The kids had been right: there was a robot in Caernarfon.

Morag had been skeptical when Blodwyn and Rain had come running to tell her. Robots were scarce and becoming scarcer. There were a small number of feral ones still roaming the hillsides, but, with no one to fix them, their lifespan was limited. Seamus, the walkbot that had attached itself to Morag a few years back, owed its continued survival to a combination of chance, luck, determination, and, more recently, Morag’s own skill with a soldering iron, so the chances of another robot surviving were rather low.

But there it was. It stood motionless in what was normally one of the fairground’s livestock paddocks, looming twice as tall as a human. The robot’s body was a verdigris-green metal sphere, with what looked like a mirrored visor at the front. The robot had long copper arms with three-fingered grabbers at the end. Morag took note of those grabbers. She’d been thinking of fitting something similar to Seamus, replacing the stump on its anterior where a camera or gun had once been. The robot had two big, flat feet and what looked like a small collection of organ pipes near the top of the sphere.

And Morag was sure she’d seen something like it before, long ago when she was a child.

The banner beside the robot read The Iron Piper, with a more or less accurate picture of the machine, and promised shows every hour on the hour. Morag bought a large bag of hazelnuts to share and settled in on the makeshift stand beside the paddock to wait for the chime of the city clock, the children talking excitedly and Seamus folding its six digitigrade limbs and settling down at her feet like a dog, exposing its dorsal solar array to the light.

Morag’s brother Zeb and his husband Dai always came to the Rugby Weekend in Caernarfon at midsummer to support their foster-son Rabbie, who was captain of the Pen-Y-Groes side. But, because Rugby Weekend had long ago become about more than just rugby, they also came to make trade talk with the other brewers in the area, to catch up with their grown children who had moved away to places like Portmeirion or Ffestiniog, or joined one or the other of the local bands of nomads, and to give the rest of their brood of orphans an exciting trip. And for Morag, it was worth the trip to swap tech, plans, and gossip with other salvagers.

On the hour, as promised, the Iron Piper sprang into life. The organ pipes cleared and began playing a shrill, inhuman song.

The crowd gasped.

The big machine stomped around the paddock, pipes blaring out tune after tune. A robust, plump woman with bright scarlet hair and a top hat materialized from out of a nearby canvas tent and began a swift announcer’s patter. This was interesting enough, since most people locally didn’t tend to that sort of physique. Not that everyone was skinny, but that this woman’s plumpness didn’t have muscle under it. Meaning, she didn’t have to labor. Morag couldn’t think of the last person she’d met who didn’t. Even the scholars at the archive at Portmeirion had bodies that spoke of doing shifts of cleaning and mending and gardening and repairing work in between research projects.

Morag listened to the woman with half an ear, since most of it was clearly made up: outrageous stories about this being a genuine work robot out of London that had survived the chaos of the past decades, that it was the product of some fabled American automation lab, that it had won awards and achieved wonders. Mostly, she watched as the robot went through a standard strong man act, bending iron bars and lifting heavy objects, including one or two volunteers from the audience, tearing a metal barrel into a flat sheet, and then folding that sheet into a hat and putting it on top of the sphere.

After the climactic business with the hat, the robot marched out of the paddock and into the tent. The large woman took center stage. She made a brief, enthusiastic speech, which Morag initially tuned out. But then something brought her attention back to what the woman was saying.

“ . . . a tech organization, in Aberystwyth.” The woman gestured with her top hat. “The Campus. Like in the good old days, when there were start-ups and apps. We have more robots like this, even different ones for different jobs. We’re looking for people who would be interested in joining us, learning how to build and fix robots, bringing back the old tech, and making new applications for the new world. We’ll be here ’til the end of Rugby Weekend, and then we’ll be moving on.”

Morag noticed that several people, most of them young, took the printed leaflets the woman was handing out. She took one too, examined it, then put it in her jacket pocket, thanked the kids for telling her about the show, smiled meaningfully when they asked if it was a real robot, gave them the remains of the bag of hazelnuts, and walked out, Seamus at her heels.

Then she doubled back, not hurrying, taking her time. Walked past the paddock with its banner, then, casually, ducked into the tent.

“Busted,” she said.

The top-hat woman didn’t seem surprised or upset. She looked up at Morag from over the sandwich she was eating. Alongside her was a thin, tired-looking man in an old microfiber suit, hair slick with sweat. Both of them were sitting on folding chairs by a table in the rear. A couple of bedrolls nearby, a sealed box of the kind most people carried food and similar for journeys, bags, and packages. All of it arrayed, like an audience, around the robot.

The robot was open. A door at the rear, showing the interior, with its big comfortable seat and the panel full of controls. The mirrored visor was revealed to be a one-way mirror, a window from the perspective of the operator.

The woman gestured for Morag to join them. “You were at the show this afternoon. I saw you. With a walkbot.” She nodded at Seamus. “I’m Maeve,” she said. Morag waited for her to introduce the man, but she didn’t. Instead, the man silently got up, found another folding chair in their supplies, and unfolded it for her.

“Morag,” Morag said, taking the chair. “That’s Seamus. And that,” she gestured at the spherical robot, “is a modified robot-assisted exosuit. Developed for heavy lifting in industry and for possible medical uses for the paralyzed, though I don’t think it ever really got very far in that market. And, since it’s been designed to look on the outside like a Gundam from a streaming series I vaguely remember, and since they don’t ordinarily come with a built-in organ, my guess is it’s for display rather than industrial use.”

“That’s the truth,” Maeve said, nodding at the machine. “We’re pretty sure it was originally used for a robot show. You know, stage performances, actors in robot suits swinging swords and flying on wires. We’ve got some of the less pretty ones, too, on the Campus. For work, not robot shows. Salvaged from the docks in Liverpool.”

“So, why pretend it’s a robot?” The thin man offered her a potted-mutton sandwich and, with a slight hesitation, Morag took it. They weren’t going to poison her, she told herself.

“What’s your name?” she asked the man cheerily.

“Tam,” he said, so quietly Morag almost didn’t hear it.

“Marketing,” the woman said with a shrug, ignoring this exchange. “Most of the audience sees it, believes in it, and goes away. Then you get the handful of people, mostly kids, who figure out it isn’t a robot. They come ’round after the show, and they say, ‘busted.’” She smiled at Morag. “Which shows they’ve got the knowledge, or if not the knowledge, then the perception skills that we’re looking for. If they do, I tell them more about the Campus.”

“More marketing? Or true things?”

Maeve smiled wryly. “Yes. Once we get past the initial recruitment stages, we need to know if we’re right for each other.”

Morag was getting echoes of the old tech companies in the way Maeve talked and wondered if she’d worked for one of them. She looked about Morag’s age, and Morag had been in her twenties when the tech companies went bust, so perhaps she had, for a while. “Can I see your walkbot?”

“Seamus,” Morag said, “come forward and let Maeve look at you.”

Maeve examined the little robot while it stood, six legs braced and the stump on its anterior raised as if it were preparing to defend itself. Morag put Seamus through the paces she usually did when people asked to see him: walking a circle, trotting, running, standing on four legs with his anterior ones and then his posterior ones raised.

She didn’t ask him to deploy the aluminum claws hidden in his feet. They had to keep some secrets.

Morag noted that Maeve did seem to know what she was about, checking the connections and access ports and stopping over the wear on the joints and the scars from life on the hills.

“Do you have any like that?” Morag asked.

Maeve shook her head slowly. “Parts of them, yes. They were fairly common back in the day, and we’ve got enough broken ones that we’ve been able to assemble some complete bodies. Problem is, they don’t work. Just stand there. Software’s missing.”

“Really? Can’t you retro-engineer some?” Morag was disappointed. Lately, she found herself worrying about Seamus’ programming. Not that there was anything disturbing, but she’d noticed a few physical tics that were probably the result of its not having had specialist attention for over twenty years. Reminders that robots, like humans, don’t last forever.

She’d thought maybe, if there was a tech institute out there . . . but these people didn’t seem to be what she needed.

“We’ve tried,” Maeve said. “Never seems to work. We’ve got a few people who worked on smart machines, but no one who knows how to program a walkbot. Do you think we could do a deal?” she asked abruptly. “Copy this one’s software, see if we can read it into ours?”

Morag wasn’t sure that was a good idea. Seamus might be a useful helper, guarding the farm and helping her carry goods and tools, but he’d been designed as a killer. And Maeve and her Campus had to know that, too.

“What are you offering in return?” she asked.

“Why don’t you come back with me to the Campus?” Maeve said. “We’d love to have you join us, of course, but even if you don’t want to, you might be able to find ways of improving your robot.”

“Tell me more about this. Is it an actual campus?”

Maeve nodded. “We set up where the Aberystwyth University used to be.”

About two days away on foot, Morag thought. No wonder she hadn’t heard of them before—and there was a question to answer about why they’d come this far north, recruiting.

“We’ve been fixing up the surviving buildings. Haven’t built more yet, but we’re planning to, once we have the resources. We’ve rehabilitated the tech wing, got some of the accommodation blocks working again. We’re self-sufficient. We’ve got our own farm with fields and livestock.”

“Who works on those?” Morag asked.

“Lots of people want to join us,” Maeve said, a little smoothly, Morag thought. “Not just the technically minded. There are lots of people out there now without communities, looking for work. You know as well as I do.”

“Casuals,” Morag said. This was the name, these days, for the laborers who migrated from place to place, taking seasonal work. Although they’d started out on the fringes, enough of them had now banded together into groups, with networks and families and efficient communications systems, that one couldn’t really consider them any more disadvantaged than any other tribe of nomads. They had marks and symbols they used to rate farms and businesses, collective forms of representation, systems for negotiating wages, and for sharing the wages amongst themselves.

“Casuals, yes. But also people on their own. Some move on, but many stay,” Maeve said. Her tone suggested to Morag that she preferred her labor less organized.

“And the technically minded?”

“When we get new people in, we give them an intake test. Find out what job everyone’s best at, or most interested in. We give them training, get them working on what they can.”

“I mean, do they stay or move on?”

“Most stay,” Maeve said. “Everyone’s free to do what they want, of course, but a lot of people like the stability.”

“I’ve already got stability,” Morag said. “What can you offer me?”

“Knowledge,” Maeve said. “Respect. It can’t be easy for someone with your skills out here. I’m thinking you have to spend most of your time farming, just to survive?”

Morag nodded, though this wasn’t entirely the truth: she had a pretty good living and was doing much better than surviving. It wasn’t a lie, though, to say that she’d much rather spend her time in the tech workshop than weeding beetroot rows, digging potatoes, and feeding goats. The archivists at Portmeirion had offered her a place if she ever wanted to give up the farm, but she didn’t think she’d want to spend her time researching and cataloging the past, when there was so much future still to come.

And she had more than a suspicion that what they really wanted was to get their hands on Seamus. Not that they had a use for it; they kept an archive room of old tech, silent, switched off, and useless. Dead.

But these people were actual tech builders. Might they be better? For Seamus, and for her?

“We can offer you a place where you could work full-time on the things you want to do. Fixing robots. Maybe building new robots? Teaching people. Leaving a legacy for later generations. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“I would,” Morag replied.

“Then why not come, for a short visit or cultural exchange, at least? Think about it,” Maeve added.

---

Morag got back to Zeb and Dai’s camp in time for the evening meal. Cliff was there, sitting propped against his big walkbot, Will, telling the younger kids a story.

Cliff had been one of Zeb and Dai’s orphans, who’d later transferred himself to Morag due to his affinity for tech. But rather than be a salvager and fixer like Morag, he wanted to design his own machines: ones that could run off the technology people had. Not be dependent on what people could salvage from the spoil heaps and ruins. Like Will, a cargo walkbot with damage to its systems and no way of restoring the software. Cliff had fixed it so it could walk and follow simple instructions.

Now Cliff and Will walked a circuit between the towns and farming communities, selling plans for people to build their own machines, and his services for people who didn’t want to, or couldn’t, do the building and fixing themselves.

Morag recognized the story Cliff was telling. It was a familiar one in the region: about the billionaire who’d moved into the local manor house twenty-five or thirty years before. Thinking he could ride out the end of civilization as the ruler of a feudal demesne, with an army of hired security taking advantage of the lack of codified laws.

“ . . . and then the security robots rose up and shot him, and shot his wife, and shot the bad soldiers, but let the good soldiers go,” Cliff was saying. “And the children. And now the Big House belongs to everyone. We grow food in its gardens, lots of people live in the buildings, and—”

“Was Seamus one of the robots?” Rain demanded, catching sight of Morag and Seamus.

“Actually, it was,” Morag said, settling down in the group. “So you’d better behave.” Morag had been the one to take the programming restraints off the robots, but she generally preferred that people leave that part of the narrative out. “No, don’t climb Seamus, Blodwyn, you know he’s not for climbing on.”

“I want another story!”

“After dinner, I’ll tell you the one about how Janet of Orkney rescued her lover from the Queen of the Fairies.”

“I’d rather have the one about the Queen in the North who fed her husband to his own dogs.”

“Well, you can have that one too, but in the meantime, your brother and I need to talk about boring things. Why don’t you two go play football with Seamus ’til the meal’s ready?”

“I was hoping you’d be here,” Cliff said, digging in his packs, as the kids and robot ran off for a kickabout. “I brought you something. Well, Seamus something.” He handed her an object about the length of her forearm, wrapped in cloth. She pulled it out, examined it. Laughed.

“I’d heard about these,” she said. “There was a craze, for a while. Videos on the Internet. But still, I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable giving Seamus a flamethrower. Where’d you get it?”

Cliff chuckled. “Farmer found it in his shed, offered it to me in exchange for fixing his threshing machine. I didn’t feel I could say no. Wasn’t sure if you’d actually want it, but thought it was worth a try. Want me to see if I can sell it to the tech shop in Porthmadog?”

“No, it’s all right, I’m sure I can find a use for it. I could use it to burn off stubble or maybe see if there’s a way to turn it into a welding torch. Now that would be genuinely useful.” Tucking it into her own carry bag, Morag settled herself against Will and accepted the bottle of ale Cliff handed her. Told Cliff about the Iron Piper, about Maeve and Tam, about the Campus. About Maeve’s offer.

“We got around the software problem with Will,” Cliff remarked.

“It’ll never be smart, like Seamus,” Morag said. “No value judgment implied. But you know what I mean.”

“I do.” Will could walk, stand, sit, follow people, but it couldn’t take initiative like Seamus did. “So, are you going to let them copy his software?” Cliff said.

Morag shrugged. “You know I’m not one to hoard knowledge or information. But there’s a lot of reasons we tell the kids that story about the billionaire and the Big House.”

“People setting themselves up over other people is bad.” Cliff didn’t need to remind her that he had spent most of his childhood in a tech shop run by a gang in a city, disassembling and rebuilding machines for them to sell or to use in their feuds, before escaping and finding his way to Zeb and Dai.

“That’s one. Another is that Seamus and his kind are killers as much as they are helpers. There’s lots of people who want to bring back the old days, not thinking about whether or not what we had still works now.”

“You want to find out more about them first.”

“I want to find out what their agenda is,” Morag said. “Deception as an entry point makes me suspicious. The way Maeve ignored Tam more so. There’s always more than one side to every story.”

---

Morag was sitting with the walkbots by the fire in the midsummer twilight, listening to the sounds of revelry from over at the castle and wondering whether or not to take her friend Glyn up on his offer of spending the night in his rooms at the Black Buoy Inn, purely for the sake of her back of course, when Seamus sprang abruptly from power-saving into guard mode. Will didn’t have a guard mode, but, responding to the change in atmosphere, tensed its legs, preparing to stand.

“This is a surprise,” Morag said, offering Tam a seat on one of the old logs by the firepit. Meaning, it wasn’t actually a surprise, but she was being polite.

Tam settled down. “I thought we could talk,” he said.

“Maeve’s not going to come down on us like a fiend from hell, is she?”

A slight, fragile headshake. “She got invited out by the Llanfair rugby eleven.”

“She’ll be busy for a while, then. Shouldn’t you be watching the robot?”

“I should,” Tam said, “but I traded a favor with the child who’s minding the livestock pen next door.”

“Well, then,” Morag said, indicating to Seamus to decrease alert level but stay on guard and reaching for a bottle of ale. “Want to tell me how you wound up working on the Campus? And why you’re in a robot show?”

The man smiled, thinly. “Politics,” he said.

Morag passed him the bottle. He drank deeply from it, wiped his mouth with a sigh. “I haven’t had proper home-brewed ale in I don’t know how long.”

“They don’t do it on the Campus?”

He shook his head. “It was a good idea,” he said. “The Campus. I was one of the first recruits. I had worked in a start-up in Cardiff. But I’d been drifting since the start-ups closed. Finding work in the countryside, but nothing that made use of my skills. I was wasted raising sheep and poultry.”

Morag, who was good with tech but also thought she wasn’t too bad at keeping goats and geese, and furthermore thought there was no shame in farming work, shrugged.

“Some of the casuals do tech work,” she said. There were enough people needing things fixed, and not every village had someone like Morag who could.

Tam scoffed again.

“The casuals,” he said. “Even if you can get the work, they expect their cut.”

“It’s insurance. You share your take when you score, someone else shares theirs when times are lean for you.”

“I don’t like to depend on other people,” Tam said.

Well, there’s your problem, Morag thought. People who don’t like to depend on other people are vulnerable to the Maeves of the world.

“So you wouldn’t join a tribe, then,” she said.

Tam scoffed. “Even worse than the casuals. Do you know what their lives are like? Sleeping under the rain, eating any old scraps you can find, starving to death, like as not?”

Morag knew a thing or two about how nomads lived, and it wasn’t that bad a lifestyle. But she gestured for Tam to go on.

“Same with a lot of the people who joined. People with city jobs. People without families, or with talents their families didn’t understand. Working toward something better. And everyone was valued, believe me. Even people working in the fields, as cooks, as cleaners.” Morag carefully didn’t say anything. “So long as they worked. Everyone got an equal share of food, shelter, entertainment. It was a flat structure.”

“You wanted to bring back the old tech campuses,” Morag said, neutrally. “People saving the world with better technology. Meritocracy where people rise through their skills and abilities.”

“More than that. It was going to be where people could think long-term. Things might be difficult now, but we need to think about what we as a species need to survive and thrive.”

“I’ve read biology,” Morag said. Not in the university sense of having a degree, but her older sister had got a BSc in agricultural science from a southern university, and Morag had, of course, been all over her textbooks. “And there used to be a research center between where I live and the coast, studying the wolf population. And I know that from a species point of view, all you need is for members to survive long enough to reproduce and raise the offspring to reproductive age. Not necessarily to have a happy life.”

“What’s your point?” Tam looked annoyed.

“Just that I’m not sure you’ve got your science right.” Morag was worried she’d put him off. “Go on. What happened, then? Since I’m assuming from the way Maeve treats you that it’s really not a flat structure anymore.”

Tam sighed. “The usual problem,” he said. “Eventually, someone decides that some of the people should have more food and better leisure activities.”

“The people who write the code get the break rooms and the pool tables, the people who work tech support lines get a living wage and should be grateful for it. I remember how it went,” Morag said.

“It was worse than that,” Tam said. “It happened with my start-up, and other start-ups. After a while, the people who write the code don’t get the break rooms and the pool tables either. We’ve got to make savings, don’t you know.”

“And you wanted that life back?”

“No, I didn’t,” Tam protested. “That was the point. I thought we could be better than that. I still do.”

Morag nodded. She was feeling strangely ambivalent toward him, as she did toward anyone with an ideology.

“So what do you want from me?”

“Same thing Maeve wants,” Tam said. “Let me copy your robot’s code.”

“Seamus?” Morag looked over at the little machine, standing watchful by the fire, ready to deploy its claws if Tam did anything threatening. “I already decided. I’m not giving the code to Maeve. It’s too dangerous.”

“Then give it to me,” Tam said. “There’s a lot of us who don’t like the hierarchy. Don’t like the way things are going. They’ve already got problems: people used to come to them from the local communities. But now, word’s got around that if you do, you’ll wind up sleeping in a bunkhouse and working a robot suit in the fields.”

Which would explain why they were going farther away with their recruitment drive, Morag thought. New markets, people who hadn’t heard yet.

“But we’re organizing. And we’re going to take over. Bring back the way things were. If you don’t give her the code, but you give it to us, we can use the robots against Maeve and the others.”

Morag remembered what had happened at the Big House. Except she hadn’t turned the robots on the billionaire. She’d just given the robots free will to choose whether to keep on serving him or to do something else.

Not handed someone else the keys to their guns.

“What if I said to you that this is an evolutionary blind alley?” Morag poked at the embers of the fire. “That in a couple of hundred years’ time, most of us will probably be hunter-gatherers?”

“I’d say that was a pessimistic outlook.” Tam finished the bottle. “We can do better. So, will you help us?”

---

“Why didn’t you give him the code?” Cliff asked as he and Morag observed the Iron Piper’s pitch from a safe distance. Namely, a weaver’s stand on the other side of the crowd from the livestock pens, where Morag was ranking bolts of fabric as to their suitability for a new winter jacket. They’d brought Seamus but, because of his bulk, had left Will in camp with a rotating guard of children. “He’s right, that place clearly needs a revolution.”

“Revolutions aren’t a good thing,” Morag said, comparing a dark red wool with a dark teal. “Too many people get hurt. And they don’t actually break hierarchies. Mostly, they just build new ones. What that place needs is to not exist. The future, tech-wise, is with people like you. People making tech that the world can use now, not trying to bring back what it had. Or making something for hypothetical people two hundred years from now, who might not want it, assuming they even exist.” She put the dark red back, examined the teal critically. “And work-wise, it’s people like the casuals. Organizing networks, agreeing on terms, rewarding employers who play fair, and punishing those who don’t. A bridge between the villages and the hardcore nomads.” One day, the world would probably be all nomads. But then again, life had a way of surprising people.

“Did you tell him that?” Cliff exchanged wary glances with a couple of nomads, from the Hawk Winds to judge by their long flowing hair and beards, who were stalking ’round the edge of the market.

“No. I told him I wouldn’t take sides. I wasn’t going to give either of them the code. All the same, I don’t like that the Campus is out there, and I’m worried about, well, that.” Morag gestured as Maeve handed leaflets to a couple of teenagers. “There’s always going to be some kids who’ll be tempted by that sort of thing. I might have been myself.”

“Is it a bad thing, though? Helping kids who don’t fit the mold to find someplace they can do things they love?”

Morag shrugged, putting the teal fabric back. “So long as you can walk away when you want to. Tam sneered about the casuals, but everybody knows that if the casuals aren’t happy with your terms, they won’t work for you. Keeps things fair. Imagine if it wasn’t like that—if the casuals had no choice but to take what was offered, however bad.”

“I know,” Cliff said. “Maybe better than most around here, I know. Hang on, where’s Seamus?”

With a glance at each other, they both pushed their way quickly over to the Iron Piper tent.

Seamus had backed Maeve into a corner, standing on its posterior four legs and with the claws in its forelimbs extended. Maeve was on the ground, one arm raised in protection. The Piper had been knocked over onto its side, and Tam was struggling to get out of it. Morag wasn’t sure how Seamus had managed that, but she did know it had a very good knowledge of exactly what point to strike on a human to throw them off-balance, and maybe the same applied to those suits.

“Seamus, stand down,” Morag said. “I’m here now.” The little robot made a praying mantis snap with its raised limbs but lowered them and trotted over to her. Cliff, with a glance at the scene, went over and helped Tam up.

Morag looked over at Maeve, still sitting on the ground, red-faced and tense. Next to her was a tablet and some cables.

“You tried to copy his data,” she said. “You thief. I ought to just let Seamus kick you about, except that I’m trying to discourage aggressive behavior.”

“Let me have the code!” Morag had to hand it to Maeve, at least she was persistent. “For God’s sake. I’ll give you the Piper in exchange.”

Morag snorted. “What would I do with a thing like that?”

“I’ll give you Tam, too.”

Now that was unexpected. “What? You can’t give me a human being.”

“I can,” Maeve said. “He signed a contract. An indenture. The Campus owns him, until he pays off his debt for training, food, and housing.”

“Meaning, forever.” Morag waved off Maeve’s attempt to protest that interpretation. “Come on, Cliff. I’m done with these people, and I’m going home early.”

“Ought to burn the place down,” Cliff muttered angrily to her as they emerged from the tent.

Morag reached out, clumsily, and hugged him from the side—a bit awkwardly, since he was taller than her. “I understand,” she said.

As they reached Zeb and Dai’s camp, they heard footsteps behind them. Morag whirled, a few seconds behind Seamus, who already had its claws out.

“Tam,” she said, relaxing slightly.

“I’ve come to ask you to take Maeve’s offer,” he said.

“What?” Cliff snorted. “No. That’s ridiculous. How can you want to be traded like a wagon or a piece of cloth? Even animals have rights.” It was true; the rule in the hillsides was that animals were only the property of the farmer so long as they stayed with the farmer, and if they decided to go somewhere else, there wasn’t a lot the farmer could do about it.

“At least if Morag holds my indenture, I know it’s with someone who won’t treat me badly,” he said. “You could even free me.”

“I could,” Morag said. “But there’s an easier way. Free yourself.”

“I can’t. She holds—”

“A contract’s only got standing if people respect it,” Morag said. “There’s no actual law anymore, if ever there was—just people agreeing on things. And out here, nobody’s going to respect a contract like that.”

“But where could I go?” Tam looked lost and hurt.

Morag looked him in the eye. “Go to the nomads. Seriously. The Children of Flame—their territory’s around Cwm Pennant, just south of here. And they know me. If you say my name, they’ll take you in.” Cliff nodded at this; she knew he’d found being able to drop Morag’s name had kept him from trouble with them on the road.

“I can’t be a nomad.”

“You don’t have to. But they’re used to people coming in from the villages and farms. They’ll look after you while you find your feet. Teach you a few survival skills. Protect you, if anyone from Aberystwyth comes after you. Though I’m not sure they will.”

“And there’s more than one way of being a nomad,” Cliff said. “Why not be like me? Walk a circuit between the towns. Fixing and selling tech. Teaching people skills. I haven’t gone hungry or cold in years.”

Tam’s face brightened, then clouded.

“I can’t let them down.”

Cliff laughed derisively. “After all they’ve done to you? You still think you have to work for them?”

“It’s not the Campus he means,” Morag said. “Is it?”

Tam shook his head. “It’s the people there,” he said. “Too many people. Still trapped there. I can’t leave them.”

“Then take them with you,” Cliff said. “You can be your own tribe. A tribe of tech.”

Interesting, Morag thought. He’s not as much of an individualist as he thinks he is.

“Then give me something,” Tam reached out and grabbed her hand, desperate. “Something to fight back with.”

Morag started to refuse, but hesitated. “I think we might be able to do a trade,” she said. “Something I have for something I want. Just one condition.”

---

Morag was already awake and packing to go when she heard the fire alarm.

She dropped her bags and ran toward the glow. By the time she and Seamus had arrived, a bucket brigade had already formed, and the fire was under control, a few dozen strong rugby players hurling water on the blaze and putting in a firebreak. Fires weren’t uncommon during Rugby Weekend, particularly if it was dry: canvas burned well if it caught, and there were a lot of people who could, under party conditions, get careless about campfire safety, to say nothing of the rules involving candles and oil-lamps in tents. So people knew what to do.

Except possibly the owners of this particular tent.

Maeve, ash-streaked, launched herself at Morag. Fortunately, two of the Borth-y-Gest Eleven grabbed her before she could get in range of Seamus’ claws.

“You did this,” she shouted.

This was a serious accusation, and the rugby players looked at Morag sternly.

“I didn’t,” Morag said angrily. “I’ve been in my family’s camp since suppertime last night. I have witnesses.”

“No, you didn’t do it personally,” Maeve sneered. With her hair astray, out of her costume, and with her makeup smeared, she looked hideous, not like the glamorous thing she’d been before. “Tam did it. He took the robot and burned the camp. And I know damn well you put him up to it.”

“You’ve no proof of that,” Morag said. The rugby players evidently agreed with her, tightening their grip.

“You’ve got a nerve—”

“I’m leaving today,” Morag said. The final still had to be played, but frankly, she was sick of rugby, and people, and their preoccupations. And although she knew she shouldn’t, she couldn’t resist adding, “Employees that are treated well and are happy don’t generally burn down tents and run away.”

Maeve tried to lunge at her again, but by this point, someone official from the city of Caernarfon turned up and began calmly asking questions. Morag took the opportunity to duck behind two very large rugby players and sneak, as much as anyone tailed by a six-legged walkbot the size of a collie could sneak, back to the camp.

“I thought you’d told Tam not to use the flamethrower in Caernarfon,” Cliff said. “Like, it was your sole condition of trade.”

“I did, but I guess he’s not as big on respecting terms and conditions as he used to be,” Morag said. She was a little angry but starting to see the positive side. She threw her small pack together and found her walking stick.

“You’re really going home right now? Not waiting for the final?”

“Yes. Tell your dads.”

Cliff sighed. “I might leave early, too. Go up to the tea plantation at Ffestiniog, see if their drying kilns need fixing.”

Morag gave in to an unexpected impulse, reached out, and hugged him. “Thanks for everything, and see you when you next come our way.”

Shouldering her pack and with Seamus at her heels, she set off down the road.

By the time she was back at her farm, her geese charging up the path to hiss at her for her absence and her cats peering at her suspiciously from the kitchen windows, the events of the weekend seemed like something that had happened a long time ago. Seamus, recognizing the familiar landscape, trotted off on its usual security patrol.

Everything was right again. Well, not quite everything, but everything in Morag’s part of the world.

---

Morag believed the kids when they came running to tell her there was a robot on the hills by the Nasareth road, heading south from the village.

She had a feeling she knew where it had come from.

Taking her walking stick and whistling up Seamus, she walked up into the hillsides. It was a pleasant enough early autumn day, with the sun out and birds cackling to each other, and insects humming around the trees.

More and more insects every year. That was a good sign. Nature was rebuilding.

Cresting the hill, she saw it.

Looming twice as tall as a man, a giant sphere. Two huge squat legs ending in flat feet. Two long arms. One ending in a grab, the other in a flamethrower.

At the top, what looked like a small collection of organ pipes. Gleaming brass and shiny, where the rest of the machine was flaking its paint, showing signs of rust and scorching.

At the front, where the hatch opened for the operator, the door hung loose. Something, a fox maybe, had torn the stuffing out of the seat to make a nest.

“So, then,” Morag said aloud to it. “It’s over.”

She wondered if he’d taken the trouble to go back to the Campus. To burn it down, liberate the others. She’d been keeping an ear out for news of it from the south, but things had been strangely quiet given the splash they’d made at Rugby Weekend. But maybe he’d just got as far as the Nasareth road before deciding to leave it to itself.

Had he joined the Children of Flame, like she’d told him? Had he started a tribe of tech, like Cliff had suggested? Or just filtered out into the landscape, joined the casuals, found a place in a town or a farm?

In a gesture she couldn’t resist, even though she knew it was pointless and sentimental, she reached over to the Piper’s grabber arm. Touched it.

“It’s a way of life that didn’t even work when it was supposed to work,” she told Seamus, who was gently probing the ground around the big robot with its own new grabber-arm. The twin, of course, of the one still on the robot, thanks to the swap she’d done with Tam. “Do me a favor, Seamus. Gain sentience if you want, but never, never, gain that sort of blind self-deception.”

She fixed the way to get to the robot in her mind so she could tell the other salvagers where it was. Removed the control panel, so as to make the journey worth her while, and stowed it on Seamus’ back.

She could use it to build a new machine for one of the farmers or to fix one of the machines that was wearing down. Either way, it would become something that people could actually use.