On Sunday, they took Nick's van - half full of an utter melee of stuff packed into fishboxes, from guns to welding equipment to a full-sized household fridge and no worse for the wear for having had its engine so recently removed - round to Mackie's place to get his stuff loaded up ready to head for Inverness in the morning, and found him watching something on a small black-and-white television; he made a wait-one gesture when Nick got his attention, and said, "Hold up, this is being interesting."

On the screen, a very handsome woman who appeared to have a ramrod for a spine, clad in an absolutely spotless Royal Navy officer's uniform, who appeared to be named Samantha Amundsen and to hold the military rank of Commander, was standing in what appeared to be a Nissen hut full of electronics and computer hardware and endeavouring to explain something calling itself a Deep Sky Magnetic Observatory - which appeared from context to be a very large magnetic telescope based around satellites orbiting a very long way from Earth indeed - to a wasp-waisted blonde reporterette by the name of Amanda Vought who was either the sort of bubblehead you have to suspect is slightly less intelligent than her own shoe or just played one on TV, and Mackie insistently watched the entire thing before getting his arse out of his chair and getting his stuff loaded into the van.

With the van fully loaded with all Nick's stuff, all Mackie's stuff, and most of what little Alice so far owned in this world, they headed back to the Macbane croft for an afternoon spent watching Nick repeatedly remember something he wanted to take and stow it too in the van.

Then at last Monday arrived, and Nick insisted on attaching a trailer to the van and loading his wreck of a motorbike into it along with several more heavier bits of crap, and as Brigid, who'd been hanging around and looking a bit downcast and was now holding the chicken Nick had removed from the van's engine compartment, opened the gate for them Alice indicated the stereo, from which rollicking not-quite-rock music was belting, and asked, "Who's this?"

"They're called Rock Stotation, there's two members of the band including the lassie doing the singing are Nihonjin refugees' bairns from Inverness and the rest of the band's from all over the north of Scotland," Nick told her. "They've been putting on pub and village hall concerts all up and down the north for a couple of years now, and at this point they've put out two live albums that're nothing more than spur-of-the-moment recordings of concerts - this one's the first of the two, they recorded it in the Harbourmaster's Arms through in Inverness this time last year, the other one's from their Hogmanay concert up in Kirkwall in Orkney this New Year just past - the lead guitarist and the piper are both Kirkwall lads. Don't ask me where the name comes from though, 'Rock Stotation', I haven't an earthlies."

"Huh," said Alice, and listened a bit more as the van rattled along the driveway. "They're pretty good... what was that with the chicken in the engine?"

"Hmm? Oh, there's a place on top of the left-hand wheelarch of a van like this where there's enough space for a hen to sit," said Nick. "I guess the hens must like the warmth from the engine or something, they have nests in all our vans' engines dug out of the sound-dampening foam in there - you'd think they'd panic and get wrapped round the prop shaft or something when you start the engine but I guess the roar and the vibrations must mesmerise them, or maybe our hens just like to go for a spree, they just sit there until you switch off. Most of our hens have had rides through to Inverness, we've had our own fresh eggs while visiting Dad's parents down in Glasgow and Mum's brother John down in Dundee and there's a couple of our hens have made it as far afield as England, and we lost one in Muir of Ord once, it hopped out and wouldn't get back in and we couldn't catch the bloody thing."

Alice slowly shook her head, and that was about that for conversation in the van for the short ride over to Mackie's house.

Mackie, for his part, added another four fishboxes full of God-alone-knows-what, half a dozen random cardboard boxes, two more desktop computers, and into the trailer another desperate wreck of a motorbike before, having bid his mother farewell in Russian, piling into the van and they got back on the road, headed east.

Halfway along from Mackie's place to the turning where you could either head down to the harbour or up the hill towards the road east, Nick with a cry of "Shit!" skidded the van to a halt in a passing place as, coming round the bend, they were confronted by half of a little grey Ferguson tractor - to the tune of the engine, back wheels, and a huge lump of rock strapped on hanging in midair where the front axle would more normally be - towing (and rigidly attached to the front of) a peculiarly-constructed and incredibly rusty railway wagon riding on the absurdly wide set of rails that bracketed that stretch of road, onto which was loaded a scruffy little green-and-white fishing boat, from this perspective looking to be roughly as tall as a house, the bottom of which had an overall coating of barnacles and seaweed.

It had the word 'WALRUS' painted in black across the front rim of the wheelhouse roof.

"So Struan's finally decided to get all the shite off the bottom of his bloody tub," said Nick; he slid the door open and shouted across, "Morning Jock,"

"Morning Nick," said the very large and very hairy pipe-smoking man in Trade Union hat and grubby orange boiler suit who was driving the half-of-a-tractor as his conveyance trundled past; Nick took the van off the moment the wagon full of boat was out of the way, not bothering to close his door.

The road east out of the village worked its way north along the western uphill edge of the area of 'terraces' of flattish land above the harbour, climbing steeply most of the way and with a house almost directly onto the side of it every couple of hundred feet, passing under the railway directly before hanging a sharp right turn to aim back to the east, steadily getting steeper and more and more precipitous as it went until, as it came up to the brow of the hill, the ground was falling away at a better than forty-five degree angle below the road while the road was climbing at a rate of about one in six with more-or-less level household driveways looking like they were steeply sloped as they came off of it, and while this wasn't the first time Alice had been along this stretch of road you got a sight better a view from the front seats of the van than the back of a minibus full of hairy Macbanes.

Across the brow of the rise the land levelled out, the road passing between one last pair of houses (from which there must have been a fantastic view back out over the Atlantic Ocean) and over a cattle grid immediately followed by a level crossing - the tracks this crossed featured only the traditional two rails, sized to fit what Annie had called 'standard gauge' when Alice had asked her about the Sutherland's surfeit of rails on Tuesday after the haggis hunt - and out onto a barren windswept moor - a dirt track branched off to the left and gently uphill towards a cluster of barns and high fences, and the railway curved away across a bridge over what was presumably the river that came out down near the harbour, right where the river exited a broad expanse of freshwater loch, along the far side of which from the road the railway could be seen winding - road and rails were both barely three feet above the surface of the loch, and while from about halfway along the loch the road began climbing steadily uphill again, the rails stayed at a level until, at the head of the loch, they ran into a tunnel to the seaward side of the vast looming bulk of a mountain that Mackie identified as Ben Allen.

As the road climbed along the moor towards the mountain, they crossed culvert after culvert, myriad burns emerging from the vast expanse of peat bogs between Inverallen and the mountains - these, Mackie said, were where the river that came out near the harbour came from, he said that the river was only actually a river below what he called 'the upper loch'.

The road kept climbing, the land each side getting steeper and steeper, crossing small bridges now where it'd crossed culverts on the more level ground, now hundreds of feet above the surface of the loch, and by the time it reached Ben Allen proper - now clinging to the cliffs in as vertigo-inducing a way as the road Mackie had called stone-age heading north - they had climbed, Mackie cheerfully declared, to over a thousand feet above the surface of the upper loch, with most of that height being a sheer cliff face Mackie explained that the road had been blasted out of by the military in the 1940s with a view to using Inverallen's overbuilt harbour, left over from shipping iron south by sea when the railway only went as far as a mine behind Ben Allen, for the war - he said that instead they'd built what eventually became the fleet space arm base at Kylestrome, and that during the Battle of Britain thousands of Canadian-built military vehicles had travelled south across the pass they were climbing - there were, Nick added, at least two dozen assorted wartime vehicles in the bottom of the loch having gone 'off the edge of the bloody world' and would Mackie kindly shut up so as to be sure they didn't join them, he (Mackie) was distracting the driver, you great teuchter.

It was of no small relief when they came to the crest in the pass and the road turned sharply away from 'the edge of the bloody world', instead winding between boggy lochens with the side of Ben Allen behind them on one side and boulder-strewn hillocks on the other, before taking a sharp turn back towards Loch Allen and emerging at the top of another incline just as insanely steep as the road up to the cattle grid at the top of the village - this heading downhill for a little under half a mile, at the bottom of which there was helpfully enough a hairpin turn with nothing between the bottom end of the slope in the road and a drop-off but very bent and totally inadequate-looking crash barriers, complete with ominous-looking skid marks pointing straight at them.

The turn having been made without incident, they continued rapidly descending, until at the bottom they arrived at another level crossing, having gone all the way back down to the same level as the railway line - peering over Nick as they crossed the tracks, Alice could see that the railway ran into what was presumably the other end of the tunnel, through which she was startled to clearly see a nice clear tunnel-shaped blob of the blue-green of the ocean.

"The ridge of Lann Fala between Ben Allen and An Bairdheas is only actually about four hundred feet wide back there where the tunnel is," Mackie said, seeing where she was peering.

"Aye, four hundred feet wide with almost a thousand feet of rock above it," Nick said. "The top of the ridge is barely wide enough to walk along, there's no mistake it's called the 'bloody blade' in the Gaelic, the number of people who've died from falling off of it over the years..." and he grimly shook his head.

Across the railway the land opened out, a half-mile-wide strip of flatlands running for miles along the north shore of Loch Allen with a range of semi-cojoined mountains Mackie identified as Glas Beinn, Beinn Uidhe, and Mullach an Leathaid Riabhaich none of which Alice had the faintest idea how to spell from how he said, forming a wall of sorts to the north - across the strip of bright sunlit water Mackie called the narrows between Outer Loch Allen and Inner Loch Allen loomed Beinn an Furhein and Ben More Assynt, their flanks running almost straight down into the waters of the narrows with the rough country to the south sprawling out behind them; the loch itself turned sharply southwards from the narrows and the land to their north opened up, becoming almost flat as the road began to head downhill, and Mackie said there was nothing worth the title of mountain from there to Loch Shin and, beyond it, the Dornoch Firth - the railway failed to make the turn with the loch, instead disappearing off into the rolling hills to the east, only for the road to meet the other railway, the one they'd ridden to Duchally a week prior, a couple of miles later, right on the shore of the loch as they climbed downhill to meet the sea, and another couple of miles after tha they were entering Duchally.

The drive had taken nearly twice the time the previous week's train ride had, and having passed through Duchally they chanced to meet Annie's pickup, likewise towing a trailer and likewise loaded up to the gunnels, right at the junction where the road from Inverallen and the north joined the road from Stronecrubie and, beyond it, Ullapool, and headed east towards Scotland's furthest shore.

-/-/-/-/-/-

It was, all be told, a beautiful day, and it only got more so as they travelled south and east. The occasional contrail excepted, the last cloud Alice saw that day had been west of Inverallen out over the mouth of the loch and was well out of sight by the time they were headed east out of Duchally - from there to Inverness there was nothing but blue from horizon to horizon, and they stopped momentarily in Bonar Bridge for Nick to shed his jacket and to buy choc-ices before getting back on the road and making non-stop for Inverness.

The difference in atmosphere, the whole air and persona of the place, between Inverness and the crofting communities in which Alice had spent the previous week was even more striking now she'd almost started to get used to the remoteness of Inverallen - it looked, even more visibly now the town was crowded, almost like someone in the first decade of the twentieth century had done an excellent job of predicting the future of technological development while utterly failing to comprehend possibilities like fashion mores and sensibilities maybe not staying more or less the same for the duration.

The college building - the same place they'd been when Annie more or less strongarmed the college into accepting Alice - was one of the most modern-looking buildings in town, a post-war high-rise concrete eyesore just across an urban dual carriageway from the back of the railway station and not a stone's throw from JOHNSON & CO GUNSMITHS. It had a sprawl of car park taking up most of the space between it and the approximate line of where the road began to slope up to the bridge over the railway - there was a mixture of brick and concrete industrial units between there and where railway tracks went down into the harbour, all of them very run-down and covered in graffiti that managed to be oddly charming via being written in Gaelic.

The cars in the car park were a weird melange. Many were heavily rusted and otherwise visibly damaged, though few to a quality matching Annie's pile of scrap iron, and plenty of them were missing numberplates. Most of them looked downright antiquated - there were half a dozen vaguely modern-looking vehicles in the entire car park, with most of the rest looking like someone not having noticed the 70s had started and a few looking like they should've been on the set of some sort of Prohibition-era gangster movie.

As for the crowds of students the four newly arrived from the west found themselves merging into as a unit, they left Alice feeling even more lost in time than the traffic. Sexual dimorphism in apparel seemed to be strictly enforced with hardly anything something that'd have looked particularly out of place sometime at the end of the Victorian era save that is from a dearth of hats, with Nick and Mackie about the only young men in the entire place not clad in a manner Alice would've called pushing suitable for a wedding or a funeral, and it came as quite some relief when, as they joined the queue to receive their digs assignment, the first female student neither corsetted nor clad in a dress with a cutout showing her cleavage appeared, joining the queue directly behind the four from the west: a solidly-built young woman with darkish skin and darker eyes, her head shaved aside from an inch-long bright-green mohawk, a black turtleneck pullover emblazoned with the words, FREE NIHON, in chunky bright red block caps that appeared to have been scrawled on with a paintbrush, and an immensely baggy set of red-brown camouflage cargo trousers. She had shitkicking boots, a studded leather belt with a holstered pistol one side and a kukri of all things the other, she had multiple ear piercings and a ring through her left nostril, she had a prominent scar on her right temple, she had a maniac grin on her face, and she was treating the weird looks varied people who, Alice felt, should probably know better kept giving her with the total contempt they deserved.

Alice decided she liked her at first glance.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The college digs was situated in a converted stately home sort of a structure not far from the River Ness, close to the Ness Islands. The building had a multi-floored dormitory built as a truly unsightly extension on its southeastern end - this was a proper post-war eyesore of a building, just this big square grey concrete box festooned with rows of blank windows stuck on one end of what had once been quite a nice-looking structure - someone had, it appeared, noticed how visually appealing it wasn't and planted a neat row of poplar trees between the concrete bit and the nearby road.

All four of the Loch Allen students found themselves in two-person rooms on the top floor, with Nick and Mackie sharing a room - Annie found herself rooming with the punker girl, who introduced herself as Val Adamson, while Alice's roommate - one 'Fiona Macleod' going by the sheet the digs manager had - was, at that stage in the game, conspicuous by her absence.

The room itself - at the northmost end of the dormitory's fourth floor - was entirely as drab and unprepossessing as the building's exterior. It was arranged in two halves with a draw curtain down the middle, terminating at the window. On each side was - all built into each other in a fixed unit - a bed, wardrobe, desk, and a couple of side cupboards, with the remaining side wall space taken up by a pair of flat-panel radiators at the door side of the room and an upright lockbox at the window end of the room; a pair of those cheap tubular-metal-frame-and-plastic chairs had been 'generously' provided for seating. There were three power points each side, one on each taken up by an angle-poise desk light, and what was presumably a network cable strung to the desk - the assumption being confirmed by an official notice of connection usage policy. The window looked out on what looked to be a playing field, positioned between the line of poplar trees beside the wall and the college dorm building itself.

Everything, curtain included, was either white (walls, ceiling, bedding) or beige with the sole spot of colour in the entire room the network cables, which were bright red - they were strung up the walls and along the ceiling to a junction box just above the door.

Alice picked the side of the room away from the stairwell at that end of the building, and set to distributing her sparse possessions - several changes of clothing (all much the same as what Grace had given her, despite Annie's urgings to 'not look like you're at a funeral') into the wardrobe, laptop and varied documents onto the desk, what little else there was in one of the side cupboards under the bed. Outside, Nick and Mackie were still humping things up the stairs to their dorm room at the far end of the row with a lot of swearing and sarcastic advice from Annie, who'd mucked in to help under the agreement that they'd help her with her nearly-as-copious stuff.

About the only things they didn't seem hell-bent on taking up there were their bikes and Nick's gas welding equipment.

Alice, ignoring them, decided to resume getting used to her new computer equipment and was rather surprised, emerging from the laptop when Annie stuck her head in the door with a spoken "Knock knock," to discover that it was two hours later.

"We're heading down to the pub," Annie continued. "Fancy coming along?"

Alice was for a moment going to say no, but then she realised how stiff her back was getting from sitting on that terrible chair for two hours.

"Oh, sure, might as well - I could do with a bit of a break," she said.

-/-/-/-/-/-

It was, it occurred to Alice as they drove, the first time she'd actually been into the town part of Inverness itself as opposed to from one place to another on the outlaying industrial estates or just driving through.

The look of the place was more or less as she'd been coming to expect - she spent a moment mentally composing an open letter or message in a bottle of some sort about it, 'Send help, I'm stuck in a twenty years ago that thinks its a hundred and twenty years ago despite doing cyberpunk', before shaking that particular weird mood off.

From the college digs it wasn't far to where the road ran along the bank of the River Ness towards the harbour - this was the road they'd come up earlier that afternoon, but she'd had her nose in the college orientation package. The buildings along the other side of the road from the river were all Victorian-looking stone-built affairs, houses gradually giving way to shops and restaurants as they got further into the town proper. There were sparsely-spaced bridges over the river - a pedestrian suspension bridge, a low arch for cars, further down the road that passed the college crossed the river and beyond that the same went for the railway - and a row of tall very Victorian buildings across the water.

Annie took the right into the town that extended across the low arch road bridge - this climbed sharply uphill in among more tall very Victorian town-house style structures, most of them with shop fronts on the ground floor - there was lines of car parking all along one side of the road, thoroughly full of a dizzying assortment of mismatched motor vehicles and homogenised people and to Alice's considerable surprise had a set of tram tracks in it, and a moment and another turning later they spotted Nick, who'd rode down to the town on his motorbike, waving at them - it quickly transpired he'd been indicating to Annie that he'd found a space for her to park the pickup, right in front of a shop sign (the most Victorian-looking yet) reading GUNSMITHS, and after a moment of hilarity getting out of the way of a double-decker tram of all things Annie successfully got the pickup into the space Nick had indicated.

"Nice one," she declared as they piled out of the vehicle, "Got a space right next to the pub, I wouldn't have been expecting that,"

"Aye, some numpty-boy was taking off in a tearing hurry when I was getting there," Nick told her with a nod.

"Bloody hell," said Mackie, looking around him, "The town's heaving,"

(Alice was about to ask what he was on about - the place wasn't really that crowded though it was a bit busier than Ullapool had been on Friday - then remembered he was a farmboy from some one-horse village up the arse end of nowhere who probably thought twenty people was a horde.)

"Aye, it's jumping tonight," Nick agreed with a nod. Farmboy. "I suppose there's the entire college population thinking about the same thing as ourselves."

"Well let's hope we can get a bloody seat," said Annie, heading directly for the pub.

Inside was a very traditional British pub - wood panelling, overstuffed red leather seating, open fire, fruit machine with a guy in a leather jacket feeding it coins, pool table replete with players, unoccupied dartboard, huge overbuilt polished wood bar with a line of tall stools in front each of which was occupied by some crusty old codger in a Trade Union hat, and the walls decorated with masses of horse brasses and stuffed animal head hunting trophies prominently including (directly above the centre of the bar) a fox that was, for whatever reason, wearing spectacles and had an unlit cigarette stub hanging from the corner of its mouth.

There was a pall of smoke in the air, a strong smell of cannabis and cheap beer, and loud rock music playing on the jukebox.

It was, truth be told, pretty crowded even by Alice's standards, with most of the crowd teenagers and young adults. Most were clad as she was by now coming to expect, and everyone, without exception, was armed. There was scarcely a belt to be seen that hadn't got a pistol holstered upon it, no matter how ridiculously narrow the waist it might be beneath.

To her surprise they managed to find a table with relative ease - one of the ones near the pool table, conveniently one right by the window looking at where they'd parked, was in the course of clearing out as they arrived - and they set to and got drinking.

An hour and three beers in and perhaps half an hour after dark, Nick rose to his feet declaring his intention to take his bike back up to the digs while he was still fit to drive - Mackie wandered out towards the street with him, the two of them laughing and joking, and Alice was just starting to wonder since when three beers in meant still fit to drive when Annie, looking out the window, shot to her feet with a cry of "Oh what the hell,"

"What's up?" Val asked as she and Alice looked where Annie was looking.

Outside where they were parked, Mackie was on the ground curled up in a foetal position, Nick was staggering to his feet roaring like a madman, a bunch of 'greaser' types - leather jackets, denim jeans, sunglasses at night, shitkicking boots, quiffs - were running past screaming blue murder, and of Nick's bike there was no sign.

"Some twat just ran up, kicked Mackie in the nadgers, flattened Nick clean off his bike, and nicked the bloody bike!" Annie declared in the course of getting up and making a beeline for the door. Val hastened after her, and Alice, after a heartbeat's thought, wasn't far behind them.

By the time they got out the pub, the situation had changed radically, and while Mackie was still on the ground making small whimpering noises, Nick had got into a shouting match with the gang of greaser-looking types.

They were just in time to hear one of said greasers declaring, "Let's cream him," directly after which the speaker pulled what appeared to be a sawn-off pool cue out of his jacket. His mates made assorted agreeing noises and started producing their own blunt instruments.

Nick, who was standing right next to Annie's pickup, wasn't having that: he shoved his hand under the tarp and came out with a steel pinch bar - four feet long by a couple of inches thick with one end pointed and a cast-in metal ball at the other.

This he effortlessly swung round into a two-handed grip, feet planted wide, point of the bar down at about a forty-five degree angle.

"Calm the fuck down and back the fuck off before I have to fucking hurt you," he said.

"What's going on?" Annie asked Mackie. The greasers disregarded Nick's advice - their apparent leader went in for the swing, and the pinch bar blurred - there was a meaty thud and the lead greaser's pool cue went bouncing along the street - another string of smacks and thuds as Nick laid about himself with the pinch bar.

Several people had come out of the pub behind the girls, and were watching with interest. Annie poked at Mackie with her foot, getting a stream of pained-sounding Gaelic in reply.

"Well aye, I saw that much, what are these numpties playing at?"

"Dunno," Mackie said.

The lead greaser type pulled a gun - a big slab-sided self-loading pistol.

Nick saw it coming - the pinch bar whirred round, blinding fast, and there was a horrible crunch as the ball end impacted the greaser's skull.

The pistol went skittering down the street as its owner went over with his sunglasses broken and his temple visibly caved in - and everything started happening very fast, so much so that it all kind of blurred together in Alice's mind.

One of the other greasers pulled a gun - a black T-shaped bit of metal;

Annie's revolver seemed to teleport into her hands and roared twice in close succession;

The greaser with the T-shaped gun dropped it as the back of his skull flew off;

The greaser whose skull Nick had just caved in came reeling back to his feet yelling "Don't you know how much that stings you-!";

Nick drove the pointed tip of the pinch bar into the centre of the dented-skulled man's chest;

The man with the dented skull burst like a sack of wet cement - and that seemed to be the signal for events to go back to normal speed: the remaining greasers took off running, the one with half the back of his head shot off included - Nick hurled the pinch bar, spinning - it caught one of the running greasers between the shoulder blades taking the target down, and Annie said, "The hell, I could swear I hit him!"

"You hit him, myself was seeing it," Mackie declared. Everyone, inclusive, was staring at the guy who'd just turned into sludge. His clothing was intact - save for the hole the pinch bar had put in his shirt - but the rest of him had just completely disintegrated into a massive pile of some sort of slurry. "Half the back of his head's off for Christ's sake, you were definitely hitting him,"

"Might be on PCP or something," Alice finally contributed, quite aware she was staring round-eyed at the mud puddle that used to be a man.

"Well," Annie declared, slotting her revolver back into it's holster, "Whichever way we'll ken once he's keeled over - pass us a bin liner out the back of the ute Mackie, I'm betting the coppers will be wanting a look at this thing," and she toed the black T-shaped metal thing.

Mackie, who was by now back on his feet if walking funny, had a fish around in the back of the ute and came out with a plastic sack - this he wrapped round his hand before picking the offending article up.

"Looks like a Glenmoray crackler but it's nae home-made," he said. "What the hell, someone's been filing at it? Myself am thinking they were efter the serial number?"

"It's a Yank gun, an Ingram, it's what a Glenmoray crackler's a direct copy of - rare as hell, there can't be more than a dozen of those in the Home Islands," Annie told him, peering critically at it. "One of Dad's friends from uni - Billy Conroy, he's a gun collector down south - has one of these and I've got one of the others in my handbag, I'm betting this one's been stolen, it's no the sort of gun that'll just turn up in some wanker's jacket."

"You'd better get that pistol too Mackie," Nick said, and turned and walked over to where the person - from the voice, either female or castrated - he'd hit with the thrown pinch bar was laying face down and screaming and swearing a lot.

Alice followed him after a moment's hesitation as he turned what was definitely a woman over with his foot.

She was pretty in an indeterminately Eastern European sort of way, dressed the same as her mates - a motorbike jacket, jeans making her (counting Val) the second woman Alice had seen wearing trousers since arrival in Inverness, tank-top over a corsetted waist even tinier than Annie's, and shitkicking boots. She had a studded belt with a death's head buckle, her tank top appeared to be a men's vest with a skull and crossbones drawn on the front with a black marker, her hair was up in pigtails, and she had a battered piece of heavy-looking chain round her neck.

She also started laughing maniacally the moment Nick turned her over.

"I know your face now, mortal," she told him. "I know your face."

"Well it's no going to be doing you much good with a broken back now, is it," he said with a shake of his head and turned and walked back towards the pickup, still shaking his head.

"Let's get out of here," he told Annie. "I'm no in the mood for more drinking."

"Aye," Annie said with a nod, shoving her hand through the hole in the pickup's bonnet and starting in on persuading it to start. "You're no wrong."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Aye," Annie said, putting her own black T-shaped nasty-looking sub-machine gun back in her handbag. "That's definitely the serial numbers that've been filed off of this thing," and she tapped the side of the greaser's Ingram, which was now laying inside a large ziplock bag on the desk in Nick and Mackie's dorm room. "I'm taking it down to the police station in the morning."

They'd retired to the boys room for what seemed to be some sort of council of war the moment they'd arrived back at the dorms.

"Are you sure involving the pigs is a good idea?" Val asked.

"Well they'll know it was myself shot that one arsehole the moment they find wherever my slugs went, it's nae like we're in the middle of a land war and it's nae like it all went down the other side of the goods yard, " Annie said with a shrug. "Or, hell, after he's keeling over if he's nae crawled into a hole by then they'll be finding rifling marks matching my gun on what's left of his skull I'm betting. It won't be a hard match to find, the big Colt's in an American calibre, there's only a couple of hundred guns that'll chamber those rounds in the Home Islands and the last time someone mistook me for a get-rich-quick scheme was four weeks back at that big space-technology conference up at Culloden and tonight was the first time I've actually fired the big Colt since - they've got a slug on file from exactly three bullets ago. This thing here, you saw he was no wearing gloves, it'll be covered in his fingerprints and I'm betting his DNA to boot and you can class that as proof I was needing to slot him."

"You'd probably better be turning this thing in at the same time Annie," Nick said, indicating the pistol. "It's full of hollowpoints, factory-made stuff, and those aren't so easy to be getting, and someone's had a go at its serials too… I've got a bad feeling about this. Something tells me that lassie wasn't joking when she was on about being after us, they'll be back, I'd bet on it."

"Aye, I get that sense too," Annie said with a sharp nod. "Particularly since I blew one of their mates' brains out and you… well."

"Aye, but what'll we be doing about it? For Christ sake the college is no allowing long arms on campus and we're all knowing how bloody useless Nick is with a pistol and to be honest myself's no much better," said Mackie.

Nick snorted, reached under his bed, and dragged out a very large sword, in scabbard, with very distinctive slanted crossguard and unnecessarily large pommel.

"Well for one thing I'm no thinking this qualifies under 'long arm'," he said.

"Shit the bed, is that a proper bloody claymore like what William Wallace had?" Val declared, visibly impressed.

"Well technically speaking it's a spud bar that's been hit with a hammer a lot," Nick said. "Took me two dozen tries to get the balance and temper something like right, I've got an entire fishbox full of vaguely sword-shaped scrap metal back on the croft, but it'll do until I can find the time to get better at that sort of metalworking or maybe just bloody pay someone who knows what they're about to do the work, welding is one thing but I'm no exactly a master-smith."

"I think we're all dancing around the point," Alice said. "What the hell was that with that guy turning into… well, mud?" and that was enough to silence all four of the others.

"I haven't a bloody clue," Annie finally admitted.

-/-/-/-/-

On walking back into her dorm room Alice was very abruptly reminded that the person she was sharing with hadn't previously appeared on finding that while they'd been down at the pub the mystery 'Fiona Macleod' had in fact appeared, and half the room had undergone a dramatic transformation.

The central curtain - which was now bundled up at the window end - had become something of a dividing line, with very little of the room's beige remaining visible outside of Alice's half - Fiona had, it seemed, come prepared.

The walls and wardrobe were hidden by dark fabric wall-hangings and the floor covered in what appeared to be furs - there was no sign of the original bedclothes, these having been replaced by an enormous black quilt, and a very large desktop computer replete with tower case sat on floor occupied the desk. The shelves were entirely stuffed full of books and what appeared to be jewellery boxes, and a low coffee table had appeared in the middle of that half of the floor - a bulky black leather trenchcoat was hung from the curtain rail, and a black leather gunbelt replete with a pair of ornate pearl-gripped revolvers was laying on the coffee table.

The cause of this transformation was approximately the most 'goth' blonde Alice had ever seen in her life. The girl who had to be Fiona - rail thin wound down even narrower at the centre by corsetry even more pronounced than Annie Kelly went in for and entirely black-clad in a style loosely reminiscent of a Victorian doll - was seated at her computer and had just stopped typing and started turning round as Alice opened the door.

"Aha, so the mysterious Alice Liddell has appeared at last then," she declared. She looked just as resoundingly 'goth' from the front as she did from the back, she even had too much mascara, an overly chunky knobbly studded dog collar with a large ring dangling from the front, masses of silver jewelery, and her hair - of which she had a tremendous quantity and volume - was tied back in a set of elaborate tresses.

She also had a similar accent to Mackie, and the easy smile didn't really match the goth thing.

"And you'd be the mysterious Fiona Macleod I spent most of the afternoon wondering where was," Alice said, going and flopping on her bed. Fiona let out a light laugh.

"Aye, that I am," she said. "I take it you're worn then."

"Nothing wrong with me that about a month's sleep wouldn't fix," Alice lied.

-/-/-/-/-

"You're knowing Alice Liddell from before the college," said an unexpected Stornaway-accented voice, speaking in the Gaelic, and Mackie, who had got up early as per his lifelong habit, turned round from what he'd been doing - lubing his motorbike's chain - with a grunt.

"Aye, no very well mind, myself had only known her a week," he said, figuring that the speaker - a pretty dark-clad blonde girl with a lot of eye makeup and a dead giveaway that would have Nick and Annie thinking someone was a right lucky bastard - had to be Alice's new roommate. "Why's that?"

"Not that myself's wanting to be prying or anything, but herself was waking up with this choked-off sort of start of a shriek three times over the course of last night," the girl - who on a closer look seemed really rather frazzled somewhere under her ocean of mascara - said. "Herself's up there wide awake right now huddled up in a wee ball, what in God's name was happening to her?"

"Well myself am not too clear on the details," Mackie told her with a sigh, "And myself am not much of a one for the gossiping, but… herself was being blown up, bloody near to killed, in some sort of a bombing probably back in March. Herself's got more of her metal than flesh."

"Well myself was thinking it was shellshock myself was seeing," the girl said, grimly shaking her head. "That poor wee lassie. Och, don't get worked up man, myself will no be letting on that yourself was spilling that one. Discretion, ken - och, ourselves have no been introduced, myself am Fiona Macleod, Alice there's myself's room-mate,"

Mackie drew an agreeing inbreath.

"Aye, myself was thinking as much," he said, then grunted in surprise as Nick came wondering out of the digs yawning to himself.

Nick Macbane had never been an early riser - this was the earliest Mackie had seen him out of bed (sea days excluded) in months.

"Morning," he said. "Yourself's out of your pit early," and he watched the mental gearchange of Nick switching to the Gaelic in his head.

"Aye, myself am thinking myself'll be starting in on chasing up parts for a new bike," Nick said, ambling over to his van.

"A new bike, what," Fiona started.

"Aye, my Norton was being stolen last night, right out of under my bloody nose too," Nick told her with a bit of a grumble. "By now it's most likely already in pieces, so that'd be that. Time to be building another bike."

"So yourself'll be headed for the scrappers then, aye?" said Mackie.

"Aye," said Nick as he climbed into the van. "First things first, seeing about some sort of a wee engine."

-/-/-/-/-/-

When Nick Macbane came humping a grease-encrusted engine up the stairs in the college digs, he was just in time to promptly get caught up on what was going on, as Annie chose that exact moment to exit the room being shared by Fiona and Alice, to be greeted by Mackie - who'd been leaning against the wall beside the door ready to tear anyone who tried to put their nose in a new one - with a simple, Gaelic-languaged, "How's herself?"

"Actually asleep," Annie told him in that same language. "The poor lass was sleep-deprived on top of everything else - ah, Nick, perfect timing, we're needing some sort of ban put on Alice's bed to help her sleep without being back in the middle of that bloody bombing every time she's closing her eyes. Fiona there was giving her something that should stop her dreaming this once, but herself's saying it's no good to be taking that stuff all the time."

"So she was having the meltdown we'd been half-expecting then," said Nick, shifting his engine to a more comfortable position. "I should've bloody put a ban on her bed like the one at home last night but I clean forgot,"

"Aye," Annie said. "It was slipping my mind too."

"When'll yourself be wanting that ban put on herself's bed then?" Nick asked.

"Fiona will be letting you know once Alice is waking up, we can't be going around behind her back - it wouldn't be doing her head any good at all," Annie told him. "Any rate I'm going to head over to the police station with those guns, I'll be seeing you later."

He nodded, and went to take his engine to his room.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Morning, Miss Kelly," said Constable Jim Higgins, looking up from his newspaper. "Scored another notch on your gunbelt last night, I understand."

"Aye," Annie said with a nod, and held up the poly bags holding the two guns she and Nick had retrieved from the scene. "That I did, has the body turned up yet?"

"Not that I know of, at a guess he crawled into a hole in the no-go and died there, I expect he's in a peat bog by now. That'll be the assailants' weapons then?" and he indicated the bag. "I'll just let Constable Joy know you're here then,"

"No need, I'm right here," a cheerful Kirkwall-accented voice called from through the main part of the office, and the door into the station proper opened to reveal the smiling face of Constable Joy. "What have you got for us today?"

"One rare-as-hell Yank machine pistol with the serial numbers filed at by an idiot, and a Yank self-loading pistol again with the serials filed at, and loaded with factory hollowpoints to boot, I expect that they're stolen," Annie said, holding her bagged guns up again. Pam Joy frowned and accepted the bags.

"Come on through, we'd better get a statement and see what Billy can rustle up concerning those guns," she said.

"Well for one thing it'd be worth having a look for fingerprints and DNA on 'em," Annie told her. "We made sure to keep poly bags between us and the guns the whole time,"

"And neither of the 'criminal masterminds' in question were wearing any visible glove, yes," Pam said as the two of them headed through to the offices. "The surveillance unit got the entire affair on video, we've had a whole rash of unpleasantness in what's supposed to be a safe part of town - stick-ups, four missing persons, several particularly nasty attacks, and one lassie was bitten last night for Pete's sake… Just one thing though - what in God's name happened when your pal stabbed that one in the chest?"

"I honestly haven't an earthlies, the guy just… disintegrated? I've been thinking it could be some sort of black-market nanotechnology or something? Maybe nicked military stuff? I've never heard of anything that does that but I can see how something that'd wipe a dead body out like that would be very popular with the likes of the SOE. They were definitely boosted, not any heavy stuff though - about what you'd expect some footie hooligan to manage to scrape together, maybe a bit above, call it 'lucky yob' level."

"I take it your friend's boosted,"

"Well technically speaking Nick and Mackie are my bodyguards, right,"

"Say no more. Billy! Miss Kelly's got a couple of guns for you to get a ganders at," and Billy Mandell - implausibly lanky and one of those people who can look perfectly presentable when leaving the house but will still be rumpled and in need of a shave by the time of arrival at the workplace - emerged from a desk positively encrusted in implements of destruction.

"Oho," he declared the moment he had the bagged Ingram in his hands and had taken a close enough look at it to tell it was factory-made. "I'll bet I know where this beauty was nicked from!"

"Oh aye?" Annie said.

"Yup, collector through in Montrose had seventy-six assorted rare or foreign guns stolen back in February, including guess what - he'd kept immaculate records of their ballistics and so far we've identified six killings this thing's been used to commit. There should be ultraviolet identification marking on top of their receivers and inside their magazine wells, we'll have a look once we've seen what we can get in the way of prints and DNA," He accepted the bagged pistol. "Aha, and I'll bet this is one of the four Colt .45's he's missing too... Oh for Christ sake, what nitwit went at the serials with a file? They don't even do things that dim on the telly any more!"

-/-/-/-/-/-

Waking up the fourth time that first day in Inverness was almost as odd as waking up in Grace's living room had been, and for the first few moments left Alice just as utterly lost as she'd been then, before everything came back to her in a rush.

She sat up, and looked around, immediately drawing Fiona's notice.

"Morning," Fiona said.

"Is it still morning… I didn't sleep right through to Wednesday did I. God, what a way to make for a first impression, flailing around like a total basket case,"

"Och I wouldn't be saying that much - you're far from the first person I've ever been seeing having a flashback, my grandfather was gassed three times at the Somme and the number of folks I've kent who've been screwed up by the land wars there's no a chance you'll be the last." Fiona shook her head. "And honestly it hasn't been morning for a while, it's just after six in the afternoon, but don't be getting too excited, we're no due into anything official to do with the college until the morrow."

"Four? The last thing I knew it must've been about,"

"You slept for ten hours straight once the Kelly lass was getting you to actually go to sleep," Fiona said.

"Thought it had to be about that," Alice admitted with a sigh. "You gave me something to help me sleep, didn't you."

"Aye, though it has to be said you can't be depending on that stuff going forwards," Fiona told her. "How it works is by preventing you going into REM sleep - that's the phase of sleep you dream in - and that is not good for you."

"Worse than not being able to sleep?"

"How does hallucinating at the drop of a hat sound? Besides, it's unnecessary when we can readily prevent you actually having those nightmares. That stuff is the equivalent of a splint, it's 'first aid', so to speak. Now we need something equivalent to putting a cast on a limb to keep the break set while it heals," Fiona explained, rising to her feet. "Any rate it's about dinner time. Let's go."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Aye," Nick said. "We'll just need to be putting the right sort of a ban on your bed again,"

Alice drew in and let out a deep breath.

"Okay," she said. "Just… the hell is that stuff?" and that got a puzzled glance out of Fiona. "I mean, why? How?"

"Just so we're on the same page, we're talking about common-or-garden warding, right?" Fiona asked, and Alice shrugged.

"No idea," she said, "That stuff is all totally new to me, I'd never seen anything like it in my life before last week," and that got her a curious look out of Fiona.

Nick fished a bit of card and a biro out of his pocket and repeated his trick of making the card vanish, and Fiona said, "Huh."

"Huh what?" Nick asked.

"Huh I've never seen someone write Ogham without a key," said Fiona. Nick, as he had the previous week while Alice was in the process of suffering a total system crash, ran his thumb along the rim of it, then scribbled at a specific part with the biro, causing it to reappear just as abruptly as it'd vanished.

"How'd you do that?" Fiona, sounding slightly impressed, asked. "Not the vanishing part, I'm familiar with the principle, the making it reappear,"

"Well the ban I put on it was 'you can't see me'," Nick told her. "So I wrote the T in 'Can't' really hard so I could feel it with my thumb, then to make it reappear I scribbled the T out, making the ban 'You can see me'."

"Huh - very interesting, I'd no realised that'd work," she said.

"Okay, okay, okay, we're getting distracted," said Alice. "How the hell does that happen?"

"Well edges and boundaries and the likes are having an effect on the world," Nick told her with a shrug; Fiona gave him a considering look. "And if you know what you're about - if you know how to write something into the edge - you can use it to change that part of the world. The Ogham script works well enough for that, I don't know how or why, but I do know well enough to be doing this," and he made a whole load more marks along another side of the card then threw it on the table, above which it proceeded to float, and Alice's brain nearly crashed again. "It's nae all that strong, I mean you couldnae lift a car like that, and it works best when it's messing with someone's senses - it's much easier to hide something with it than it is to do much else and the concealment's no that strong, it'll break down if enough folks are looking for it hard enough."

"There's thousand-plus-year-old inscriptions in Inverallen meant, if we've been translating them right, to turn Vikings away from the place," Mackie said.

"Okay so what can it do? Is this seriously actual magic?"

"Well I guess you could say that," Nick said with a frown. "I have to say I haven't a clue how it works, but before you're writing that," and he indicated the levitating card, "Off as magic, before you're saying just because we don't know how it works right now it can't be known, you tell me exactly what's going on inside those cybernetic eyes that you have in your skull."

"And you've been using something like that to, to help me sleep," Alice finally said.

"Aye and that was working too, wasn't it."

"Yeah... fuck, this is doing my head in - hey, Nick?"

"What's up?"

"Do you think I'd be able to do that?" and Alice pointed at the bit of still-floating card.

"I wouldn't see why not," he said. "I've nae ever met anyone who couldn't, though most folks don't have it memorised the way I do - I can write you up a key if you like."

"I'll think about it," Alice said with a sigh.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The remainder of that first week was blessedly quiet with college affairs limited to induction and orientation, and it turned out that Fiona was one of the seven other first-year archaeology students. Aside from Fiona there was one other girl - named Keiko Megami, who for some unknown reason had the full-time company of a squirrel that appeared to be named 'Jock' who appeared to like to ride around on top of her head, and she looked as Japanese as her name sounded but had a nigh-impenetrable Scots accent that Fiona said was something called Doric and specifically the variety that marked her as from Buckie and Alice didn't like to ask how that had happened given everyone else acted as if visibly-Japanese girls running around with the thickest accent in Scotland was entirely normal - and five boys - identical twins from Fort William named Saul and Malcolm Chisholm and both of them jug-eared and ginger, a lanky dark-haired young Inverness native called Andy Macbride, a pudgy blond very-English-accented young man called Kenny Fauntleroy with a manner a bit like a large amiably stupid dog, and an unassuming farmboy from the Black Isle called Mike Mackenzie who everyone found themselves liking within minutes of having met him.

As for the faculty, in addition to Dr Jack Kensington - who continued to leave a good impression outside of how very reserved he was - they found themselves introduced to almost as many tutors as there were students on the course. Teaching data analysis was one Kevin Murchison, a slender man with slicked-back hair and a fussy moustache who insisted that everyone address him as Mister Murchison, stress on the 'mister' part. Archaeological theory was taught by a sharply-dressed fortysomething woman who put one in mind of a Victorian schoolmarm, whose name was Elisabeth Beckett. Data collection was taught by Micheal 'Mikey' Kirkbride, the shortest member of the faculty and the owner of an accent almost as impenetrable as Keiko's and a permanent glum expression. Archaeological method was taught by a moustachioed and rather stern-looking chap called Neville Belrose, whose forbidding exterior with its faintly military air proved to conceal a remarkably genial fellow with a very silly sense of humour the instant he opened his mouth. The world archaeology tutor was a very tall and rather overweight gentleman with very little hair all of which was grey, named Archibald Chelmsleywood, known to all as Archie and possessed of a similar level of boundless energy and enthusiasm to your average five-year-old and generally the exact sort of person one would expect to hear use words such as 'spiffing'. And last but definitely not least, historic landscapes was taught by this completely adorable dumpy smiley very elderly (but not in the slightest bit frail) lady with a blue-rinse and a permanent air of someone's beloved grandmother, usually called Mrs Pritchard though her given name was Josephine.

Alice spent the week in a state as close to hibernation as she could get, and was finally pulled away from that by Val Adamson on the evening of Friday 6th just after sundown, when said luminary stuck her head into Alice and Fiona's room and said, "We're heading down the pub, coming?"

"I guess," Alice said, "I might as well.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The boys had, it transpired, headed on down to the pub on foot without waiting for the girls, and that was what lead to Alice back in the front seat of Annie's wretched mess of a pickup for a lift down to the town and giving faintly dubious looks to the battered old pump-action shotgun that was laying on the dashboard and had not, to her recollection, been there the previous times Annie had given her lifts, but the ride quickly got interrupted - just where the road met the side of the River Ness a body came flying out into the road in front of the pickup causing Annie to slam on the brakes with a loud curse.

"Oh what the hell, hey, that's Mackie!" she declared as the body - which was indeed Mackie Romanov - finished the fall by kickflipping back upright and charging back into the fray that was, it transpired, ongoing just in the mouth of a side-street: a veritable horde of the greaser types were attempting to mob Nick, who was preventing any mobbing by furiously flailing around with what appeared to be a roadsign - quite how he'd come to have a roadsign to wave around was another question. It appeared to still have a lump of concrete attached to one end.

Annie went piling out of the idling pickup, taking the shotgun off the dashboard as she went; she hurled it in the general direction of the fight with a yell of "Oi Mackie, catch!"

Mackie grabbed the thrown shotgun out of the air, whirled round, and let it fly point blank into the nearest greaser's upper chest. The blast dramatically lifted the unfortunate man clean off his feet in a manner Alice had been under the impression guns only did in silly action movies, and hurled him over the road, across the guardrail, and into the River Ness, and the entire dynamic of the fight abruptly changed.

-/-/-/-/-/-

Next - Settling on what to do about it turns into throwing Alice for another loop, and then the gang find out exactly what they're dealing with and are not even momentarily impressed.