The Legacy

his arm to Anna.
    ‘Together,’ she said.
    ‘’Gether,’ Ben said, looking up at her uncertainly. ‘Home now? Go home?’
    ‘This is your home, young man,’ Pip said, his eyes twinkling again. ‘The whole world is.’
    .

Epilogue
    14 MARCH, AF 15
    Mol y lay back in her chair, let ing the sun warm her face for just a few minutes more.
    It was early afternoon and she knew she shouldn’t be wasting good daylight, but it was too delicious, too blissful just lying there, suspended in time.
    ‘Mol y?’ She glanced up to see Albert, her younger brother, looking at her curiously.
    ‘Yeah, I’m coming. I was just . . .’ She trailed off as she saw him grin, his eyes twinkling, and realised that he wasn’t annoyed with her, wasn’t going to tel .
    ‘I know exactly what you were doing,’ he said cheerful y. ‘Just don’t let Dad catch you.’
    She nodded, and pul ed herself off the chair wearily.
    ‘He’s fixed the tractor,’ Albert continued.
    Mol y’s eyes lit up. The tractor had been out of action for days now, resulting in aching limbs and backs for al of them. ‘He did? How?’
    Albert shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. ‘Dunno. Ben was helping him.
    Engine was dirty or something.’
    Mol y rol ed her eyes. ‘Dirty?’ It never ceased to amaze her that her brother showed so lit le interest in anything of a technical nature. ‘Do you know how an engine actual y works, Alby?’
    ‘No, and I don’t want to,’ he said, winking. Mol y laughed and fol owed him down the dirt track towards the fields where they spent their afternoons every day.
    Mornings were for learning – her mother was always clear about that. Words and sums and science and questions were what mat ered in Mum’s eyes. ‘You have to question everything,’ she’d say. ‘You have to always ask why, and if you don’t understand the answer, you ask again.’
    So Mol y did. She asked questions al the time, demanding to know how things worked and why, discovering what happened when you added one thing to another, finding out how to make things and how to break them. She also asked about the past. She’d been too lit le to remember the Old World much – al she remembered was heated conversations and moving around a lot and staying inside because ‘the hoodlums’ were smashing up the high street and pil aging. She remembered her father disappearing for what felt like years to join the New Underground Army to patrol the streets and divide things up fairly, to Manage the Handover. She stil wasn’t sure what the Handover was, but she knew that what was being handed over was valuable and that the people who had it didn’t want to give it away.
    Her parents didn’t talk about the Handover much – they said it was too recent, that the New Civilisation was stil too fragile. But they answered Mol y’s questions about the Old World happily enough. What was it like to have shops instead of having to produce your own food? Was there real y a time when there were too many people?
    What was wrong with Mrs Baker up the road, and where had Mr Baker gone?
    The shops were OK, her mother told her, but you weren’t always free to buy what you wanted and sometimes things were so expensive you couldn’t get them even if you were al owed. That led to another question about money, which sounded very exotic and exciting to Mol y, but her mother assured her it never helped anyone much.
    Yes, the world was indeed too ful once, her mother told her, and no children were al owed at al because no one died. Mol y used to love and hate that story in equal measure. It had been her favourite bedtime tale when she’d been lit le – a world with no children, with Catchers and Surplus Hal s and no brothers to play with, no space to play in. They had al the space in the world now, her mother would tel her. They were very lucky, even if it was cold sometimes and there weren’t many other children to play with. They had each other and that was more important than anything. They had the future too.
    As for Mrs Baker, her mother told her that she was one of the Old Legals. There weren’t many of them left because most had died a long time ago from the Virus, but some had survived – no one real y knew why. Now she was very, very old and she couldn’t do much more than sit her time out, which was why they had to look after her and Mol y was sent round every day to read to her, to make things more bearable until the end came. Mr Baker had already