Is it possible that she has been here all along, and that Greaves has simply overlooked her? He thinks it unlikely. She is the only child present, which makes her an anomaly. The other hungries in the room, all wearing the same overalls with the same logo over the breast pocket, were employees of this facility until they became infected. She would have stood out from the start.
The girl is dressed oddly too, given that hungries always wear the increasingly ragged and filthy remnants of what they were wearing at the moment when they were bitten and took the infection. If she is a hungry, then at the moment of infection she must have been in some kind of fancy dress. Twin lines of blue and yellow paint have been daubed roughly and unevenly across her brows, two more down the mid-line of her nose. A man’s shirt in a narrow pinstripe hangs loosely on her skinny frame all the way down to her knees, cinched at her waist with a brown belt made of plaited leather strings. Dozens of what look to be ornamental key rings are attached to the belt, all of them different. Greaves sees a skull, a smiley face, a rabbit’s foot, a tiny shoe. Underneath the shirt, the girl is wearing what looks like the vest from a wetsuit. Her feet are bare.
Is she a hungry? If she is, then her stepping into view and then halting again defies explanation. The hungries toggle between two states: they are either stock still or running headlong after food. They don’t make concerted movements and then stop. Only humans do that.
Conversely, if the girl is human why don’t the hungries smell her humanity and respond to her? Turn on her and eat their fill? She can’t be wearing e-blocker. Beacon is the only place in the whole of mainland Britain where the protective gel is manufactured, and she is not from Beacon.
Uncertainty frightens Greaves. Even a small amount of unresolvable ambiguity makes him unhappy at a very deep level, makes his brain itch and tears start in his eyes.
His hand begins a super-slow glide across his chest, into the pocket of his flak jacket. He keeps a relic there, whose touch comforts him. He finds it now and turns it in his fingers. A small, angular shape. A flat rectangle, but slightly convex on one side. With the tip of his index finger, Greaves traces the vertical bars of a tiny speaker grille.
Activate jump gate, captain, he mouths silently.
Neutron star at your six o’clock.
We come in peace from Planet Earth.
The plastic lozenge is the voice box from a child’s toy. There are twenty-four phrases in its inventory. Five of them never play any more but Greaves knows them all. Every quirk of intonation and every hiss or crackle that the little speaker adds on its own account. In moments of personal crisis, he recites them like a catechism and it calms him.
It calms him now, but still he has to know. He needs to resolve the ambiguity before it topples his reason and makes him panic. Panicking here would be very bad.
He applies the only test he can think of. “I see you,” he says. He keeps his voice to a murmur, doesn’t move his lips even a fraction. In this pregnant silence, the sound should be loud enough to reach her without standing out in the hungries’ perceptions as purposive and worth investigating.
But the girl doesn’t move. Her eyes don’t flick in his direction. Is their grey tone natural or is it the grey that comes with infection? He’s too far away from her to tell for sure.
“My name is Stephen,” he says, trying again. Again she makes no response.
Greaves takes a slow, sidling step towards her, but then immediately stops. He is stymied. If he advances on her and she runs away, he will have killed her by drawing down the hungries’ attentions on her. While if she is a hungry herself, she will almost certainly register his movement any second now and attack him. He is taking a risk even in looking at her for so long.
The only safe thing to do is to withdraw. But if he withdraws he may never have an answer. Not having an answer is unacceptable. Impossible.
He does it without even thinking. His hand, inside his pocket, is already folded around the voice box. He brings it out, very slowly.
His intention is only half-formed but on some level he is already committed. His hands move of their own accord: he parses the decision after it has already happened. He displays the little plastic box, which is bright red and no more than an inch in diameter. He holds it up so the girl can see it, turns it this way and that in his hand.
He is essaying a magic trick that Private Phillips taught him. Normally he is proficient, but normally his movements are much quicker than this. Misdirection is harder at glacial speeds.
In fact, it’s impossible. Greaves performs the pass, and the re-pass, but nobody watching would be in any doubt that the voice box is now in the palm of his left hand.
He tries again, elaborately (and very gradually) waving the fingers of his left hand in sequence to disguise the moment when he slides the box across to the right. The hungries stir a little. In spite of the care Greaves is taking with his gestures, he is close to triggering them into wakefulness. The girl is still not looking in his direction but something about her stance, too, suggests a heightened alertness. She is interested, but whether in the trick or in the imminent possibility of a meal Greaves can’t tell.
And he can’t go any further. He has to abandon the trick before it kills him.
Again, his body is quicker than his mind. His finger and thumb find the string that is the voice box’s only control, and draw it out to a six-inch length.
As the string ravels back, a voice speaks into the utter stillness of the room. The voice of Captain Power, the galactic engineer. It is muted by Greaves’ enclosing hand, and it seems to come from nowhere.
“We need to go to light speed.”
The girl’s face flickers, just for a moment, lit up from the inside by a spark of surprise she can’t suppress in time.
Greaves has his answer. Sheer amazement punches him in the heart and compresses his diaphragm tight enough so that his next breath hurts.
What now? What should he do? He has to get himself and the girl out of this room. He has to talk to her (he hates talking to anyone, but children are not as scary as adults) and find out who she is. How she came to be here. What she is using to keep the hungries from scenting her out.
He has to take her back to the safety of Rosie.
Even as he thinks these thoughts, the still life moves.
A pigeon flies down through the gaping hole in the roof. All the hungries raise their heads in a simultaneous jerking shudder, like cars cold-starting on a frosty winter morning. Their heads turn and their eyes range.
The pigeon settles on a rusted steel railing (stainless steel, it used to be called, but you can’t keep out oxygen for ever) and looks around the room with its black-bead eyes. Its blue-grey head ducks and darts. Looking for food, most likely, and completely unaware that it’s the best thing on the menu.