It was, as it happened, the first time Alice Liddell had ever worn high heels – a set of chunky very Victorian-or-Edwardian-looking kinda Goth affairs constructed as knee boots in black leather, with several inches lift at the back and fastened with half a dozen buckles down the outsides of each – and Alice found herself both puzzled and faintly worried by how much less trouble she had walking in them than she’d expected: a close friend had decided that heels were The Way To Go the previous autumn, and what an experience that had turned into.

These monstrosities felt entirely too natural on Alice’s new set of feet, she felt, as they exited Grace’s house having been shooed out the door as soon as Alice was what Grace deemed presentable – the combination of a hand-knit grey and russetty brown Arran pullover, Victorian underwear (including a corset of all things that thankfully didn’t do nearly the squeezing she’d feared, partially because she seemed to be substantially narrower at the middle than she clearly remembered being, and nor could she remember having had much in the way of cleavage before) and a long black skirt again looked utterly unlike anything she’d ever worn before, and the whole thing left her feeling faintly ridiculous.

Grace’s house was, it turned out, incredibly higgledy-piggledy from the outside, even more so than from within – it stood two full floors tall with the bottom floor half buried in the ground and the top floor half made out of corrugated iron, with sections perched atop each other in any old random order, every wall curved, there was not one true corner in the entire structure, and a birch tree was growing out of the top of one of the walls of a lower section. It nestled in a stand of trees, jammed in between a pair of truly gigantic oaks and surrounded by a mish-mash of birch, rowan, hazel, alder, and apple trees; a scruffy old hoodie crow was giving the three youngsters a dubious look from atop the roof as they walked up to Grace’s driveway, a dirt track on the bank a few feet above the house’s ground floor level with a churned-up widened area to allow vehicles to turn – there was a series of ramshackle round-ended tar-roofed barns lined up along the other side of the turning circle, and what was either a fuzzy bear with horns or a small insanely hairy black cow was sitting at the top of the bank and watching the world go by.

There were a dozen assorted vehicles or what had once been vehicles scattered along the side of the barnyard, three of which - a horribly battered pile of scrap that had once been an estate car and looked very much like it should be derelict, a beat-up and antiqated-looking van with the word ALBION in chrome letters across the front above the radiator grille, and a saloon car that stood out by being the only vehicle present that actually looked roadworthy - had fresh tyre tracks leading to them, despite the fact that only the clean car actually possessed numberplates.

It was to the van that Nick and Mackie led Alice, and up close you could see someone had been doing some work on it - there was a lot of signs of welding done along the bottom of the bodyshell with patches of weird red-brown paint over the top of that, some of what had to have been rust patches had been sanded down in preparation for further welding, and one wheel was visibly a lot newer than the others.

Nick headed for the driver's side, demonstrating it to have sliding doors, and Mackie let Alice into the centre seat before clambering in behind her - the seat height was a lot higher than anything (other than a bus) she'd travelled in before, and in a bus you weren't exactly in the front seats.

Inside was just as disreputable as outside and seemed to have at some point been the scene of a firefight if the empty cartridge cases littered everywhere was anything to go by, the dashboard was the sole surface that didn't have any and it was littered with unfired rounds - there were even a few empties on the seats - a two-person bench seat left, a single for the driver right and no sign of any seatbelts. A gun rack - just two metal brackets shaped roughly like a stretched-out upper-case D on the floor into which the guns' shoulder stocks slotted, then a piece of tubing running from floor to ceiling with a pair of attached U-shaped metal brackets with riveted-on leather straps to hold the loud end, all visibly cobbled together out of junk - occupied most of the space between the seats; the main reason Alice knew it was a gun rack was it had two very different guns loaded into it, one very military-looking and the other the sort someone might actually hunt with - another gun sat in two hooks, one front and one back, on the dashboard in front of the passenger seats.

The whole thing was also grubby, rusty, and visibly battered, from holes in the seat covers to a rust hole in the footwell through which you could see road.

The van came to life with a lot less fuss than its beat-up appearance had made Alice expect, Nick got it turned with practised ease despite the cramped confines of the barnyard, and they were quickly rattling off down the dirt track without, as it happened, Nick having bothered to close the driver's door.

Alice pulled the passenger’s sunvisor down, and was momentarily slightly surprised to find that the mirror was still there before what had to be her own reflection distracted her.

The eerily unfamiliar girl in the mirror had big soulful dark eyes, perfect skin, full lips, not a trace of acne scars, and elegant eyebrows. The clothes she was wearing and her now startlingly slender waist merely completed the effect, making her a total stranger to herself despite little things like her face still having the same general shape and her shoulders still being the same general width – all in, her reflection looked weirdly like a Victorian fairy, or maybe a sort of goth version of the fictional girl her parents had in all their wisdom saddled her with the name of. All it'd take would be the hairband and maybe a blue dress.

Through the looking glass indeed.

"Myself," said Mackie, "Am thinking that there was being something more weird than usual about the way Grace was carrying on back there, almost as if herself could no be waiting to be getting yourself out of the door."

Silence. Total silence, well, apart from the clatter of the van's engine and the rattle from elderly suspension travelling over a buckled dirt track.

"I thought that was just me," Alice admitted, successfully tearing herself away from looking at the foreign face in the mirror.

"No, not even a wee bit," Nick told her as he slowed the vehicle to turn right off of the dirt track that served as Grace’s driveway and onto an actual metalled (if single-track and extremely poorly maintained) road - there was an open patch of water surrounded by rugged rocky shores to the left, and the beginnings of a village a couple of hundred feet along the way that they were headed. The road curved sharply round the shore behind them, before splitting to go over a bridge onto what looked to be a small rugged stony island one way and into the trees the other. "Grace is… well, my big sister Elf gets on just fine with her but she’s always given me this sense that she’s looking down on me and no just in the ‘adult talking to a child’ sense either, and the doc's a genius, I mean as a person he’s a right weird bugger, but…"

The road ran straight up a modest village street for another couple of hundred feet - the buildings were a mix of small white-harled tin-roofed things and these odd almost lozenge-shaped structures made from drystone with oval tin roofs - past an age-stained red telephone box beside a tiny fuel station consisting largely of a tin shed and two antiquated fuel pumps where a white-haired man in a check shirt and flat blue hat was putting fuel into another miserable wreck of a car - and out into a stretch with newer-looking houses on one side and trees on the other for another hundred yards.

"You’d been unconscious in Grace’s kitchen since that entire bloody disaster back in March," Nick continued. "You weren't in good shape at all when we pulled you out of the wreck, there was a lot less of you then and as far as I can work out the doc did all of your cybersurgery post the initial emergency stuff from the wreck site right there in Grace’s kitchen which is weird in and of itself, I still can’t think of a reason you were no in an actual hospital, then the very same day you come round she’s chasing you out the door to stay with us... Mackie's right and I don’t think it was just them being rude either, there’s something going on."

The road came to sharply angled hybrid of junction and crossroads, onto a twin-track (but still basically unmaintained) road with railway tracks perhaps four feet from the verge the other side and, across from that, the heavily fortified entrance to what appeared to be a military base and Alice could swear she saw a couple of soldiers watching them down the sights of machine guns - Nick turned left into a cutting between two craggy pieces of rock in which the road and railway actually ran on top of each other - away behind them the road wound away uphill with trees the side they'd just come from and fortifications the other.

"The doc was taking one look at what was left of you and started shitting hedgehogs, he had you in the Navy's field cybersurgery lorry for ten hours straight before he decided you were stable enough for the time being and came down to the croft and went tilt, full on stone-age pillow, then the very next morning himself and Grace are insisting that you have to be kept at Grace's croft until you were coming round and I really couldn't be saying why. Elf, she's my big sister, it was herself that was finding yourself in the wreck,"

"What wreck? You keep talking about a wreck, and, uh, Grace said something about a train? Was there a train crash, it doesn't, well, it doesn't match what I remember," Alice asked as the van rattled down the battered road out of the cutting - the railway tracks stayed firmly cohabiting with the right-hand lane of the road. A track junction was built in the road surface, with tracks curving off towards the military base, and a train was moving at little more than a walking pace up the diverging tracks off of the road and onto the military base looking area - it consisted of a dozen flat wagons with pill-shaped containers of some sort loaded onto them, was being hauled by an oddly compact mustard yellow diesel locomotive, and the tail was brought up by a large brake van bristling with weapons. Nick and Mackie totally ignored it as if trains in the middle of the road were too everyday to be worth paying any attention to whatsoever, instead they shared a meaningful look and Nick shook his head.

"There was a bad bull haggis rampage just west of Inverallen back in March, worst one in a very long time," he finally said as he guided the van along the road as it wound downhill towards the shore, still cohabiting with railway - the land opened out as they passed the train, with an unmistakably rural Scottish sea loch of a sort Alice couldn't think of having seen since she'd been on holiday in the northwest of Scotland with her parents when she was a very little girl stretching away to the right and mountains looming up dead ahead across the water. "The bastard thing charged a passenger train headed north, the Sunday lunchtime train, Christ, myself and my brothers were no a hundred yards away when the bastard thing just came out of nowhere and turned the front coach over, we'd been looking for a deer - we legged it back to the croft and got Dad and our gun buggy. The brute was still thrashing around in the wreck back there when we got up there despite some of the Navy lads having seen it from one of their helicopters, they were trying to draw it away with their machine guns but it just wouldn’t stop heading back to keep at the train, well I got the Landy turned round and Dad let fly with the big gun, got it to charge after us, well it swerved to one side and went into the peat when Dad hit it the second time thank Christ... It was bad, really bad, worst thing that's happened in the northwest in decades. Seventy-six dead and over four hundred wounded, the train was packed with folks headed to the afternoon service in the church here in Kylesku, Elf found you in what was left of the lead coach, right in the worst damaged part of the entire train, you were less than six feet from where the beast hit the train in its initial charge. We, well, we never found your arms, or your legs, or your scalp or, well, or most of your face and basically all the rest of you was nearly as much of a state, I, when Elf got me over there to start cutting the wreckage away from around you, Jesus Christ, the state you were in I was certain she'd gone mental and we were trying to get another dead body out until Dad got there and saw what Elf had seen, that you were still breathing though I can't for the life of me say how," and with that they all lapsed into silence.

The road passed round a long sweeping bend and onto what was clearly a built-up embankment with more sea visible to the left, and they quickly came to what was at one and the same time a road and railway bridge, sharply curving and with, even more weirdly, a single-track railway station (with platform signs reading KYLESKU/KYLESTROME) built with half the platform actually on the bridge - there was another cluster of buildings on both sides of tracks and road, with little shops and the likes built into many of them.

There were junctions off to both sides of the road, after the fourth of which they rattled across a cattle grid whereupon Nick put his foot down, causing the engine's clatter to rise to a roar as the road began to wind uphill towards the mountains Alice had seen from the other side of the bridge.

The road south out of Kylesku was the broad end of single-track, precipitous, and battered. It wound its way steadily uphill out of the village, leaving the railway – which turned away from the road to the right in their direction of travel – far below, and after a couple of miles of steady uphill slog (tackled by the ratty old van with no appearance of effort bar a slight increase in the volume of the engine) crossed a narrow pass between two vast looming bulks of rock, sullen grey to their right and grey marked with a striking swathe of white that looked very much like quartz to Alice’s eye, which Mackie identified in response to her query as respectively Sgurr Dubh and Sgurr Geal, nither of which Alice had any idea how one might spell – both, he explained, were what he called Munroes – the top of the pass on the road was half a mile above sea level and they had another half mile and change of rock towering over them.

The view from the top of the pass was breathtaking no matter whether you looked forwards or back; at Alice's request Nick pulled into a strategically-positioned layby and they piled out for Alice to admire it for a while, with Mackie happily identifying each peak, village, section of water and in some cases which little slice of green amongst the browns and greys was whose croft, name after name that meant nothing to her but both of the boys obviously knew well.

The rolling hills of Sutherland stretched out like a map back the way they’d come to the north, and to their south the long silvery shape of Loch Allen ran from east to west, surrounded in every direction bar due west (where it opened into the Atlantic ocean) by mountains almost beyond count, fading from the dull greys of native rock through to almost smoke blue as they reached towards the horizon and, somewhere far beyond it, England. Scattered croft-houses and the clusters of villages dotted the coast and anywhere there was traces of green, and you could just make out the distant clatter of an engine and dogs barking somewhere down towards the shore; the first other road user (excluding the train) they’d seen since leaving Grace’s house came rattling up the hill heading towards Kylesku as they stood and gazed on the vista, a battered old-fashioned-looking white van quite similar to Nick's if bearing a different manufacturer's badge, this one reading 'SENTINEL'. There was a weatherbeaten-looking greying-haired man with a trade union hat in the driver’s seat, and a black-and-white sheepdog sitting bolt upright in the middle of the two-person bench passenger seat watching the world go by with that very particular sheepdoggy bonkers glee; the driver waved, and Nick waved back with a cry of "There goes Murdo McMurdo,"

The descent from the top once they got going again was even steeper than the climb the other side had been, and the road spent the first quarter of a mile of the way down carved out of a cliff on Sgurr Geal’s southwestern face – for a heart-stopping stretch of perhaps a hundred yards they had a thousand feet of all-but-sheer rock towering over them and another two hundred below – and then they were swiftly going downhill towards the edge of a broad stretch of barren moorland between the mountains and the sea, where they rejoined the railway and, to Alice’s considerable surprise, were met by a second set of rails - these were rather wider than the set that curved off to work its way round the foot of the mountains; a single-track road accompanied this new line in gradually climbing up from down near the seaside; the other road went through a bridge under the tracks and climbed steeply up to join the road they were following, while the second set of rails continued gradually climbing up and up towards the same level as the narrower setup she’d seen winding its way round the foot of Sgurr Dubh to the west.

"Hey, why doesn’t the road north follow the railway?" she asked, and both locals laughed.

"Well the road was there a good five thousand years before the first steam locomotive was turning a wheel," Mackie told her. "That’d be the oldest known road in Scotland by easily a thousand years – it was carved out of the cliffs using nothing more than antlers for picks and setting fires to weaken the rock, it was used for bringing slabs of the quartz Sgurr Geal got its name from bigger than this van down from the quarry up near to the top of the pass to be building the stone circles just outside of Lochinver west up the coast from here. It must have been one hell of an undertaking for a bunch of stone-age tribesmen, they’re thought to have been at it for centuries – we’re knowing how the road, the quarry and the stone circles are all fitting together for definite because there’s a couple of buggered-up stones down at the bottom of the cliff there that must have been going over the side when they were bringing them down."

"Three smashed cars and an old Army lorry down there too," said Nick. "Adair Macrae, the laddie who drives the lorry taking feed up to the big fishfarm out to the east of Kylesku, nearly ended up down the bottom of the cliff ay time as well – he was losing his brakes just after coming over the peak of the pass, well he baled out of the lorry, had to go right across the cab and out of the passenger side – the lorry nearly rubbed him off on the rock face beside the road, went into the inboard ditch, and they reckon from the distance it pushed the boulder it hit just coming out of the mouth of the half-tunnel it was travelling at a good hundred ten by then. That entire side of the cab was looking like someone had been taking a wrecking ball to it. Wasn't much left worth keeping apart from the back axle, that's on Willie Campbell's lorry now after he blew the diff on a heavy load of cattle feed down Ullapool way."

The van crested a small rise, bringing into view a small railway station – little more than a pair of platforms, one bearing a structure like a small wooden bus shelter – a couple of hundred yards before which both road and railway crossed by bridge what was either a small river or a large brook – the bridge was directly followed by a cattle grid, directly before which the two different sets of railway tracks actually joined, leading to the odd spectacle of a railway track with three actual rails - several long sidings with the wider sets of rails extended back as far as the bridge from the little station, and other siding extended out the other end of the station.

Having crossed the railway via turning ninety degrees onto a level crossing right smack dab on the end of the platforms – this seemed to serve double-duty as how passengers would get from one platform to the other, and was completely ungated and lacking any lights or other such gestures towards the though that introducing your car to a train might not be the best idea you'd ever have – the road went across another cattle grid and sharply downhill then straight through what appeared to be someone’s barnyard – a higgledy-piggledy pile of house (though not nearly as much so as Grace’s malformed pile of rocks and wriggly tin) clad in white harling with a slate roof leant against the side of the slope up to the tracks and platforms – the barnyard (complete with decrepit little grey tractor and a car that appeared to be rapidly rusting away before one's eyes) formed another ninety-degree turn, this one back to heading in the same rough direction as they had since coming down onto the moor. This gradually diverged downhill from the railway, running along the top of a bit of an escarpment – the hillside dropped steeply down towards a large tree-rimmed field with a lochen – a small lake – in the nearest corner, a line of half a dozen assorted barns along the far edge, and a good-sized house edging onto a patch of woodlands on its western side; the woods extended away back towards and across the line of the river they’d just crossed a bridge over.

The road carried on down a gentle slope for a couple of hundred yards, passing two steep driveways down to stone-built croft-houses on one side and a line of half a dozen smartly white-harled cottages with the road all but directly off their front doorsteps on the other – each had a sharply sloped back garden leading up to the fence on the other side of which was the railway, and the road entered a patch of woodland – rowan, birch, and the occasional oak tree, one of which was an arboreal giant that towered over everything around – through which the slope dramatically steepened, dropping down maybe a hundred feet in another couple of hundred yards.

At the bottom of this the road wildly widened out and went straight through what Alice momentarily thought, as it came into view, was another barnyard – but it was crossed by more railway tracks in three different widths, which joined each other into a total of two sets – each composed of no less than four rails – on the left side of the road and plunged into the row of sheds on the right side of the road; a gigantic and rather foriegn-looking mustard-yellow diesel locomotive was sitting silent and still on one of the pairs of rails composing the left-hand set of tracks. More railway equipment – assorted coaches, a box van and a rather woebegone steam locomotive utterly dwarfed by the diesel, you just about could have fitted the entire steamer inside the diesel's engine compartment – was visible inside the sheds.

Beyond the railway yards, the road – now accompanied by the widest set of rails, which had diverged from the rest – continued gently downhill between a stand of trees (into which the rest of the rails, now forming a single set of three, disappeared heading slightly uphill) above the road and another row of five white-harled houses on the right side; Nick turned onto a side road directly before the row of houses, beyond which everything immediately opened out and they were driving between two sets of fields, the road lined on each side by ditches infested by a mish-mash of brambles, bracken, and the occasional rowan tree – the occasional driveway turned off left or right, five in total, three of these being dirt tracks and only one of which – the first – you could see the house that it led to, the rest vanished into stands of trees; they were marked as driveways by the presence of postboxes at their heads.

The road plunged into a dense patch of woods in the middle of which another driveway – this one another dirt track with a pile of rust that appeared to have once been a blue estate car dumped beside its postbox – then emerged from this after only a couple of hundred feet, to be met by the fenceline beside the lochen they’d seen from up near the railway station.

Here the road became a turning circle, with a driveway – denoted by another postbox – heading sharp left towards the sea, and arriving at a hard right turn followed by a farm gate after a couple of hundred feet. There was a heathery patch of scrubland to the left of the driveway, and the field with the line of barns on the edge of it to the right; there was an assortment of small scraggly grey sheep loitering in the field, all of which watched the arrival of the van with some interest.

Nick headed down the driveway and Mackie baled out to get the gate; Nick didn't stop for him to get back in, instead driving straight down the slight slope to where the barns were while Mackie closed the gate and followed on foot.

Nick parked amongst the barns – there were multiple vehicles here, half of them lacking any form of numberplate; a couple of vans, a rough-terrain telescopic handler forklift that looked startlingly like it’d been pieced together out of wrecks, a little grey agricultural tractor, two very battered cars, two utterly miserable piles of rusted junk shaped like motorbikes, and a beautifully maintained clean to the point almost of spotlessness articulated lorry tractor unit that gave Alice a bit of a double-take with its perfect cleanliness amongst all the beat-up rusted bangers.

One of the sheep – a particularly scraggly example of the species – attempted to jam its nose into Nick's pocket the moment he got out the van; he shooed it away with a slap on its sheepy nose and a cry of "Get out of it, Pestface!"

Alice had, as it happens, having grown up in a city and never actually spent more than a week anywhere you could see more than the far end of the street (and that had been when she was very little) been taught that sheep go ‘Baa’, as have numerous little boys and girls who’ve never actually met a sheep: it was at this point in her life that she discovered that sheep do in fact not go ‘Baa’.

Sheep go ‘Maaaarrrr’, the going of which apparently requires the sheep to open its mouth as wide as possible, involves a lot of protruding tongue, and may very well be accompanied by a spray of sheep dribble.

"Maaarrr," said the sheep, continuing to attempt to gain access to Nick’s pocket. "Maaarrr,"

"Bugger off you old nuisance," Nick declared, fending the sheep off with his foot. "No I don’t have any tasty treats for sheep and no you’re not getting my bloody Mars bar," and Pestface the sheep – followed by the as-yet unnamed remainder of the flock – followed them all the way to the gate leading into the garden round the house anyway, its behaviour so utterly unlike what Alice had expected she was left boggling in complete silence.

"Ex orphan lamb," Mackie told her, catching the look. "She was being hand-reared by Nick's mum myself am thinking it was, as a result she’s entirely unafraid of people."

"She’s one half family pet and one half pain in the neck," said Nick with a nod, shutting the gate behind them having prevented any sheep entering via the strategic positioning of his foot. "And actually it was Elf that was rearing her."

"It would be," said Mackie with an amused snort.

The Macbane home itself was the most resolutely modern building Alice had seen since her awakening, for one thing being very visibly made out of concrete, for all that it was finished with the same smart white harling as half of every other building in the area it seemed. It wasn’t a small building either – you’d have been able to fit the brick terraced house Alice had grown up in into its footprint three or four times over, and it stood two full floors tall with a set of attic trusses on top of that, despite which it was still towered over by a majestic old-growth oak tree standing all but directly in front of the front door – said door being on the western end of the house. There wouldn’t be much of a view from the windows along the south side of the house, which looked across the garden on a sea of trees and the side of the westernmost barn, but walking up the garden path round the southwest corner of the house you got a good look out amongst the few trees in that direction and over the loch, and out into the vast blue-green emptiness of the north Atlantic.

There was nothing, Nick had said, between his bedroom window on the western gable of the house and Canada but open water – well, aside from a quarter of a mile of hillside and a few trees.

The door – a solid wood specimen that’d have looked more in place on a barn despite having a very ‘house’ sort of a doorhandle – was standing open, revealing a tiled-floored porch and allowing the egress of a small swarm of dogs – two immensely excited Border Collies, a Westie terrier, and an amiably brainless-looking mutt of unknowable parentage and enormous size – all bouncing and wagging wildly and snuffing at hands in their joy to see all three arrivals – Alice was met with a good sniffing of her hand followed by just as much enthusiasm as the other three, and an amiably stupid basso profoundo WUMF sort of noise (the sole bark of the entire welcoming committee) from the huge muttley-dog. There was a pair of big chest freezers in the porch – itself a good-sized room – along with a coat rack utterly full of jackets and overcoats of all shapes and sizes, and several old sheepskins and an assortment of wellington boots. There were a pair of motorbike helmets sitting on top of one of the freezers, along with a large cardboard box full of bananas, and an interior door directly opposite the exterior door was open onto a large, roomy, airy, kitchen, with a giant black-and-white enamelled stove mostly occupying the portion of room that Alice could see from the porch.

"We’re back," called Nick, ambling into the kitchen having ejected his boots; Mackie’s followed his onto the pile of footwear, though on noting that there were people inside with shoes on Annie after a moment's dithering decided not to emulate them, partially as she’d heard it hurts to wear high heels for much of any time and she wanted to know how much time that meant given that firstly these were currently her only footwear and secondly her feet were fine after half an hour in them.

Two of the occupants of the room were adults; one of the largest men Alice had ever seen, even taller and wider than Mackie with a bushy beard and 1940s hair and a striking familial resemblance to Nick on the level of Nick looking like a younger shorter narrower longer-haired version of him. He was dressed in corduroy trousers and a check shirt with the sleeves rolled up and was busy chopping up vegetables while the woman Alice guessed to be Nick's mother, a small and faintly stocky woman with hair in a neat bob sort of cut, clad similarly to Ian, was dicing meat assisted by a scruffy-haired barefoot preteen child of indeterminable gender (given the propensity for hair demonstrated by Nick) dressed in beat-up trousers and an oversized check shirt with the sleeves rolled up, age somewhere in the ten-to-twelve range.

The room itself was large, open, and airy, with a row of south-facing windows. The stove took up the centre of the wall at the far end from the door they’d entered via. There was three other doors out of the kitchen, all on the north-facing wall – this was an interior wall running along the centreline of the house – the middle of which for some unknown reason had its doorhandle at head height, and an open arch to the left of the range opening onto a space in which could be seen an array of bookshelves. To the right of the range was a series of fitted kitchen units forming an L shape of cupboards leading to, at the far end from the range at one of the south-facing windows, a sink, along from which was a gas cooker up against one of the sections of wall that didn’t have window in it – a curious-looking lamp was attached to the wall directly above the cooker.

Between cooker and entryway on the south-facing wall stood an enormous wooden kitchen table – there was a white-painted bench up against the wall and a row of assorted chairs the side of the table away from the wall, and an old upright wooden armchair with a shaggy grey sheepskin draped over it at the cookerwards end of the table. The north wall had a settee against it, facing onto a low coffee table upon which was a melee of mechanical parts that, from the presence of a wooden gun stock and what looked like it could very well be a gun barrel, appeared to be the components of a firearm, along with several tools and what looked to be a can of oil; there were several chairs and a spinning wheel grouped round the coffee table and half the north wall was taken up with an enormous corkboard festooned in photographs and assorted children’s drawings, most of which did not have attached names. Lastly, several musical instruments hung from the wall to the left of the door through which they’d entered, and most of the floor was filled by a large beat-up floral carpet.

"Well, that's us back," Nick declared. "Venison stew? Awesome!"

(There was a thump and a puzzled ‘Wurf?’ noise from behind them; glancing thataway, Alice discovered that the big dog had managed to walk behind the door, despite the fact that said door was standing wide open, and into the wall. This was followed by another thud as the dog then went round the door, went too far the other way straight past the doorway, and collided with the wall below the coat rack.)

"Aye," said his father, proving to have a very different (if still distinctly Scottish) accent to his son. "This is the bit we kept of that deer you took most of to Grace, it’s not like we’ve got room left in the freezer, so..." and he shrugged, not pausing in his vegetable-chopping. The big stupid dog, having successfully navigated the porch at the third attempt, went and flopped on the floor near the couch, and lay there drooling happily with its tail producing lazily rhythmic thuds as it struck the floor.

"I’m not complaining, I’m not complaining," Nick assured him. "So anyway Dad, here she is, and right enough that was her name on that bank card sort of thing: Alice Liddell. Alice, this is my dad, Ian; this is my mum, Carol; and my littler brother, Nat."

"Hello," Alice said.

"Oh, sit down, sit down, and the same goes for yourself, Mackie, make yourselves at home, I'll put the kettle on," Carol declared, in yet another different but just as Scottish accent, turning her attention from what she'd been doing in favour of doing exactly that - Nick made a direct beeline to take over from her, pausing to wash his hands, as another barefoot child, this one wearing a similar handknit pullover over a startlingly slender middle and a skirt, at-a-guess-she was bespectacled and probably about nine, came ambling through the archway and sat down half on top of the very large dog.

"I don’t want to impose," Alice started, but Ian cut her off with a momentary raised index finger and a shake of his head before going back to his vegetables.

"I wouldn’t worry too much about that," he said. "We’re none of us in the habit of turning away people who have nowhere to go, and anyway, between the fishing, the lorry, and Nat’s unerring ability to drop a deer in one shot from twice the range anyone else in the village can so much as hit the broad side of a barn, it’s no hardship."

"And we have everything set up anyway," Carol agreed, "We've a room ready for you and I've spent the last two months organising clothes for you, there were plenty of people with clothes they were glad to give."

"It’s no that Dad," said Nick. "She’s been awake I think about three hours, if that, at this point, Grace and the doctor made sure she could walk then pretty much handed her those clothes that she’s wearing and chased her to hell out the door," and that silenced his parents for a moment.

"Well that’s a hell of a thing," Ian finally said, giving Alice a measuring look; he plunked the lid on the saucepan, put it onto the top of the range, fished a plastic coal scuttle out of the kitchen cupboard next to said range, opened the firebox door, peered critically at it, and added a bit of coal, then the whole family seated themselves round the kitchen table to join their guests.

"It was just fucking strange, Dad," said Nick. "I’ve never seen Grace or the Doctor carry on like that, they were almost like they were..." and he drifted off, shaking his head.

"Like what?" Nat asked him.

"Like they were feart of her," he said. "They really didnae want her in Grace’s house! It was almost like… mind that time Brigid got into the guns when she was wee? The look on Grace’s face whenever she looked at Alice, it was like the look on Mum’s face whenever Brigid was near that bloody cupboard door for months."

The small bespectacled child huffed, crossed arms, and gave Nick a miffed look; Nick ruffled said child’s hair and said, "Admit it squirt, you really put the wind up Mum when you knocked my Bren gun over."

"Well," said Brigid, demonstrating herself to possess the same accent as Nick, "You should’ve been bloody stowing it properly then, shouldnae you," and her brother accepted that with a shrug and a what-can-you-do noise.

Carol and Ian glanced at each other.

"Would it be worth trying to get Elf and Neil to have a wee word with Grace?" Mackie asked, causing the family to share a round of glances.

"Probably not." said Brigid. "I heard Grace talking to Ali Beag Macrae last week, they didnae ken I were there neither. Do you know what ‘unspace’ means?" she asked Alice. "I dinnae, but they kept saying you had to have been somewhere called 'unspace' before you were in the smashed-up train and Grace thinks you’re ‘interesting’, herself was saying she was really looking forwards to hearing your version of events when you woke up and that she was thinking you were going to be giving her insight into something she called ‘the grey barrier’ and I dinnae ken about anyone else but I wouldnae want Grace thinking I was ‘interesting’, herself’s weird and I dinnae mean the good sort of weird neither."

"Unspace, unspace, where have I heard that word before," Carol muttered, glaring at the table. "I swear I’ve heard that word before – makes me almost wish I still had access to my mother’s archive."

"It’s no ringing any bells," Ian said.

"Aye and that alone would hint that it’s my mother’s archive I’m remembering it from," Carol said with a groan, sitting back. "Meaning that we can forget about ever getting a look at it. Rats."

"Wouldn’t it be easiest," Alice said, "To just upfront ask Grace what she was on about?" and she wasn’t exactly happy about the laughter that got.

"In time," Ian told her, "You’ll come to realise that Grace Mitchell’s very favourite saying is ‘If you cannae work that out for yourself then you’re no ready to be knowing’."

"We’re back!" came a cheerful cry from the door, in a voice that Alice found immediately and arrestingly familiar - the young woman who she clearly remembered having heard saying 'Dear God, he's breathing' - and another pair of what had to be Macbane siblings came wandering in

The two of them immediately registered what was going on; the girl frowned and said, "Okay, so what’s happening and who’s this?" demonstrating herself to indeed be the owner of that voice. She looked a good deal like her mother, with the same facial structure round nose, brows, and cheekbones that made all her siblings look like each other – like her mother she was impossible to adequately judge the age of, and was wearing an Arran jumper, beat-up skirt, a belt with a knotwork pewter buckle and attached whacking great belt knife, and had what appeared to be a telescope case slung over her shoulder.

"She's that lass you were finding in the wreck," her father told her. "Alice, this is my eldest, Elf, and my second son, Neil."

"Ah, about time you came round," Neil declared. He had a striking familial resemblance to his brothers, was midway between them in age, dressed in the same approximate manner as all the male members of his family, and currently that gangly-limbed-and-gawky stage of teenager. He wore his hair short, unlike any of his siblings, and had a moustache, an honest-to-god pornstache to boot, and no signs of beard. ""So, where are you from then? I’ve got a bet with Murdo Ross about it."

"Neil," said Ian.

"No Dad, it’s every bit as transparent as it was looking at the first glance," Neil said, blithely ignoring his father’s tone and Alice’s expression. "Even before we're talking talk about the weird money or that funny-sized bank card, that granny phone has this weird looking sort of D-shaped serial connector instead of a normal CRVGS port, and the doc’s ascertained that nothing, anywhere, ever, in the world has ever used a hookup arranged like that, and when the doc took the phone apart the inside is laid out like literally no phone ever, it’s got a battery that seems to be made using something called ‘lithium’ which basically nobody ever anywhere uses for batteries. Think about it! Hey," and he turned to Alice, "And what do you remember?"

"Being killed by what I think must have been some sort of terrorist bomb," Alice bluntly informed him; his mouth, to her brief but intense satisfaction, shut with a snap. "I work – worked, I guess – front of house in a restaurant, earning enough money to live on while I was going through college, I was walking to work. Just another day, right? I, there was just this… blow, and I can clearly remember seeing my hand just this mess of, of sort of ribbons of, you know, and my legs and my other arm not there any more, then this bit of I think it was car hit me in the face and the last thing I saw was my glasses and my nose being smashed inwards before what was left of my glasses lenses blinded me. I think it was about then that I realised I was dying… I need some air,