The Girl with All the Gifts

4

Why? Why did she do that?

Helen Justineau has no good answer, so she just keeps on asking herself the question. Stands forlorn in her room in the luxuriously appointed civilian block, a foot on every side bigger than a regular soldier’s room, and with an en suite chemical toilet. Leaning against the mirror on the wall, avoiding her own sick, accusing gaze.

She scrubbed her hands until they were raw, but she can still feel that cold flesh. So cold, as though blood never ran in it. As though she was touching something that had just been dredged up from the bottom of the sea.

Why did she do it? What happened in that laying on of hands?

Nice cop is just a role she plays – observing and measuring the children’s emotional responses to her so she can write mealy-mouthed reports for Caroline Caldwell about their capacity for normal affect.

Normal affect. That’s what Justineau is feeling now, presumably.

It’s like she dug a pit trap, nice and deep, squared off the edges, wiped her hands. Then walked right into it.

Except that it was test subject number one, really, who dug the pit. Melanie. It was her desperate, obvious, hero-worshipping crush that tripped Justineau up, or at least threw her far enough off balance that tripping became inevitable. Those big, trusting eyes, in that bone-white face. Death and the maiden, all wrapped up in one tiny package.

She didn’t turn the compassion off in time. She didn’t remind herself, the way she does at the start of every day, that when the programme wraps up, Beacon will airlift her out of here the same way they airlifted her in. Quick and easy, taking all her things with her, leaving no footprint. This isn’t life. It’s something that’s playing out in its own self-contained subroutine. She can walk out as clean as when she came in, if she just doesn’t let anything touch her.

That horse, however, may already have bolted.