The Girl with All the Gifts

30

Melanie doesn’t dream. At least, she never has before tonight. There were fantasies she indulged, like the fantasy of saving Miss Justineau from monsters, but sleep for her has always been an un-time spent in un-space. She closes her eyes, opens them again and the day recycles.

Tonight, in the garage, it’s different. Maybe it’s because she’s outside the fence, not in her cell. Or maybe it’s because the things that have happened to her today are just too vivid and too strange for her mind to let go of them.

Whatever it is, her sleep is lurid and terrifying. Hungries, soldiers and men with knives lurch at her. She bites, and is bitten – kills, and is killed. Until Miss Justineau gathers her in her arms and holds her close.

As her teeth meet in Miss Justineau’s throat, she snaps instantly awake, her mind wrenching itself away from that unthinkable prospect. But she can’t stop thinking about it. The nightmare lays its stifling folds across her thoughts, and she knows there was something inside the dream images, some hidden payload that she’ll sooner or later have to face.

There’s a sour metal taste in her mouth. It’s like the taste of blood and flesh left behind a vengeful ghost. The mulchy, textureless food that Miss Justineau gave her shifts queasily in her stomach when she moves.

The garage is dark, except for a little filtered light (moonlight, it must be) from around the edges of the door. Silent, except for the level breathing of the four grown-ups.

The red-haired soldier who’s one of Sergeant’s people murmurs in his sleep – shapeless words that sound like protest or pleading.

After a time of staring into the dark, Melanie’s eyes adjust. She can see the outline of Miss Justineau’s body, not close but closer to her than the others. She wants to crawl over to her and curl up against her, her shoulders pressed into the precisely right-shaped arc of Miss Justineau’s lower back.

But with the atmosphere of that dream on her, she can’t. She doesn’t dare. And the movement would make the bucket and the canteens clang together anyway, which would wake everyone up.

She thinks about Beacon, and about what she said to Miss Justineau that time in the classroom, after the “Charge of the Light Brigade” lesson. It stands out very clear in her mind, and it’s easy to remember the exact words, because this was the conversation that ended with Miss Justineau stroking her hair.

Will we go home to Beacon? Melanie had asked. When we’re grown up? And Miss Justineau looked so sad, so stricken, that Melanie had immediately started to blurt out apologies and assurances, trying to stave off the effects of whatever terrible thing she’d inadvertently said.

Which she understands now. From this angle, it’s obvious. What she’d said, about going home to Beacon, was impossible, like hot snow or dark sunshine. Beacon was never home to her, and never could be.

That was what made Miss Justineau sad. That there never could be a going-home for her that meant being with other boys and girls and grown-ups and doing the things she used to hear about in stories. Still less a going-home that had Miss Justineau in it. She was meant to end up in jars in Dr Caldwell’s lab.

This time she’s living in now was never foreseen or intended. Not by anyone. That’s why they keep arguing about what they’re going to do.

Nobody knows. Nobody knows any better than she does where they’re really going.