Also on those perceptual outskirts, consulted from time to time without undue urgency, is an estimate of passing time. He is counting off the seconds in a kind of mental sub-routine, a discipline he taught himself when he was ten.
He knows he will have to leave soon, that he is close to his limit. He has set an alarm. When his internal counter reaches 108,000, corresponding to an elapsed duration of approximately three hours, it will signal to him that it is time to leave. There are two reasons why he has to do this. The first is temperature. As the air around Greaves cools, the hungries will become aware of him as an anomalous hot spot in the early evening chill. They will be able to track him by his body heat.
The other reason is that the longer he stays here, the more likely it is that his absence will be noticed. That would be unpleasant. Greaves does not enjoy talking to other people, except for Dr. Khan and (sometimes) Colonel Carlisle. He likes it even less when the other people are angry or upset.
He wishes he could just be allowed to assume the risk without argument, without having to justify himself. He has come here to observe the hungries in their quiet, dormant state, and there is so much to observe. Their stillness, their silence is full of meaning.
Greaves visited the water-testing station for the first time the day before and was pleased with what he found there. The station offered a large concentration of hungries in a single enclosed space: very dangerous, but (from the point of view of information-gathering) fabulously rich pickings. He was able to stand and watch for an hour, stealing the time from a soil-acidity sweep that he had officially logged in the day-book. As far as the other crew members knew, Greaves was safely within Rosie’s defensive perimeter.
He is taking a bigger risk today. He has gone AWOL from a major sampling expedition, slipping away from Rosie as soon as the science team and its military escort were out of sight. Dr. Fournier was still on board and might have spotted him, but Greaves judged that contingency unlikely. For the most part, Dr. Fournier (like the colonel) prefers to keep to his own company and has found ways to do so even within the mobile lab’s very tight confines.
It took Greaves twenty minutes to reach the station. He could have got there more quickly by running, but running would have entailed two unwelcome risks. One: any hungry that saw him would almost certainly transition into the active pursuit state. Two: the e-blocker gel that disguises his scent—the gel that he invented and gave to the Beacon authorities to copy and mass produce—would be weakened and eventually deactivated by excessive sweating.
So he walked to the station, eased his way into the huge, central pump room at a speed slower than a snail ambling across a cabbage leaf, and this is where he is standing now. The pump room is a natural amphitheatre, shelving steeply down to a central reservoir where in former times water drawn off from the loch would have been held while it was tested for alkalinity and contaminants. The roof has fallen in at some point, so the room is open to the sky.
It’s also crowded: full of still and silent people with their heads bowed or tilted to the side and their arms dangling. They look as though their internal clockwork has run down for ever, but that’s a dangerous illusion. Greaves knows the hungries are tightly wound, hair-triggered. He was careful not to touch them as he slid like treacle into his place. He is careful, now, not to meet their cloudy gaze.
The hungries seem as motionless as statues. But if you spend long enough in their company you come to realise that their stillness is not absolute. Their responses to sound and movement and smells are well known, but Greaves has discovered other stimuli to which they will sometimes react. A strong wind makes them turn, angling their faces to take advantage of the flood of olfactory information. Excessive heat causes them to open their mouths, possibly as a means of temperature regulation. And—a recent discovery which Greaves has spent the afternoon confirming—they have heliotropism. They follow the movement of the sun across the sky, the same way plants do.
This is what he is pondering as he watches them now. Is the pathogen that has saturated the nervous system of these unfortunates trying to photosynthesise? No, that’s very close to impossible. Cordyceps is not a plant but a fungus. Its cells, in all the specimens he has examined, contain no chloroplasts. Moreover, it feeds through its host and doesn’t need to exert itself on its own account.
So it must be the warmth that the hungries are responding to, rather than the light. Greaves thinks what he is seeing is a side effect of the mechanism that lets them hunt down living prey at night by body heat alone. They are tracking the sun as though it might be something good to eat.
It’s a fascinating prospect, but there is no time to interrogate it further. His mental alarm goes off. He has reached his pre-arranged limit and he has to leave.
Has to begin to leave. The manoeuvre will take time. He needs to make his movements so gradual that the hungries won’t notice him. He turns around, very slowly, to face the door he entered by. He takes a step towards it, and then another. Tiny steps, barely lifting his feet off the ground. He is an untethered balloon, drifting in a non-existent breeze.
But just before he reaches the door, just before he drifts through it onto the stairwell beyond, he sees something that stops him in his tracks.
Movement.
It’s off to his left, at the periphery of his vision and down below his natural eye level. He almost turns. He almost looks.
Nothing should be moving here—or at least, not quickly or suddenly enough to draw his gaze. Greaves barely checks himself in time, keeps his eyes determinedly on the ground. A shudder goes through the hungries anyway as the movement impinges on their sensoria, too.
His heart pounding, Greaves begins a slow turn. It takes most of a minute.
He sees immediately what has changed in the room. There is one more person present. A child. Female, and aged (he estimates) somewhere between nine and ten years.
She is not moving now, or looking at him. She is as still as any of the adult hungries, and she wears the same vacant expression. Pale grey eyes cast down, mouth half-open. Her red hair hangs lank over her face, half-hiding a puckered scar that runs from her hairline across one eye and cheek, terminating in the fold of her neck.
Her immobility is perfectly convincing, but she wasn’t there before and therefore it must have been her that moved. It seems most likely that she has emerged from the pump room’s central well, which is now dry, but she could simply have stepped out from behind one of the other hungries. She is small enough to have been completely hidden by an adult body.