're very very down the rabbit hole.

"And if I ever get back up that bloody rabbit hole I'll have to remember to murder my bloody parents for saddling me with the world's second stupidest name," Alice told him, turning to glare at him.

"No, seriously. The reference is actually appropriate this time," Neil told her. "Point of evidence one, your phone. I told you, there's literally nothing at all like it, anywhere, ever - there's a grand total of exactly one battery contains lithium anywhere today and it's in your phone. Point of evidence two, that bank-card looking thingy. It's got an issue date sixteen years into the future, and the name of a bank that went belly-up in the sixties because of the Anglo-American split all over it. Point of evidence three, nobody remembers seeing you on that train before Elf found you in the wreckage - we pulled sixty-eight survivors out of that coach including someone who was in the seat directly across the corridor from where Elf found you and not one of them saw you, the clothes you were wearing are just too distinctive and strange for nobody to have noticed you at all like that. Point of evidence three, none of the money the doc found on you, not one coin, matches anything that's ever been minted anywhere in the entire British Empire, ever, despite some of it having dates on it from ten years ago and other bits from up to tweny years into the future. And point of evidence four, what you were just saying about Orkney. It's just completely incontrovertible, at this point the remaining questions are how and why. Taken together everything you've said and everything you had on you rules out time travel and it rules out you having dreamed the entire thing up, you have a double pocket full of hard evidence backing you up... You've gotta realise just how new this is, right? I've never even heard rumours beyond the 'space aliens crash at Rockall' level of tinfoil hattery - before you every 'visitor from another universe' story I'd ever even heard of was just completely transparently bollocks, some lying twat trying to feel important and a couple of people who'd been dropped on their heads when they were babies or something."

"… Aliens crash at Rockall?" Alice asked.

"Oh, it's the oldest saw in the books, it's right alongside stuff like that whole idiotic fairy story about an 'empire super-soldier program', what a load of old bollocks," Neil told her with an airy wave of his hand. "According to a bunch of blithering idiots the British Empire certainly couldn't have developed atomic rocketry OR anything even remotely resembling modern computer technology, oh no, it's not like we had any monumental bloody geniuses like Frank Whittle or Barnes Wallis or Alan Turing or Reg Bethnal in our corner or anything now is it, oh no, surely we had to have reverse-engineered thermonuclear-powered spaceflight and modern computer technology from what was left from a bunch of space aliens crashing their starship into Rockall, I mean it's not like Britain's continuously been building the best planes in the world since shortly after that French bloke got the first one off the ground or anything, and apparently that and certainly nothing to do with watching out for Yank spy ships was why the Empire annexed Rockall back in the 1950s. It's exactly as stupid as it sounds. Anyway, there's something I need to do."

"I think you did entirely enough earlier," Brigid said.

"No, that's what I need to do something about," Neil told her. He turned back to Alice. "I'm an arsehole, I know I'm an arsehole, and I like being an arsehole, you would not believe how many ginormous overinflated egos there are in this world and I just love puncturing them, but giving someone a flashback is a very different kettle of fish. I fucked up, and I'm sorry."

"Apology accepted, I think," Alice said with a sigh, this being no time for burning bridges.

"Thanks," Neil said with a nod, seating himself.

"So what'll ourselves be doing now, then?" Mackie asked.

"I dunno, realistically that's up to Alice," Neil said with a nod in her direction. "At this point you're basically totally off the books with London, nobody south of the border even knows you exist which could be useful or could be a problem, depending what you want to do with yourself. Honestly I don't think it'd be a good idea to jump straight into a decision right now, no until you've had some time to at least start getting your head round all this. Depends on what you want to do."

"You mean apart from 'go home' or 'curl into a little ball and scream a lot'? One I don't get the sense anyone we know has any idea how to do and the other isn't going to solve anything, I don't know about want but I'm already pretty clear I need to, basically to land."

"I," said Brigid, "Think you should go to college with Nick and Mackie and Annie and study archaeology."

"As if nothing had happened," Alice asked, giving her a look of sheer disbelief.

"No, I mean as if what's happened isn't going to be everything your life's about for the next forever and isn't going to stop you doing what you wanted to do anyway," Brigid told her, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, which in all honesty it probably was.

Alice spent several long moments staring at her, opened her mouth, had another think, then closed it again.

"I think," she said, "You've got a point."

"Brigid usually does," said Nick.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Trouble sleeping?" asked Ian Macbane, making Alice realise that firstly he was there and secondly he must be one of those morning people when she glanced at the clock on the wall beside the odd-looking light and saw it reading five o'clock almost to the minute.

He, she figured, didn't know the half of it. Every time she'd managed to get her pulse rate back to some semblance of normal again and close her eyes she'd found herself back in London walking towards the scene of the explosion knowing what was going to happen and unable to change it, and at a little after three she'd put the clothes Grace had given her back on, figuring out how the corset worked in the process, and went downstairs and was attempting to distract herself by trying to finally read the book that had made her entire childhood miserable as a copy had been sitting on the Macbane's bookshelf.

She nodded and didn't elaborate, and Ian seemed to accept that at face value, instead of saying anything further going and starting pottering about the kitchen part of the kitchen-cum-living room; Alice vaguely noticed porridgey smells and eventually clocked where they were coming from when Ian plunkd a bowl of steaming hot porridge, with spoon, on the table in front of her and sat down to start adding honey to his own bowl.

"Tuck in," he said. "Won't do you any good to go fading away to a shadow at this point," and she decided to take that in the vein it had most likely been intended, putting the book down and copying him in adding honey to the stodgy oat-based substance in the bowl; Ian glanced up again and slid a white card tub of the sort you'd expect to see salt in, complete with the shaker built into the top, over a bit towards her.

She gave it an odd look.

"Did the doctor no say anything about keeping your spare parts in tune?" Ian asked.

"Oh - yes, he said something about, this is the food supplements he said about?"

"Aye, himself was leaving a big old box of the stuff with us when he was deciding you'd most likely be coming to soon - that was late last week. There's directions for it on the tub, must admit to getting a bit nosy and having a wee read of them."

Alice picked it up and had a read, finding that she was advised to eat a tablespoon of the contents with each meal, with the full tub to be consumed in the course of one week.

She frowned and tipped a little into the spoon, and had a taste with the tip of her tongue, finding the stuff tasteless with a texture almost like chalk dust - as such she sprinkled a liberal helping onto the porridge, added some more honey, and spent a few moments stirring it about.

"Taste of much?" Ian asked.

"No, it's pretty much tasteless. Kinda like chalk dust with less flavour."

"Well, that'd probably be a good thing now, wouldn't it," said Ian with a nod.

Alice nodded back, and that was the sum total of conversation in the kitchen until two hours later when the rest of the Macbane family began filtering down in search of breakfast, with Ian spending the interim spinning wool into yarn with a wooden treadle-operated spinning wheel and Alice trying to read.

Elf was the first down, closely followed by Neil and then a very bleary-eyed and yawning Nick - all three helped themselves to servings of the porridge, which Ian had left on top of the range to keep it warm.

"I'll be headed out no long after you three," Ian said as Elf sat herself down. "Got a trailer to pick up in Inverness for Wick where I'll be picking up a trailer off of the ferry for Glasgow, it'll be a late one, I'm no expecting to be home until the middle of the night - Alice, if you'd let her know I'll be late back once she's out of her bed?"

"Okay," Alice said with a nod, then asked Elf, "Where are you three going? Just out of interest."

"Creels won't work themselves," said Neil with a flippant shrug.

"Don't start," Nick told him. "Did nobody say about the boat yesterday?"

"What boat?"

"That'll be a no then," said Elf with a laugh. "Four years back Nick pulled his biggest scrounge yet, he got Donnie Munroe's big crane, Donnie's the scrappy over in Lochinver, running again after it blew its hydraulics and in return Donnie gave him the pick of anything he wanted out of the yard, well what should be laying up the back of the scrapyard but the big shunter from the old mine through that way that'd closed down a few years earlier."

"I had a look at it and there wasn't much wrong with it, it'd just been sitting a few years since the mine ran dry," said Nick. "Well I scrounged up some scrap track to sit it on and got Dad to give us a hand getting it back here, got everything running, the batteries were totally dead and the hydraulic reservoir has sprung a leak - it's got a hydraulic transmission - then once it was moving under its own power I sold it to our friend Annie's dad over in Stroncrubie, Annie was saying something about them needing something like that fast, that was when they were just pushing the standard gauge up to the new mines up the back of Ben Daor, anyway that and the money Grandpa left to us kids went on the boat and the equipment we were needing to work her and at this point she's paid for herself at least ten times over."

"What sort of stuff do you fish for?" Alice asked.

"Crab for the main part, we also get lobster and the odd cray as a bycatch that's worth a fair bit and we're often enough getting a wee bit of skatan for the pot while we're at it," Elf told her, and it would be a while before Alice realised she'd said 'Sgagdan' or that this meant 'Herring'. "Oh, talking of letting Mum ken things, could you tell her she'll no be able to get us on the radio until this afternoon, we're starting the day up to Kylestrome then working our way south, we'll be headed across the mouth of the loch to Eilen Shea probably just about midday, maybe as late as two if the Navy lot decide to be pestering us this morning, we've got a couple of single-enders down on the sunken flying boat right near to their base, good spot for lobster but they can get a bit jumpy about boats coming close in near to the bottom of their runway there when they've got anything big to be taking up."

"Okay," Alice said with a nod.

-/-/-/-/-/-

As per prediction the rest of the family weren't up until after the trio were at sea and Ian was off on the road south, and Alice duly relaid her two messages, for which Caroline thanked her.

She was next interrupted from her attempt to read and not dwell on having been blown up by Brigid, shortly after the younger two siblings and mother had eaten their breakfast, sitting down beside her and asking, "Want to come and visit Mackie? I feel like a walk."

It didn't take Alice twenty seconds to decide a distraction would be just the thing, so she marked her place - the page she hadn't managed to finish reading for half an hour - and nodded.

"That sounds nice," she said.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Mackie's home address turned out to be the house jammed into the corner between the road that extended into the Macbane's driveway, the road they'd come into the village on the day before, and the railway sheds, and the man himself was in the attached garden, fiddling with something down the side of one of the small wooden sheds that lined the west fence of the garden.

"Morning," Brigid called over as Alice followed her through one of the garden's three gates, causing a startled grunt.

"Brigid," he said, and started to add something in Gaelic only to notice Alice and switch to his heavily-accented English almost mid-word. "Och, and Alice too, how's yourselves?"

"We're having a walk and thought we'd drop in and say hello," said Brigid.

"Aye, hang on a mo and myself'll be putting the kettle on - Mum's away down getting the shop opened up," he said, and resumed what he'd been doing - now she was closer and at the correct angle Alice could see that he was halfway through attaching a new plank to the bottom edge of the shed's wall via the rather disconcerting process of pushing nails in with his thumb as if the wood was plasticine despite the fact it didn't look anything even remotely close to that rotten. "Annie'll be over any minute now - you've no been meeting Annie, have you Alice, herself's a dear friend of myself and of Nick, her dad's owning the railway, that's her ute parked up by the railway's sheds, she's just," he pronounced it 'Chust', "Having a wee look at something probably train-related and she'll be down to the house once she's finished. There," and apparently satisfied he shoved the packet of nails into his pocket and stood up. "That'll be stopping any bloody pine-martens getting into the hens then."

"I don't want to be any bother," Alice said.

"And yourself's no bother at all," Mackie happily told her, waving it off as if the idea of Alice being any bother was ridiculous."Come away in and have a wee cup of tea, myself was just about to be putting the kettle on anyway."

"Well that's timing then," declared a cheery contralto voice with a completely unplaceable neither actually Scottish nor actually English accent, and glancing over in that direction - the top of the garden, right at the corner where it met road and the railway sheds - Alice found strutting - that or 'sauntering' were the only words that really seemed adequate to the task - through the gate a very memorable young woman indeed.

About five foot ten tall, she had a bit of a roundish face with a sharply-defined dimple on the left corner of her mouth, making her smile look oddly hamster-cheeked. Her hair - completely jet black - was in a rough approximation of an overgrown pixie cut kept back out her face with a black Alice band, and she had honey-coloured eyes with something odd about them, but it was the mixture of how she was dressed and the air she had about her that would make sure she was the centre of attention wherever she went; she was wearing a full-skirted wine-red dress, snug around the top and accentuating an astonishingly slender waist, with a high almost Edwardian-looking neckline and a palm-sized cutout showing skin right in the middle of her cleavage - of which she had a not inconsiderable amount - and several prominent grease stains, and she had a black leather gunbelt of all things slung at a jaunty angle round her hips complete with a holstered pistol and little pouches probably containing ammunition.

"Annie," said Mackie with a nod. "This is Alice,"

"As in Doctor Clayton's other patient he had to take off in a tearing hurry to see yesterday, good to meet you at last," Annie declared, meeting them as they arrived at the back door. Now she was closer Alice realised what was odd about her eyes; they had very visible mechanical irises. "Nick at sea?"

"Aye," said Brigid. "They were off before I was waking up again."

"As usual, Miss No-A-Morning-Person," said Mackie with a snort.

"I get up at silly o'clock in the morning when I have to get up at silly o'clock in the morning and not just because the way Dad does," Brigid snootily informed him, getting an amused snort out of him.

"And so yourself is always saying," he said.

"Don't point out me repeating myself and I'll no be pointing out you repeating yourself,"

"Yourself's doing that almost as often as Nick does," Mack said with the air of a conversation that has been had many times but continues to amuse all involved, then he added, "If you're no putting that away myself'll be extracting it for a closer look," when Brigid stuck her tongue out at him.

Inside Mackie's family home was very much in tune with the appearance of its resident - rustic, very 'rural', and somewhat scruffy. It was laid out in a way Alice would eventually learn was pretty much normal for houses built in the early to mid 20th century in that part of the world; thick stone walls, slate roof, lath-and-plaster interior, two rooms down and two up. The back door through which they entered led via a tiny tin porch (in which Mackie left his wellies) directly into the kitchen-cum-living-room - this took up roughly half the ground floor, was an odd L-shape with kitchen facilities in the leg of the L that ran lengthwise from end wall to a little beyond half way along the house and a large farmhouse table surrounded by straght-backed wooden dining chairs in the larger front-to-back leg. A range identical to the one in the Macbanes kitchen was centred on the end wall of the building with its flue pipe hooked into the chimney - it had visibly been added over a blocked-up open fireplace - half the rest of the end wall was occupied by an overstuffed gun rack, the walls were encrusted in framed photographs of hairy men and women with a distinct familial resemblance to Mackie, a battered red leather sofa occupied most of the front wall under the window, and a similarly beat-up dresser utterly festooned in knick-knacks, crockery, and bottles of whisky occupied half the back wall; an ornate and beautifully-kept grandfather clock was jammed in between the dresser and the end wall of the house, looking rather out of place by being the only thing in the room that wasn't battered.

Mackie proceeded to demonstrate that the cooker was gas-powered by turning a knob on, getting a box of matches from the dresser, and lighting the hob from the other side of the kitchen leg of the L, before turning his attention to filling up the kettle.

"So what's yourself been up to then Annie?" he asked as he joined them at the table.

"Stopping Dad making too much of a mess of putting the new bearings into 3124," she said with a laugh. "He's got all the enthusiasm in the world but if a machine's any bigger than a microprocessor he doesn't know which end of it to start with and if it isn't electrical he's even more totally lost, I swear the railway runs despite Dad and not because of him, what'll happen if anything big breaks down while I'm at the college I don't know."

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Sir Joe's got good folks working for him," Mackie said with a shrug. "Murdo-Alec and Murdo McMurdo'll no be letting himself go far wrong, you ken that," and he caught Alice's expression and grinned. "In a lot of ways it's more Annie's railway than it's her dad's railway, daft as himself is for the trains she's ten times worse."

"What can I say, I'm my parents' daughter, Mum's just as bad for pedigree sheep as Dad is for trains," Annie said with an unconcerned shrug. "Don't go listening to Mackie too much, he's just as bad as Dad, this great teuchter," and she angled a thumb at Mackie, "Fancies himself for Czar of all Russians and spaceman."

Mackie kept grinning and said something Gaelic, which got Brigid to burst out laughing and Annie to snort and say, "Oh aye, well you'd know all about brush-chewing you numpty. Anyway," and she looked at Alice, "So how's things back in the land of the living then, and while I'm at it just out of interest whereabouts are you from?" She paused, visibly realised the way everyone else in the room had gone dead quiet, and added, "Uh, sorry, I just, uh, you got torn up while you were travelling on our railway and that makes me feel responsible, you know,,"

"I don't know if I did," Alice finally said. "I'm pretty sure - as in unless everything I can remember is completely wrong - that I got smashed up before I was anywhere near that train everyone keeps talking about. It's, um, it's not something I'm really into talking about, you understand, but basically if the doctor said I looked more like I'd been blown up, well, that's because," and she took a deep breath, "That's because, I don't know how I ended up in that train - I can't properly remember anything from in between, just these disjointed bits and pieces, but I can definitely remember being caught in some sort of I think it must have been a terrorist bombing while I was walking to work."

Annie gave her a long measured look, and then said, "That honestly makes more sense - apart from how in God's name you ended up in the train, Doctor Clayton said something about digging a lot of shrapnel out of you and he swore one bit looked for all the world like half of a car's front axle."

"I don't think I need to know much more about how smashed up I was, I already know far too much for comfort," Alice told her with a shiver.

"Aye, I sympathise," Annie said with a frown. "God knows I didn't enjoy Doctor Clayton explaining how he'd been rooting around in my skull, he's got this Godawful habit of going into all the gruesome details at the drop of a hat. Don't get me wrong, he's an amazing cyberneticist and a master surgeon but he's basically impossible to disgust, finds the insides of people fascinating, and doesn't really seem to realise how weird seeing live footage of your own brain through a hole in your head is."

"Something to do with, well, with your eyes, yeah?" Alice asked.

"Aye," Annie said with a nod. "I was born blind - my retinas failed to form in the womb, right - I was ten when I got my first set of cybernetic eyes fitted, that was basically when Dad decided he was comfortable enough with the results of the clinical trials Doctor Clayton's team had been running for two years at that point and gave him the go-ahead to, well, to open me up."

"Myself," said Makie, "Was right there when herself was coming round from the anaesthetic, it's a crying shame we didnae have a camera with us, the look on her face when she was opening her eyes and seeing for the first time..." and he smiled and shook his head.

"Tell you a secret, I have pretty much that exact expression on my face every morning, it's been eight years and the first thing that goes through my head whenever I wake up and open my eyes is pretty much 'Oh my God, I can see,' I don't think I'll ever really be getting used to it - I mean for Christ sake will you no take a look at the world? It does my nut the way folks take their eyesight for granted, the number of people who're no ever looking up from their bloody mobile..."

"So you're always saying," Brigid happily declared.

"Don't point out me repeating myself and I'll no point out you repeating yourself," said Annie.

"Were we no just having that conversation no five minutes ago?" Mackie said, and Brigid snorted and gave him a dour look, while Annie laughed.

"Anyway," Annie said, "Talking about my eyes, there was a reason I was across and not just to meet Alice properly," and she took a deep breath. "I have an appointment tomorrow. Doctor Clayton says he's satisfied with how my cyberbrain's healed in. I'm getting my new eyes in tomorrow and I wanted to ask if you and Nick..."

"Would be available for a wee bit of morale support, aye," said Mackie with a nod. "Well for my part there's no a timetable for this week - Murdo-Ian's already set down at the pub, myself am just getting a few wee bitties done around the house and that in between getting everything ready for the college. As far as Nick goes, he's at sea today, we can see if we can be raising the Vigra on the radio,"

"We won't be able to until later," said Brigid. "They're up towards Kylestrome at the moment, they're crossing the mouth of the loch towards Eilen Shea probably about lunchtime - at this point they're probably working south towards Lochinver with Sgurr Geal still between us and them."

"We could go for a bit of a spree," said Mackie. "Just be grabbing the radio and driving up the coast until we're seeing the boat then giving themselves a wee shout, it's no like the radio's plugging into the wall now, is it."

"Aye, I'm up for it," said Annie with a shrug. "What about yourselves, Alice, Brigid? Fancy a bit of a spree?"

Brigid looked at Alice.

"Sure," Alice said. "Let's go."

So that was exactly what they did.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The vehicle that awaited them, once they'd finished their tea and Mackie had got the radio - a bulky grey plastic walkie-talkie sort of a thing - off of its charging stand, turned out to be the worst pile of junk Alice had so far since her awakening seen.

It had at one time been a double-cab pickup painted, somewhere under the years of neglect, the same shade of mustard yellow as the local railway used for their locomotives; it was fitted out with road-rail gear in the form of little rail wheels attached to each end that could be lowered onto the track - of these it had two seemingly-independent sets - and a full rollcage with an attached mounting point of some sort on the top bar.

Beyond that, it looked very much like it should have been scrapped years back. Every body panel including the roof was bent, the rear driver's side door was blue and the least rusty, least bent, part of the entire bodyshell, it sat at a drunken angle - low on the left rear side - there was a large hole in the bonnet with two pieces of rusty metal pipe sticking up out of it, the driver's door had a gate latch bolted to it instead of a doorhandle, the radiator grille was entirely missing as was the front bumper, the windscreen was cracked, and a numberplate hung at a funny angle from cable ties attached to the front subframe.

Annie proceeded to persuade it to start by leaning into the cab, making sure it was out of gear and the handbrake was all the way on, then reaching through the bonnet's huge rust hole and poking at something, causing the shitcan of a pickup to cough violently several times, spit a cloud of smoke and fire out of the two bits of rusty pipe sticking out of the bonnet (demonstrating them to be what it used for exhausts) with a shattering backfire, before choking and spluttering its way into life; Annie tugged at something in there a couple of times, causing the engine to gun, then as it settled into a rough and raucous and honestly kinda unhealthy-sounding tickover - it was hunting a little, the revs audibly rising and falling instead of holding steady, and occasionally it missed a beat then let off another tremendous backfire - she pulled her hand out of the engine and gave her apocalyptic chariot a satisfied mad grin.

Mackie and Brigid piled in the back while Alice rather dubiously looped round and got in the front passenger side, finding the interior to be just as disreputable as the exterior - there were holes in the footwell big enough to put your foot through going all the way to road, the driver's seat was completely missing any upholstery or stuffing, instead having an assortment of what looked like seat cushions off a sofa duct taped to it and a sheepskin slung over that, the steering wheel appeared to be attached by a single prominent bolt, the dashboard was entirely missing with the varied gauges and switches cable-tied to the exposed frame, there was no sign of a rear-view mirror and seatbelts were conspicuous by their absence, the headliner was entirely absent with nothing above your head but the battered metal of the cab roof, the ignition barrel was hanging from its cables, in between the holes the whole floor was littered in crisp packets, empty cartridge cases, and flattened beercans, and it wasn't a whole lot less loud inside than out - it let off another whole string of massive backfires as Alice was working out how to persuade the door to close (you had to really slam it) and Annie said, "Oh come on," and gunned the engine a couple of times, finally persuading it that it should be firing on all cylinders.

"Is there a particular reason," Alice started as Annie persuaded the wreck into motion, but she drifted off, not wanting to say the 'you drive such a piece of crap'.

"I drive a pile of scrap iron?" Annie asked with a laugh. "It's pretty much my project car, right? I've been gradually piecing it back together for a couple of years, I love this thing. It was one of the Sutherland Railway's maintenance-of-way vehicles until it got caught in a flood down at Ullapool three years before I was born, that was about when the Sutherland really started to go skint, so this old thing spent the following twenty years sitting in the back of the locomotive shed in Stroncrubie - we used to play in it when the lads were across visiting me, it was pretty much our favourite den, right, then three years back when I started learning to drive we started wondering and had an actual look at it and it didn't take us half an afternoon to get it to move under its own power, mostly because of Nick honestly, he's got a magic touch with engines. Most of the electrics were stripped out and the driver's seat and door were gone, Murdo McMurdo used it as a parts donor to keep the other one usable, but everything else was sound enough to run apart from the exhaust - there must have been water laying in there from the flood or something, it shited its whole exhaust pipe off when we got it to fire up, you should've seen Ewan Macrae's face when the backbox went out the shed door like a cruise missile and missed him by about half an inch."

"Aye, and it's nothing to do with the number of computers in a more modern car or the amount of trouble you'll have charging an electric up here," said Mackie with a snort as the shitcan pickup crested the rise from the rail yards onto the stretch of flat ground towards the tiny station.

"That too," said Annie with a shrug; she glanced over and caught Alice's expression. "Look, the nearest mains electricity is on the Black Isle, there's a few community hyro-electric schemes up here like what Nick helped put together here in Inverallen and there's places like Stroncrubie running on diesel generators but you're no going to reliably charge an electric off a home-made waterwheel and you can't exactly stick fifty ton of electricity on the back of a train."

"Then there's the way every current-production vehicle in the Home Islands if no the entire Empire has more onboard electronics than the bodies of everyone in this ute and aye myself's kenning how much work yourself's been having done, Alice. In cars, that's including mobile phone functionality, basically the entire time the car's connected to the manufacturer's computer systems and even before we're getting to the part about tracking, there's, uh, been some incidents, most of them seem to go a bit wonky if they're out of mobile connectivity for too long and, well, that means pretty much anywhere north of Loch Ness, the nearest mobile phone tower is south of Inverness. Between one thing and another hardly anyone in the north of Scotland drives anything actually built since about twenty years ago when the switchover to electrics and heavy computerisation was really getting going," Mackie said. "And then there's the way a motor like this makes yourself look like a nutter."

"That's just a bonus," Annie said, then caught Alice's expression. "What? I've done being the helpless damsel in distress and it was bloody awful and I'm not having with it again," and Alice's expression must have given away how thoroughly she wasn't getting it. "Look, my dad's loaded and ten years back, a couple of months after we moved up here, this bunch of clever buggers from down south decided the thing to do was to kidnap me for ransom. They waited until I was alone in the house Mum and Dad were renting here in Inverallen, Mum and Dad were across in Stroncrubie talking to the geologist Dad got in to look at the new ore strike up the back of Ben Daor and I was in a strop and wouldn't go, so these two twats kicked the door in, shot our housekeeper - he lived, thank Christ - stuffed me in the boot of their car, and got as far as halfway to Murdo McMurdo's driveway before Mackie chucked a big rock off the bluff above the road through their windscreen, he was out shooting rabbits for the pot and saw what was happening. Well the car went into the ditch, the twat in the passenger side went through the windscreen and staved his skull in off the side of Morag Macrae's house and the twat in the driver's seat basically staked himself through the heart on the steering column."

"So right about then Murdo McMurdo comes running down the road shitting hedgehogs, he was about to be throttling me but myself had gone straight round the back and was getting the boot open, himself was changing his tune right smart when he saw me getting the new landlord's wee daughter out the back of that bloody car," Mackie said.

"They proper started panicking before I managed to get through to them me being blind was normal and it probably didn't help that was before Mackie learned English," Annie said. "I was pretty banged about, not just from the crash either, those two bastards had decided to reaffirm their masculinity by beating up a little blind eight-year-old girl, so anyway after I told them Mum and Dad were off out of the village they got me into Murdo's van and took me over to the nearest thing to a doctor in the village, in other words Ian Macbane, he used to be a mountain rescue team paramedic down in Perthshire. So anyway in the aftermath of that mess Mum said something about me not having any friends where Mackie and Nick could hear it and they both hit the bloody roof, they basically assigned themselves the position and were round visiting every day for the rest of the time we were living there in Inverallen then after we moved through to Stroncrubie that autumn after the new mines opened up those two idiots started jumping goods trains to come over pretty much daily, and after six weeks of that and it becoming eminently clear they weren't going to quit it Dad just told the locomotive crews to let the boys ride in their cabs so there was no an accident. Fast forwards a year and a half and I got my first set of working eyes in and to cut a long story short it wasn't long before I was joining the boys riding goods trains all up and down the coast."

"And finding out that ourselves had no been making up any of the wee stories we'd been telling herself," Mackie added as Annie hauled the wheel across to turn onto the level crossing - she brought the pickup almost to a halt, glanced in both directions, then hit the gas again.

"Any rate about then I swore to myself I was never ever being some bastard's helpless bloody victim ever again," Annie continued, ignoring Mackie's comment. "There's now six idiots in the ground, two in a prison hospital, and another five in one of the penal colonies on Mars, who decided a rich bloke's pretty daughter obviously wasn't going to know how to use this," and she indicated her pistol then hauled the wheel back across in the other direction to turn onto the road west out the village.

"As if Murdo McMurdo and Calum Boyd were going to be letting the daughter of the man who was saving our railway wander around not knowing how to be looking after herself, myself am guessing some people are just born daft," Mackie said with a snort. "Let's face it, there's a reason Claire's never on her own, nobody at the railway is wanting a repeat of May '86."

He then caught the expression on Annie's face via the rear-view mirror, and added, "What?"

"... You're saying the two hardest bastards on the loch reckon I can look after myself,"

"After the number of times yourself's been proving it?"

Annie said, "Huh," then after a bit of a thoughtful silence, by which time she had turned off of the road that curved north towards Kylestrome and they were passing under the railway bridge Alice had seen the previous day, she added, "Cool. Still going to tell people you and Nick are my bodyguards when we're over to the college though."

"Aye, any bonnie lassie whose dad is loaded is needing some big lumps of muscle to be looming at anything that's needing to be loomed at," said Mackie with a sagely nod, at which point Annie put her foot down and the resulting racket from the engine rendered conversation functionally impossible, it was by a wide margin the loudest vehicle in which Alice had ever found herself.

The road to Lochinver was even narrower, bendier, beat-up and bumpier than the road north, though that last might have been more down to the pickup's knackered suspension and woefully decrepit seats - by the time they were turning north up the coast at Lochinver, having passed through half a dozen tiny villages on the way, Alice had definitely concluded that firstly her tailbone was not, in fact, cybernetic (or if it was she was going to have to give Dr Clayton a stern ticking off about cybernetic tailbones that can feel like they've been beat the shit out of) and secondly that she was going to do her level best to avoid lifts with Annie until something had been done about the total lack of ride quality or soundproofing. Ideally, she felt, she'd avoid ever riding in that pickup again without it first having been given a thorough seeing-to by a full team of highly-trained elite ninja motor mechanics.

They'd rattled their way through another half a dozen tiny back-of-nowhere villages with Annie waving enthusiastically at other road users every two minutes, and Alice was beginning to wonder if there's such a thing as cyborg piles, by the time Brigid pointed out the cab between the seats and yelled, only just audible from the shattering roar of the engine, "There's our boat!" and a moment later Annie had skidded to a halt with a squeal of decaying brakes in the next passing place and they were all piling out with the radio in Mackie's hand.

"Vigra, Vigra, Vigra," Mackie said into it the very moment the engine had clattered into silence, "Are you on there Elf? Over."

A couple of moments passed in refreshing peace and quiet and then Elf Macbane's voice crackled out of the radio, "You're coming out the windows Mackie, yourself's out and about there? Over."

"Annie's across asking after Nick," Mackie replied. "Herself's wanting his company across to Inverness the morrow. Over."

There was a pause, then Nick's staticky voice asked, "What's happening? Over," and Mackie handed Annie the radio.

"I'm getting my new eyes in. Over," she said, and there was another pause.

"Aye, I'll be about," Nick replied. "Murdo-Alec Maclennon's already set to be covering for me while I'm in the college, we'll see if himself's available for the morrow and if not well Nat's going to be earning a few quid. Over.

"Thanks Nick, and you too Elf. Over," Annie said, and handed the radio back to Mackie.

"Okay then, we'll leave yourselves be. Mackie out," he said, and chucked the radio back into the pickup.

"Well," he said, "Myself was telling you not to worry about it."

"Get bent you old teuchter," said Annie.

They spent half an hour wandering around the stretch of moor by the road with Mackie pointing out different random mountains and bits of island and saying which was what, then piled back into the pickup to rattle and bounce and roar all the way back to Inverallen - at Brigid's pointed suggestion they stopped off in Lochinver for ice cream and spent another half an hour wandering around the combination harbour and railway station with Mackie once again playing tour guide, before Annie dropped the other three off in Inverallen and hit the road west out the village on her way home, and as they were walking back up the driveway towards the Macbane's croft Alice shook her head and said, "Annie's bloody welcome to that pile of crap - bloody hell, my ears are ringing and my arse feels like I've been sitting on a road drill."

Brigid gave her a funny look, then snorted.

"There's a reason I got in the back," she said. "I don't like to say anything in front of Annie, she loves that old wreck, but the back seats are twenty years newer than either of what passes for front seats, the back suspension's not as bad as the front, it's at that funny angle because the front axle's bent and one of the shocks is seized up, and it's not as loud in the back either. I always let Nick or Mackie get the front seat, they seem to have concrete for arses but I guess that's not really that surprising since their bikes don't have back suspension."

"You know a lot more about how that sort of stuff works than I expected," Alice admitted.

Brigid shrugged and said, "I spend a lot of time helping Nick."

"I take it Nick's a bit of a mechanic then?"

"Aye," said Brigid with a nod.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Towards the end of the afternoon, Alice was once again pulled out of trying to avoid thinking about the explosion via her ongoing failed attempts to read Lewis Carroll, once again by Brigid, who this time transpired to have been sitting across the table watching her for a while when she eventually said, "You've been reading the same paragraph for a quarter of an hour," and then added, "Sorry," when she realised she'd made Alice jump.

Alice turned her attention from the page in question, which was something involving a cake marked 'Eat me', and said, "It's alright, I was away in a cloud."

Brigid gave her a long, measuring, entirely too adult, look and said, "Of shrapnel," and that left Alice staring blankly at her for nearly a minute.

"... how did you know?" she eventually asked.

"You're not even nearly the first person I've seen having a flashback and there's no way you're going to be the last. It takes you about ten minutes of quiet, doesn't it, then you're back there seeing that bomb going off, aren't you, it's as clear as the nose on your face. It's called shellshock and it's entirely too common here in the north what with one thing and another. I'm not surprised you've got shellshock, anyone who's been blown up even half as bad as you were has it."

Alice continued staring at her while trying to digest that and then said, "I don't think waking up and not recognising my hands helped either, or realising I've got the wrong face."

"No, it wouldn't have," Brigid said with a sigh; she frowned and then added, "Maybe it'd be a good idea if you kept busy for a while."

"What, something like a campaign of attempted distraction?" Alice asked, putting the book down - she didn't bother marking her place, she was pretty clear she wasn't going to finish it any time soon and she remembered so little of what she'd already read she was most likely going to have to start from the beginning when she did pick it back up. "Actually, that sounds like a good idea... so, what is there to do around here?"

Brigid thought about that for a moment, then glance at the clock.

"Well, the pub opens in twenty minutes and Elf was on the radio while you were, uh, distracted," Brigid said. "She says they'll be getting to the harbour in about - oh, probably about forty minutes - and it's still a nice day, so we could go down to the pier, sit outside the pub, and wait to meet the others when they come on shore."

"I don't have any ID - at least I don't think I do," Alice pointed out.

Brigid smiled.

"You're still thinking in down south," she said.

-/-/-/-/-/-

An unhurried walk from the Macbane croft down to Inverallen harbour - a distance of a little under a mile - took a little over twenty minutes.

The first half of the walk was up the Macbanes long driveway, past Mackie's house and the rail yards, and onwards along the road down from the station - this wound through the woods for a quarter of a mile or so and the whole way along had a set of absurdly wide very rusty railway tracks mostly straddling it. The woods were broken up by the occasional croft-house and/or barnyard on one side of the road or the other, and one patch about halfway along dipped into a bit of a hollow where it crossed a burn via a squat little stone arch bridge.

At the end of the more or less level woodland section the woods suddenly split up, the absurdly wide railway tracks swung off to the left in amongst the trees, and via a small rise they came out of the trees and the land opened up and they found themselves at the top of a long, steep, more or less straight hill going all the way down to the harbour for the second half of the walk, giving an excellent view out over Inverallen Bay and the lion's share of the village - the land formed a sort of bowl in three rough levels, surrounded on the side they'd come from by hills, to the left and ahead by mountains, and to the right by the waters of the bay. Crofthouses, small pastures, and little patches of cultivated land covered the whole bowl area, up as high as the skyline where the road wound out of the village to the east and down as far as sea.

The bay itself was surrounded on one side by the bowl of the village and on both the others by mountains; there was a crack of green to the southeast between the bulk of rock looming up over the bay's south side and the mountains to the east, and all round the bay just above the high tide were a long string of white-harled houses forming Inverallen's village street. From her vantage point Alice could make out three different railway lines, one thoroughly overgrown zigzagging drunkenly down towards the harbour, one making a long sweeping descent towards the slash of green at the furthest corner of the bay, and the third climbing steadily above the road east out of Inverallen that she only knew was a railway because it had a train coming down it.

There were two stone-built piers, one with a mound of crab pots on the widened far end of it, a scattering of small brightly-painted boats moored in the shelter of the piers, and a swathe of fishfarm cages sprawled out on the far side of the bay.

The road down passed several more croft-houses and barnyards jutting off of it and looking almost like they sloped upwards due to being flat while the road was so steep - at the bottom of the descent it flattened out and ran along the top of a low sea wall with rocky beach below it, with a few woefully battered derelict fishing boats slowly decaying on it - there was a total of one building between the sea and the road right where the road flattened out, a solid-looking stone structure with a roof that went much further on the seaward side than on the landward side, and this Brigid said had once been the harbourmaster's office.

The harbour area had railway tracks - both the absurdly wide and narroer-than-normal kind - set into the road surface - the narrow stuff ran out onto both piers while the wide stuff went down a slipway, where two large hairy weatherbeaten-looking men were industriously strapping a small fishing boat to a six-wheeled skeletal wagon riding on those absurdly wide rails; a dilapidated little grey tractor was hooked up to the wagon. There were old boats and clapped-out road vehicles everywhere - a mishmash of vans one of which Alice recognised as having been parked on the Macbanes croft the previous day, an assortment of woebegone cars, a couple of horribly battered pickup trucks, one very dead bulldozer, two ratty old forklifts, and what had once been a Land-Rover but now appeared to be a pile of rust.

The pub took the form of one of the white-harled stone-built houses along the waterfront, and was jammed in between a tin-and-tarpaper shack with fuel pumps out the front and another similar house the door of which was standing open and from which an elderly black-clad woman with hessian shopping bags in both hands was exiting. It had a tin roof, there were a load of very large and very ugly skulls looking like they came from a thing like a rhino's larger and gnarlier cousin attached to the end wall, a strong whiff of dope smoke and the lively strains of Celtic folk-rock coming from the door, and rough-and-ready cobbled-together camp tables out the front; one of these was occupied by a pair of crusty old codgers in Trade Union hats and dungarees, both holding pints of almost absurdly dark beer and one smoking a cob pipe; they were nattering in Gaelic about something they both very clearly thought was hilarious, and as Brigid and Alice turned into the building the old lady with the shopping bags joined in the conversation with some sort of pithy remark that left both the old boys hooting with laughter and the one who wasn't smoking slapping his knee.

Inside was very much a traditional pub: age-stained wood panelling, overstuffed red leather seating, old maps and flintlock guns hanging on the walls, and a giant teak bar structure with several hand-pumped beer taps and a huge array of whiskies above and below a big mirror behind it along with a number of pieces of unfamiliar electronics; to Alice's surprise there wasn't a single bottle of wine visible in the entire place. There was a dartboard at one end of the room, and a jukebox - from which the music audible outside was belting - beside the door; the place wasn't busy, half a dozen assorted customers (two of whom, a pair of young women, were sharing a very large spliff) all seated at the bar, and the landlord - a particularly large grey-haired man with a startling familial resemblance to Mackie - was chatting in Gaelic to a couple of customers; he immediately greeted Brigid in that same language as soon as he saw her coming in the door.

"Small beer please, Adair, and Alice will have... what'd you like Alice? My shout," Brigid said, marching up to the bar like she owned the place.

"I, um, usually drink white wine?" Alice admitted, having a peer at what was on display; that got a chuckle out of the elderly man she had stopped beside when she arrived at the bar.

"You'll no be finding a lot of that this far north," the old boy said, his Gaelic accent just as thick as Mackie's.

"Well as luck would have it I've this," the landlord said, unearthing a bottle from beneath the bar - this had one of those flip tops that clip down with a little wire latch. "Elderflower wine, would that be doing you? Or if you're fancying a red I've elderberry back here and all... Tell you what, I'll give you a wee taste," and he collected a whisky glass from above the bar, sloshed an overly generous sample of wine into it, and slid it across the bar to Alice before turning his attention to pouring a drink from one of the pumps for Brigid.

"Vigra, Vigra, Vigra, are you on there Elf? Over," one of the pieces of electronics crackled, revealing itself to be the sort of radio one would more often find in a boat. Alice sipped at the wine, finding it to be very sweet and quite unlike anything she'd ever drank before, though not unpleasant.

"Glass of this, please," she said with a nod.

"Aye, you're coming out the windows Keith, over," the radio said in Elf's voice.

"That'll be one and six please," the landlord said to Brigid, who unearthed some unfamiliar coinage from somewhere and slid it across the bar to him.

"Bonnie day for it, over."

"Here's two bob," Brigid said; the landlord took the money and gave her some change.

"Aye, it's like a sheet of glass. Are you earning a living there Keith? Over."

"Let's sit out the front, it's too smokey in here for me," Brigid said to Alice as she accepted her change, giving the pair of girls with the spliff a dubious look, to which they replied with a lot of giggling and set the landlord rolling his eyes.

"Nae a bad one Elf, that's the bills well and paid, and yourselves? Over."

"Aye, that's the diesel paid for at least, not a bad day at all. Over," and that was as much of the radio chatter as they heard as they exited the pub and took up occupation of the table that had been empty.

"What's 'small beer'?" Alice asked, sipping her wine.

"What, you don't get that where you're from? That blows," Brigid said with a frown. "It's what you get if you brew several times with the same mash, oh, here, have a taste," and she slid her glass over to Alice, who gave it a try, finding that it tasted almost but not quite like bread.

"Like it?"

"Huh - interesting," Alice said, sliding the glass back to Brigid. "Think I'll stick to wine though."

"Go steady with that stuff," the old codger with the pipe advised, and paused to finish off his beer. "That's no the sort of grape juice that they're calling wine down south, it's packing a wallop."

"Aye," the other old codger agreed, puffing on his pipe. "I've seen a few weans puking over the sea wall after a glass too many of that."

"Doesn't taste that strong," Alice said, having another sip of her wine.

"That it doesn't, it's sneaky stuff, it'll be creeping up on you for a wee ambush if you're giving it half a chance," the old boy with the pipe said.

"How strong was wee Morag saying it was again Murdo?" the old boy without the pipe asked.

"Och, I cannae mind," the old boy with the pipe said, shaking his head. "Maybe about twenty percent I think it was? It was a while back that I was last talking the brewing with herself,"

"Oh aye, memory starting to go you old teuchter?" asked the old boy without the pipe.

"Teuchter yourself Murdo, there's nae a thing wrong with my bloody memory,"

"Aye, you just cannae be bothered to be remembering unimportant wee details like what day of the week it is or," and with that both of them burst out laughing.

"Aye, you just keep telling yourself that," the old boy with the pipe chortled. "So, are you having another round then man?"

"Och, might as well, might as well," and the two of them heaved themselves to their feet and headed into the bar.

"That's Murdo London and Murdo Macrae," said Brigid. "They're harmless. Well, unless you're a herring, Murdo London basically runs on herring," She then pointed and added, "There's the Vigra, they're early," and looking up Alice found the fishing boat she'd earlier seen from the hillside north of Lochinver just emerging from behind the headland at the furthest corner of the bay.

"Don't bother standing up yet," Brigid added, causing Alice to stop and not head for the pier after all. "They have to put the day's catch into the keepers before they'll moor her."

"What's a keeper?" Alice asked.

"It's a creel with no eyes - oh, look," and she pointed at the stack of crab pots beside the top of the slipway. "See the sort of net funnel thing going into those? That's the eye, crabs and lobsters and whatnot can find their way in through it but they can't find the way back out through it because, well, basically shellfish aren't very bright. A keeper is just one where there's plain netting over that part of it, it's pretty much an underwater cage for keeping crabs and lobsters alive in - they'll live for hours out the water but not, you know, days and there's only really enough being caught to fill one crab train a week."

"What, an entire train just from here?"

"Oh - no, basically every Wednesday night there's a train works its way north from Mallaig dropping off a vivier wagon - basically that's a special box van with big tanks of salt water and stuff to oxygenate it in - or two in each harbour, right, and once it gets to Duirnish there's just the locomotive and one van left. So everyone loads the vans on Thursday, the price gets settled and everything gets weighed at the same time, and I think it's about five Thursday afternoon the train heads back down to Mallaig picking up the loaded vans to go to the cannery down there. There's other buyers of course, they bring vivier lorries up, but most people just sell to Annie's dad because the railway's right there on the pier and he gives a good price."

-/-/-/-/-/-

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