He hunts through a cupboard for a bag of nuts. There is nothing fresh in Tehani, and the choices are dried or packaged. The trees are devoid of leaves and trunks that should be brown are a sickly beige or incongruous red. There is virtually no grass and the wind blows dust about, giving all the buildings a blasted look. The town hall has no walls and is a roof held up by intricately worked pillars. The chief sits in his place, and the other corners contain the priest, the doctor and a space for Brisbane – traditionally the scribe, but a teacher will do when there’s no writer.

This meeting must be special, because the rest of the townspeople are not present. Just three old people, made older by the toxin in their system.

“Your honour,” Brisbane says. He bows slightly.

“Jeremiah. You’ve been here how long now?”

“Five years.”

“And you are one of us.”

Brisbane went through the rites two years back.

The ceremony had been difficult for him, but it was the natural end of his time as a tourist or a visitor. He is Tehani. As the line in the pledge goes, I am a defender of Tehani children and oldfolk. I will take up arms against external aggressors and submit myself to the rule of the council. I am blood of Tehani blood.

“We need you,” says the chief. Her speech is dysarthric and it takes all of Brisbane’s self-control to avoid completing words for her.

“Anything,” says Brisbane.

“We are dying. In a year, two years, no Tehani will be left, not even you. You are the least exposed and will most likely be the last to die.”

Likely to be true. Brisbane waits.

“We have decided. We do not want our name, our way of life, to die in vain when they sanitise the news and this land after us.”

“We need an instrument of vengeance and a word of caution to other communities like ours,” says the doctor.

Brisbane’s stomach growls, and he hopes the chief doesn’t hear.

“I’m not sure what you’re asking,” he says. “You want mercenaries?”

“No, Jeremiah Brisbane. We want you.”

The Tehani community, all 7922 of them left, invest all their assets in Brisbane. This is a lot of money. The camp doctor gives Brisbane a number of addresses. “Any one of them will do what needs to be done.”

“And I’ll survive?” says Brisbane. “I can’t do vengeance if I die on the operating table.”

“You’ll live long enough.”

Of course, there is a tunnel. They’re miners. This is their most basic skill, the quintessence of mining. It takes two days to walk, crawl and swim away from Tehani underneath the corporate security guards. At this stage of Tehani decay, only Brisbane is strong enough to make it. He encounters the rotting bodies of those who tried before him.