My dear, despite my loneliness I would remain here until death if I could be sure that you would return, but after all these years I have no hope of it. I cannot communicate by computer since our webgrid connection shut down but what little I have been able to glean from occasional shortwave radio broadcasts over these long lonely years tells me that our world has truly passed away. Much of Chinon is untouched, which is another irony perhaps, but Tipoda and the poles settlement, vast Mericanda and most of Uropa are radioactive wastelands. Even nature, in the end, struck out at humanity in the form of earthquakes and tremors that destroyed many areas left untouched by missiles. One broadcaster said that Newrome had been drowned after a huge quake caused a subterranean river to flood the caverns. Perhaps it was the same quake that destroyed the laboratories here. How it grieved me to learn that all of our people in the Reichler Clinic Reception Centre perished as well as those at Obernewtyn. I wonder what grotesque twist of fate decreed that I, who have no paranormal abilities, should survive when so many rare and gifted people have died.

I blame myself for the deaths here. If only I had insisted that everyone remain in the house. But when reports of the missile launches began to come through, everyone voted to go down into the lower levels of the laboratories. I reminded them that you had always said we would be safe within the house, but I had no argument when they answered that you might be wrong about that, since you had not foreseen that you would be absent from Obernewtyn when the end came.

So I let them go as I used Ines to try to reach you one last time.

It is so green and peaceful here. Sometimes it feels as if what happened is all a dream – all the years of loneliness. I wake and hear the birds singing and I find myself listening for the human voices that will tell me everyone here is alive.

I told you that I would wait forever when last we spoke. Did you foresee that I would not keep my promise even as you must have known that you would be unable to keep yours? It took me a long time to accept that even if you lived through the missile strikes and reached a shelter, the level of contamination there would require you to remain indoors for the rest of your life. My loneliness has been so great that my sanity has begun to crumble. Indeed, perhaps the dream of a shining city in a white desert is no more than the product of a disintegrating mind. Even so, I have decided it is better to pursue a hopeless hope than to give in to black despair. You told Cassandra that once, do you remember?