Coming home to her farm after her usual visit to the spoil heap for tech scraps she could fix up and sell, Morag saw a dark, bloody, furry shape, about the size of a sheepdog, hanging on a set of drying poles near the gate of her neighbor’s farm.

“Damnit, Owen,” she said aloud, glaring at the wolf pelt.

“They’re dangerous predators.” Owen’s voice startled her. She hadn’t realized he was there. Her robot, Seamus, braced for attack in response to her surprise, locking its four posterior legs and raising its forelimbs warningly, like a blocky white mantis the size of a collie dog. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Not kill them,” Morag said, gesturing to Seamus to stand down. “They’re just doing what they’re meant to do.”

“I’m losing a lamb a week to them. If it keeps up, I won’t be able to feed my family this winter.”

“That’s the wolves’ problem, too. That one was a parent. Had yearling cubs. You can’t blame them for trying to survive.”

Owen, at least, had the sense to look ashamed. He didn’t ask how she knew, but clearly, he did, because he muttered “nomads,” making the word a pejorative. “Following the animals . . . living with the animals . . . Too much of that, and they’ll become animals.”

Morag opened her mouth to tell him off. Then she remembered Owen’s child, Bry, had joined the Children of Flame. He was taking the kid’s departure harder than most people who lost family to the nomads did.

“All the same,” she said. “It’s wrong to kill an animal just for trying to live.”

And what she was really worried about was people making the step from killing wolves to attacking, maybe killing, nomads. Because, years ago, she’d seen people go down a similar sort of path. She’d been able to stop it then, but she wasn’t sure she would be as lucky now.

“It’s all right for you, they’re scared of Seamus, so they don’t go near your farm.”

“More do than you might think,” Morag said. Though it was true. Seamus was intelligent—maybe as intelligent as a human. In attack mode, it was more than a match for any wolf, and, whatever the mythology had to say, she’d yet to meet a predator that wasn’t a coward. “I’ll tell Seamus to include your farm in its patrols too, if that would help.” She didn’t like to offer because if she was extending her protection to one of her neighbors, she felt like she should offer it to all of them. But even a village of a couple of dozen houses was too large for Seamus to patrol properly.

Owen nodded reluctantly. “What about the others?” he demanded, apparently reading her thoughts. “I’m not the only one. And Seamus can’t be everywhere.”

“I’ll see if I can figure something out,” Morag said. “Maybe the nomads could help.”

Owen’s facial expression told her what he thought of that.

“I’m serious,” she said. “As well as being pretty handy with those staves of theirs, they actually live out there in the woods and on the hills. They know more than we do about wolf behavior.” Didn’t hurt to remind Owen that nomads were people, like farmers.

Owen’s look got, if anything, even more skeptical. “The Children of Flame won’t be anywhere near here for months,” he said. “This time of year, they head toward the seacoast.”

“There’s others out there,” Morag said. “And I think I know which one to ask.”

---

The chain-link fence around the old research facility was rusty and bent, but still standing. The razor wire on top had fared less well, but a few coils still dangled precariously here and there. Beyond, a jungle of overgrown space, brambles and thistles and blackberries competing for sunlight.

Morag took a grip on her small tree-clearing hatchet, looked over at Seamus. “Too bad you didn’t come with a flamethrower, eh?” she said. “Might have been useful.”

Seamus had a stump on its blocky white anterior where it had once had a camera, or a gun. Morag sometimes thought about fixing that. She was sure that she could find something that would be compatible, either in the bits of robot scrap that scavengers found on the spoil heaps or in the hillsides, or in the cellars of the Big House near her farm, the refurbished Georgian manor where Seamus itself had once been a security robot. But there seemed to be little point to it, since Seamus’ main role these days was helping her out on the farm. A camera, or a gun, would only get in the way.

As, indeed, would a flamethrower.

However, she was able to find the tottery little path through the jungle fairly easily this time and only had to do a bit of clearing. Finally, she was through to the low oblong building that had once been a research facility.

“Casey?” she called through the gaping doorway.

Then, “Damnit, Casey, you’ve got to stop doing this. Owen killed a wolf today, and there’ll be more.”

“You can’t blame me for that,” came a muffled voice as Morag pushed her way through the lianas of ivy.

Casey had done a lot of work. The plants colonizing the ruin had been cut back, and there were stacks of floor squares, melamine workbenches, and aluminum office cubicle frames lining the walls. She could see a bed platform made of repurposed shelving piled with pine branches, and a little firepit lined with ceramic tiles. Automatically, Morag glanced up and noticed the smoke-hole built into the roof.

“I can, and I do,” Morag said. Without ceremony, she extracted cheeses, fresh beetroots, and jars of jam from the bag on Seamus’ back, lining them up on top of a stack of tiles. “This solo trip you’re on is just swank. If it were only you trying to work through your issues, that’d be one thing. But you being here is affecting the wolves. This facility was set up to study them, it’s the center of their territory. And since you moved in, they’ve been adjusting their territory, going on to the farms. Owen killed the big gray he-wolf; what are his mate and cubs going to do now?”

A rustle in the foliage, and a shape emerged. Tall and thin, dressed in the traditional shirt of the Children of Flame, woven out of twisted, colored rags, and carrying a staff like all nomads did. But they weren’t wearing the feather mask that was the other tribal marker of the Children of Flame. Just a seamed face, locks of reddish hair around it. Less and less hair every year.

When did you get old? Morag thought.

“He killed the big gray?” The tone was neutral, but there was a lot of emotion in the simple phrase.

Morag nodded.

“I’ll tell the rest of the wolves when I see them.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Morag said, frustrated. “You, thinking you can hang around with wolves. They don’t want it. It’s bothering them. And it’s got one of them killed.”

“There’s lots of things that could make the wolves change their routines,” Casey said. Still neutral, but maybe defensive. They sat down on the branch of a loquat tree by the firepit and gestured for Morag to join them. After a moment, she did. “Weather. Prey animal numbers. And these wolves are interesting. They’re not local wolves, they’re a subspecies that was imported from Ukraine who escaped into the ecosystem when the facility closed down. You know why they were imported?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“They’re cancer resistant. The scientists here wanted to study why and maybe find a way of putting that cancer resistance into humans.”

Casey’s voice was still matter-of-fact, but Morag knew the backstory.

“Casey,” she began warningly. “If you’ve started to get delusions about doing the same . . . ”

Casey looked confused. They began preparing a fire in the pit, assembling thick sticks around dry twigs. “Why would I do that? I spent enough time in hospitals when I was a kid in California. My so-called parents trying to get my arthritis cured.”

“But the cancer resistance . . . ” Morag didn’t want to say it.

“Is just what makes the wolves special,” Casey sounded like the child they’d been when Morag had first met them, so many years ago. Looked like them, too, a kind of astonished innocence under the lined face as they worked the flint and steel for a spark. “Why I want to be around them, right now.”

Casey’s father had been a billionaire who’d attempted to ride out the so-called apocalypse in the hillsides; Morag had been a local girl who’d signed on as part of his security force. It had been exciting at first, swaggering around with guns and robots, defending the Georgian manor that had been the billionaire’s survival base. But after a while, the food got short and Morag’s superiors had begun talking about going round the farms, offering protection to those who worked for them and retribution to those who wouldn’t.

Making the step from having robots as slaves to humans.

That had been the point where Morag took the restraint programming off the robots. Then, after the robots had gunned or hacked down everyone they deemed worthy of the treatment, she’d walked down the hillside with Casey and their brother Zeb, back to her parents’ farm.

Yes, Morag thought, wolves were killers. But she had been a killer. So had Seamus, once. She could understand killing to save the people around you. Maybe that was partly why she’d kicked off at Owen that morning.

The incident at the Big House had been at least thirty years ago now. But Morag understood that Casey’s reasons for joining the Children of Flame were a little more complicated than most of the local farm kids who turned nomad. Just as Morag herself lived with the fear of seeing neighbor turn on neighbor, of seeing one group dehumanizing another, even enslaving them. Of having to do something dreadful to stop them. Or, worse, of not being able to stop them at all.

And of course, Casey had left the farm not long after her mother had died. Morag remembered how complicated the grieving had been. Her father railing at her about how, just a decade earlier, they might have been able to get her mother lifesaving treatment, as if this was somehow the fault of the younger generation. And then Casey joining the nomads, which Morag couldn’t help but take as an abdication of responsibility, even while understanding it wasn’t.

“You’re thinking of Mum, aren’t you?” Casey said. The tinder caught, and a small flame leaped up.

Guilty. “Aren’t you?” Her loss was still raw decades later. And the loss of her Dad, keeling over quietly in the beetroot fields a few years ago, was more so.

Come to think of it, she realized she’d first met Seamus and invited it to come live with her just a couple of months after he died. It had never occurred to her before that perhaps her reasons for looking after the robot were connected.

Casey spread their hands toward the flame. “Mum didn’t want medical treatment,” they said. “We both know it. She kept talking about how it was better to go peacefully. It was hard on us, but she believed in it. By just being with the wolves, following them and observing, not interfering—I’m doing what she would have wanted.”

“You can’t just observe and not interfere,” Morag said, irritated. “You know that. And I’m reading subtext here.” She decided to confront directly. “You think you’re dying.”

She’d hit a nerve. Casey sagged a little, watching the fire grow. “I don’t know about that,” they said. “I just know that, even with the treatment Maya at Portmeirion worked up for me, I’m hurting more, getting slower, finding it harder to keep up with the rest of the Children of Flame.”

“Did you have a fight with them?”

Casey shrugged.

“But they don’t approve of this.”

Casey shrugged again.

“Then come stay with me for a while,” Morag said. “Or your brother and his husband. You don’t have to, I don’t know, strand yourself on an ice floe to die.”

“Morag,” Casey said, surprising her. “I think you’re trying too hard.”

“What?”

“Too much responsibility.” Casey offered her something that, after a moment, she realized was a licorice root. She accepted, chewed at the end. “Ever since we were young. Always looking out for the rest of us, taking care of everyone. Mum and Dad, as well as Zeb and me. Especially after Mum got sick. But you don’t have to. And you certainly don’t have to take care of the whole damned village and two or three tribes.” Then, boldly, “you don’t have to be Mum.”

“What’s that got to do with—”

“I mean, if I want to leave the tribe and be around the wolves for a while, that’s my business. Maybe there’s something really wrong with me, in which case I’ll die happy. Or maybe it’s just that I need a slower life, in which case I’ve got one now. My business.”

“But that’s my point. It’s your business, but it can’t be just that.” Morag realized that she was talking in circles. Time to take a new approach. “What do you think I should do?” “Why don’t you stay here for a while, too?” Casey said. “Rest. Go on wolf-watch with me. Let go of things.”

Morag thought about this. “Okay,” she said. Certainly, she could stay the night at least.

---

Wolf-watch was literally that. Casey sitting in the forest grove by the research facility, watching for wolves.

“We could track their movements,” Morag said. “See where they go, look for patterns.”

“Why?”

“To find a way of keeping them out of the village.”

Casey gave her a sideways, slightly amused look. “Forget about that for a while,” they said. “Just watch them. Don’t come up with reasons.”

And a couple of hours later, the moon was high overhead, the owls were making excited noises about something, and there were still no wolves.

“We’re unlucky tonight,” Casey said. “We’ll keep it up for a while longer, but then we’ll have to go in.”

Morag felt disappointed. There’d be other times, she thought. But still, it felt typical of the way her life was going at the moment that she couldn’t even manage to see wolves while on wolf-watch.

Casey touched her arm. “Wait. Look.”

Morag’s heart leaped. She wasn’t unlucky after all. The wolves were coming.

As they watched, a trio of pale forms stalked into the clearing. Followed by a couple more. Some limping, some battered, but all six-legged oblongs about the size of a collie dog. One had a broken off stump on its anterior, like Seamus, though with more of the arm intact. The other two had what looked like searchlights.

Casey grinned at the sight.

“Trust Morag,” they said, “to go out wolf-watching and instead find robots.”

---

Morag began her own version of wolf-watch. Every day, at different times, she’d go out toward the research facility, tracking the robots. After a couple of days, it occurred to her to ask Seamus to find them for her, which made the process that much faster.

She wondered if Seamus wanted to join them.

She didn’t dare ask if it wanted to.

Morag had seen a small group of robots walking the hills before. Years ago, when she’d been a young woman learning to be a farmer and tech-fixer. But she hadn’t imagined they’d lasted this long. When she’d found Seamus, of course, or perhaps Seamus had found her, up on the spoil heap, it had been the only moving walkbot she’d seen for a good couple of decades. She’d always assumed it was unique, a last survivor of a near-dead species.

And now, it seemed, there was a pack of them.

Like the cancer wolves. Something whose reason for being there was long gone, but they kept on existing anyway.

She gathered information. Plotted movements on a map. Noted times and lengths of stay at various places.

“I think they’re doing a patrol circuit,” she said to Casey on a visit to the research center, which was looking more and more like a human habitation, if not the kind it was used to being. Casey was dismantling a set of aluminum shelves.

“Can you really call yourself a nomad if you’ve got a permanent base?” she asked, finding a screwdriver and settling in to help.

“It’s a state of mind,” Casey said.

“And you’re certainly not acting like someone who’s decided to give up and die. You look like you’re settling down.”

Casey shrugged. “I’m learning from watching the wolves. I have bad days, still, but the pain is less, and I can organize my life in a way that makes it manageable.” They made a small pile of the screws from the shelves. “The wolves howled for the big gray, and stayed hidden for a night, but they were out two nights later, and again after that.”

Morag wondered what any of that had to do with anything else but decided that saying so might be impolite. She decided to change the subject instead. “Back to the robots. As I said, I think they’re doing a patrol circuit.”

“Patrolling what?”

“This facility,” Morag said. “I’d initially thought they were from the Big House, like Seamus. But I think they might have been security walkbots for the wolf research facility.”

“Why would they need security walkbots?”

Morag shrugged. “Things were tough around the time of the crisis. And public policing was either nonexistent or actively hostile. They might have been worried about the locals breaking in and stealing the tech.”

“Or . . . huh. Maybe it was something else.” Casey began rearranging the struts of the shelves into a rectangular frame for drying meat and edible plants. “The robots don’t have guns or any kind of weapons. Just those big lights. That doesn’t seem like what you’d need to frighten off human predators.”

“You have a point. So, what else might it be?”

“To frighten off the wolves,” Casey said. “It’s fairly obvious the wolves are avoiding them.”

“Or maybe it’s the other way around? They’re avoiding the wolves?” Morag, seeing the pattern in what Casey was doing, took a strut and added it to the structure. “I mean, why would scientists who are studying wolves want to frighten off the wolves?”

“If the wolves are avoiding the walkbots, maybe the scientists were using the walkbots to guide the wolves’ routines, train them to keep to particular sites and not—”

“Not get into the farms.” Morag’s eyes widened. “Of course. That would make sense. I mean, if they wanted to keep the locals from blaming them every time a wolf got into their flocks. And make sure the wolves stick to keeping the deer population down rather than eating the sheep. Casey, I’ve got an idea.”

“You’re going to try and use the robots to keep the wolves away from the village.”

“It’s what they were built to do, after all.”

“Why did it stop working, though?”

“Probably a lot of reasons. The boundaries of the village changing, the research facility closing down. No one to update the robots’ routes or their code.” Morag examined, then discarded, a bent strut. “That might be why they came back, too. You moving in, I mean.”

“So, my moving in here affected the robots as well as the wolves?”

“Why not? And if the wolves’ movements can be affected by something as simple as you moving in here, then it shouldn’t be hard to change them again.” Morag stood back and looked critically at the structure. “But I don’t know if I can communicate it to them.”

“Seamus is the obvious vector,” Casey said.

“I know,” Morag said. “But will they listen to Seamus?”

And, she didn’t say, if I let Seamus run with a gang of robots, will it want to come back to the farm?

---

Morag finished her circuit, ordnance survey map in hand, and Seamus trotting by her side.

“There,” she said to Seamus. “Do you think you can remember that patrol route?”

She’d sat down with Owen, Naomi, and Ellie from the village, and Casey from the facility, explained what she was trying to do, and between them had worked out a defense zone that covered a decent amount of the farmland and that Casey agreed, based on their wolf-watching, would still give the wolves a good hunting territory. It wouldn’t protect any farm animals that went outside it, of course, even assuming it worked. But everyone agreed to it, that was what mattered.

And the farmers and villagers had agreed to it together with a nomad. That was important too.

“Now, the next question,” she said to Seamus, “is: do you think you could teach those other robots to walk that route?”

Seamus didn’t show any indication that it understood. Morag wondered, not for the first time, how they passed information between each other. They weren’t really supposed to; they were supposed to take their orders from humans or draw on their collective programming. And yet, she’d seen them do it. One time, when Casey and Zeb were small, she’d entertained them by programming a robot to play football, and, by the next week, all of the robots could.

“Come on,” she said, taking her stick and walking over to her robot-watching site. Like the wolves, the robots seemed to be mainly active at night, and the sun was approaching the horizon. She imagined they spent most of the day folded up somewhere safe, recharging. It always took Seamus much longer to recharge from its own solar panels than when she charged it directly from her house’s array.

She wondered if she’d have to wait long, but it was only about half an hour before she heard rustling in the undergrowth and saw the pale, tottery figures emerge.

Morag swallowed hard. Now, she thought. Time to take the risk. Get it over with.

“Seamus,” she said. “Could you please go to the robots over there and teach them that patrol route I showed you just now?”

She wanted to add “and come back to me afterward,” but she didn’t think she should. Because Seamus might take it as a command, and their relationship had always been based on choice and consent. If it wanted to leave her, it could.

And maybe it would rather be with other robots. Maybe it would be happier.

But she had to find out, and that meant taking the risk.

The little walkbot stood for a moment as if thinking about what she said. Then it trotted over to the pack of robots, joined them. It was still easy to see which one Seamus was, because of the short, broken off stump where the arm should be, but he didn’t stand out at all.

They didn’t run away from Seamus either. They all just stood together under the trees for a minute while Morag held her breath.

Then Seamus turned and began to walk toward the path she’d shown it. And the other walkbots followed.

“Right, well,” Morag said loudly, feeling complicated. “You know where to find me if you want me.”

She hoped that was enough of a hint.

---

Morag braced herself when she saw Owen coming up the street toward her. But the big man was smiling.

“Wolf problem sorted?” Morag said mildly.

“I don’t know what you did, but yes,” Owen said. “Haven’t seen a single one on the farm since you told us your plan with the robots. I admit I was skeptical before, but now I’m amazed.”

“Power of technology,” Morag said. “I’m on my way to the research facility. Want to join me?” She was hoping Owen would recognize a suggestion that he should apologize to Casey and maybe get to know a little bit about wolves. And nomads.

Because the nomads came back to the village when they needed to, and Bry wasn’t going to stop being Owen’s child just because they’d joined a tribe.

Owen shook his head. “But I can give you a leg of mutton to take with to give to your sibling. In case they’re hungry.”

“I’m sure they’ll appreciate it,” Morag said.

It was a start.

---

When she got to the research facility, she almost didn’t recognize the place. In the weeks since she’d been back, the building had been transformed into a green space, a longhouse seemingly woven out of branches and leaves. If you knew where to look, though, you could see aluminum struts, Formica foundations, windows, and skylights made out of slabs of scoured plexiglass. Solar lights strung around the inside to save on fire and on fat lamps.

“I thought the salvagers had picked the place clean.” Casey seemingly materialized at Morag’s elbow, making her jump. They indicated the lights. “But I found those in the back of a cupboard. I suppose they used to put them up at Christmas or something like that.”

“The place looks good,” Morag said, meaning it.

“Come, meet the others,” Casey nodded in the direction of the woods.

“Others?” Morag followed Casey to the grove where they’d gone on wolf-watch and found robots instead.

As they entered the grove, several faces turned. Two of the people were in rag-shirts and no mask, like Casey, a third with long, flowing white hair marking them as a member of the Hawk Wind tribe, and a fourth in the hooded homespun poncho of the Unmutuals, though without the distinctive face-makeup the Unmutuals normally wore.

On the other side of the grove, a wolf lounged, watching a few teenage wolf cubs playing with each other, pulling apart a ball of rags.

“This is Deva, and Bug, and Nys, and I. The Unmutuals don’t have names, just pronouns,” Casey said.

“I’m not an Unmutual anymore, though,” I said.

Casey nodded. “We’ll have to come up with a new tribe name.”

“This is a permanent or—”

“At least semipermanent,” Casey said. “They all want to stop moving for a while. A broken leg that didn’t heal right, a pregnancy, old age, a scientific interest in wolves. Lots of reasons to slow down. Stop traveling for a while. Maybe go back on the nomad circuit later, but for now . . . ”

“Be a nomad in spirit if not in body?”

“Where does the body end and the spirit begin?”

Morag knew better than to try and answer. “And what about her?” She gestured at the wolf and cubs.

“She’s part of the tribe as well.” Casey nodded.

“How do you reckon that?”

“She comes to join us sometimes, like this. She hunts for us, we hunt for her.”

“Making up for the big gray?”

Casey shrugged. “Not so much. Just all of us looking out for each other. Sometimes she goes away for a while, but then she comes back. Just like we do. So, she’s a member of our tribe.”

“Isn’t this against your nomadic code?”

“The code’s against domestication,” Casey said. “It’s not against sharing the space. Like you with Seamus.”

Morag nodded. She didn’t want to voice the fact that Seamus hadn’t come back. Might never come back.

“If Seamus stays with the robots,” Casey said, surprising her, “will you be okay?”

Morag thought and then, despite the pain of it, nodded. “I want what’s best for Seamus,” she said. “Always have. And I can understand that living with other robots might be just that.” Certainly, better than being cataloged away into an archive or a museum, which was one of her occasional three-in-the-morning fears for what might happen to Seamus after she died.

“I think your robot experiment’s partly responsible for this.”

“Really? How?”

“Causing the wolves to shift their hunting patterns. Moving them back toward the facility and so giving us a chance to show them we could coexist.” Casey began tidying up around the camp, seemingly by reflex. “Better than I did, with the wolf-watch.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think it’s all part of a process,” Morag said.

“No, I was trying too hard,” Casey said. “I had to let go. Just take the relationship as it came. Let them come if they wanted, or not, if they didn’t.”

Morag nodded. That’s what all this was about, really, she thought.

“Changing the subject,” Casey went on, “I had some interesting information. Did you know the nomads might be cancer resistant, too?”

“How did they figure that one out?”

“The archive at Portmeirion keeps statistics.” The Unmutuals’ territory was in the hills over the village of Portmeirion, where there was a large and expanding archive of science, technology, and culture, and the Unmutuals had a steady stream of disgruntled archivists who got fed up with academic politics coming into their ranks. “If they know the cause of death for anyone in the area, villager or nomad, they make a note. Nomads don’t seem to die of cancer.”

“Because you’re always dying from septic wounds and diseases,” Morag couldn’t resist saying.

Casey shrugged. “Apparently not,” they said. “Even when controlling for injuries and diseases, we’re more likely to die of other things than cancer.”

“There’s only been nomads for what, thirty years? Forty? Cancer’s an old person’s disease.”

“Enough time to get some preliminary statistics in there. And we don’t all join as teenagers. Some of the Hawk Winds were in their fifties and sixties when the tribe started, and I know there’s people over eighty in the Children of Flame. Maybe cancer-resistant people are drawn to the lifestyle? Or maybe it’s epigenetics.”

“Or maybe it’s the magic of the wolves,” Morag said, smiling to show that although she was joking, she didn’t mean it in a cruel way.

Casey smiled back, briefly. “And maybe epigenetics and the magic of the wolves are the same thing. Certainly, the people who built this didn’t know everything, and the more I live as a nomad, the more I learn that there’s no hard line between magic and science.”

“So, the scientists didn’t have to transfer cancer resistance from wolves to humans. They just had to let civilization collapse completely.”

“I wonder what Mum would have had to say about that?”

“I think she would have seen the funny side of it.”

They sat together for a while, watching the wolves.

“What about you?” Morag said.

Casey was quiet for a moment. “I’m fairly certain I’m not. Cancer resistant.”

“I thought there might be something there,” Morag replied. “Obsession with the wolves, obsession with cancer resistance.” She knew Casey’s arthritis treatment, both in the hospitals and, more recently, from Maya at Portmeirion, had involved steroids, and there was a cancer risk with those. “Do you have symptoms?”

Casey shrugged. “Maybe? It could be cancer, it could be something else. It might not even be fatal. I could live to be eighty. I could die tomorrow. Doesn’t really change anything.”

“This is true,” Morag said. “It’s the real reason why you came here, isn’t it?”

“It’s the reason I said. I’m slower, I have more pain.”

“There’s things we can do—”

“Morag.” Their tone was serious. “I meant it. Stop taking responsibility for everyone.”

Morag winced. “Okay. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”

“Whatever the reason is, it’s time for me to leave the Children of Flame.”

“Are you okay? With that?”

“Not exactly,” Casey admitted. “But, well,” nodding at the wolf pack, “there are compensations.”

“If Seamus stays with the robots,” Morag admitted, “I will miss it. Like I’d miss you, if you died.”

Casey nodded. “Of course. But it’s Seamus’ choice to make.”

“That it is.”

There was another silence.

“Cancer Wolves,” Morag said.

“What?”

“For a tribe name. Cancer Wolves.”

“Why not?”

The silence went on until the sun began to set.

---

A few weeks later, Morag was sitting in an old beach chair in front of her house, reading a book. The weather was clear and fine, and for once she’d done everything she needed to do before evening, so she decided to take a free hour before she started dinner.

Her eye was caught by the movement of something pale over by the woods at the edge of her property.

She closed the book but didn’t move. Hoping, but not daring to hope. It was probably a stray sheep, or a goose, or one of the neighbors’ dogs.

As she watched, the movement resolved itself into a small, compact, white oblong, tottering along on six legs. And . . . yes. There was the sheared-off stump on its anterior, the arm that had once held a camera or a gun.

Morag found herself relaxing in a way she hadn’t relaxed in some time. A tension she’d become used to, a grief that had become part of the general background radiation of grief that everyone accumulates if they live long enough.

“You’re back,” she said to Seamus.

Seamus trotted past her to its mains charger in the kitchen. She heard it clicking itself into place, heard the faint hum as her household batteries took on the extra load. It always charged faster on mains power than through its solar panels.

“Are you here for good, or just to charge and go?” she asked.

She wasn’t sure it mattered. Even if Seamus was with the robot pack now, even if it just came back to her place to charge, they still were part of each other’s lives. Like the she-wolf and cubs in the Cancer Wolves.

She saw another movement, somewhere out on the periphery. She strained to see, but yes. The pack of walkbots was moving stiffly through the forest, patrolling the land she wanted them to patrol. They’d learned their route.

An hour later, she heard the humming stop, heard Seamus unfold and get up. Trotted past her.

Morag held her breath, waiting to see if it would follow the path the wild walkbots took.

But Seamus turned and started on its familiar route round the farm. Tech shed. Potato field. Goat shed, goose shed. Down to the lake, and back up again.

Tomorrow, Morag thought, watching Seamus disappear into the little wooded area above the lake, she would go foraging up on the spoil heap near the old slate quarry, looking for tech scraps that she could fix up and sell or recycle for the raw materials. And then later, she would take some of the surplus vegetables from the farm over to Casey and the Cancer Wolves. Keep the humans, as well as the animals, from getting ideas about foraging too close to the village.

She’d leave Seamus behind, of course. No sense frightening the wolf pack.

But now, as Seamus emerged from the woods and trotted up to the porch, folding itself down into power-saving mode at her feet, she was absolutely certain that Seamus would be there for her when she returned. Just as she had been there for Seamus.