‘Jesus!’ Brodie said. ‘Two billion people?’
Sita shrugged. ‘That’s at least how many people live in coastal settlements around the world, and in those equatorial and sub-Saharan African countries made uninhabitable by rising temperatures.’
He shook his head. It made no sense to him. People were dying from heat at the equator and here they were flying into an ice storm.
Sita looked at him quizzically. ‘Where have you been, Mr Brodie?’
‘I don’t listen to the news. It’s too depressing.’
‘Burying your head in the sand, then.’ She sounded unimpressed.
‘Ostrich-like.’ He echoed the High Commissioner for Refugees.
Sita spluttered her derision. ‘Well, of course, that’s just not true.’
‘What isn’t?’
‘Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand. At least, not to hide from reality. They bury their eggs in the sand and stoop to turn them over frequently. They don’t hide from danger, they run from it. At up to seventy kilometres an hour. And if forced to fight, they will. An ostrich can kick with a force of a hundred and forty kilos per square centimetre, enough to kill a lion with a single blow.’
Brodie looked at her in astonishment. ‘Wow. How do you know all that?’
She shrugged lightly. ‘It’s sort of a hobby. I’ve been teaching my kids all about the animals and birds and fish that’ll soon be extinct. It’s important they know about the world we’ve destroyed, don’t you think?’
‘And human beings? Where do they figure on your extinction list?’
‘Oh, pretty high up, the way things are going.’
The radio was still playing in the background. Brodie said, ‘I don’t want to listen to any more of this.’ He turned towards the screen. ‘Do you mind?’
She shrugged.
‘Eve, stop,’ he said, and the news broadcast came to an abrupt end. ‘Okay, so I’m not an ostrich. I’ve just got enough problems of my own to deal with.’ And he realised, with something of a shock, that for several hours now he hadn’t thought once about the death sentence his doctor had handed down to him just yesterday.
‘Don’t we all?’ She didn’t sound sympathetic.
He looked at her. ‘So are you one of the two billion, then?’
‘I would have been. Except I’ve been here for nearly twenty years. One of the allocation of so-called skilled immigrants allowed in by the Scottish Government. People were welcoming at first. There was already a well-integrated Asian population here anyway. Both my children were born here and consider themselves Scottish. But since the country’s been overrun by immigrants, legal and otherwise, hardly anyone sees us as Scottish any more. They just see brown faces and tell us to go home.’
‘Why don’t you?’ He’d asked it before he realised how it sounded.
She scoffed. ‘You’re no different, are you, Mr Brodie? This is my home. And for your information, where I grew up is gone. I guess that’s something else you didn’t hear on the news you don’t listen to. Kolkata, where I was born, where I trained as a doctor, is somewhere under the Bay of Bengal these days. Lift your head, look a little to the north, and you’ll see that Bangladesh is gone, too. A whole country. Just not there any more. A bit like Florida. And large tracts of the eastern seaboard of the US.’ Frustration escaped her lips in a hiss. ‘Just don’t get me started on how the world failed to meet its net-zero targets.’ She spoke quietly, but there was a dangerous anger seething behind her words.
Brodie said, ‘I thought India was one of the worst offenders.’
She flashed him a look that quickly turned to embarrassment. ‘It was. Along with China and the US.’
They were following the line of the road now as it wound its way through Glencoe. Jagged peaks on either side pushed themselves up into a broken sky, patches of watery late afternoon sunlight slanting through to land on snow in dazzling patches that came and went like random searchlights in a war zone. The snow had stopped falling, but the wind had risen, and they felt the eVTOL stabilising itself against the buffeting. Here and there, clutches of pine trees pushed themselves up above the snow on some of the lower slopes. The wind blew fresh snowfall off sheer rock ridges in fine clouds that caught sporadic glimpses of sunlight from the sunset beyond the mountains to the west. Tiny, unexpected rainbows appeared and vanished in the blink of an eye.
By the time they reached Glencoe village at the western end of the valley, the sky had darkened, the sun sliding down beyond the horizon, its light snuffed out by the sudden fall of night. The first hail carried on the edge of the wind crackled against the glass.
‘What the hell’s that?’ Sita said suddenly, peering forward into the gloom.
Ahead of them, on the far side of Loch Leven, a phalanx of lights reflecting in the black of the loch blazed around what looked almost like a small city.
‘Ballachulish A,’ Brodie said. ‘A fucking eyesore. Excuse my French.’
‘The nuclear power station?’
He nodded. ‘This was a beautiful, unspoiled part of the world before they built that monstrosity in the thirties. They generate 3500 gigawatts a year there. Enough to supply electricity to every household in Scotland, they said. I used to come climbing here a lot, and hillwalking. It ruined almost every view, from every hilltop and every mountain.’
‘But zero emissions,’ she said dryly.
‘Aye, zero fucking emissions.’
She leaned forward to get a better look as Eve banked to the north-east. ‘They built it right on the water’s edge. Isn’t it in danger of flooding?’
He shook his head. ‘They demolished the Ballachulish Bridge, just to the west there.’ He pointed towards a thin line of red lights spanning and reflecting in the loch. ‘Replaced it with a barrier to contain rising sea levels. Generates tidal electricity, too. And they ran a road across the top of it, so you don’t have to go round the loch to get to the other side.’
‘Ballachulish A,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Does that mean they’re planning a Ballachulish B?’
He scoffed. ‘Probably.’
She said, ‘I can see the point of building a place like this somewhere out of the way, but how do they get the spent plutonium out? I can’t imagine that it would be very safe by road. Or sea.’
‘They don’t,’ Brodie said. ‘They drilled into the bedrock next to the plant. Half a kilometre down, something like that. Then excavated a network of tunnels. That’s where they put the waste. Buried for eternity, they say.’
‘Eternity, eh? That’s a long time. I wonder how they measure it against something that’s got a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years.’
Brodie smiled sadly in the dark. ‘Well, we’ll not be around to find out.’
And she said quietly, ‘I wonder if anyone will.’
Eve shook suddenly, as if something had slammed into her.
Involuntarily Sita reached forward to grab the dash. ‘What the hell was that?’
Brodie’s heart was pounding. ‘The wind, I guess.’
Rain turned increasingly to sleet and hail and slashed through the lights of their eVTOL as it followed the course of this Scottish fjord, mountains rising steeply in the dark on either side of a loch that was in reality a glaciated valley flooded by seawater. And all that Brodie could hear in his head were the words of his taxi driver earlier in the day, when he told him there was an incoming ice storm. Get caught in that, and yon big bird’ll drop oot the sky before you can say ‘ice on the rotors’.