The Girl with All the Gifts

49

Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You’ve already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.

She’s lying in a cell that’s a bit like her cell back at the base. But she’s sharing it with Miss Justineau. Miss Justineau’s shoulder is touching her back, and she can feel it moving rhythmically with Miss Justineau’s breath. On one level, that fills her with a happiness so complete that it’s stupefying.

But this isn’t anywhere they can stay, and live. It’s just a stop on the journey, which is full of uncertainties. And some of the uncertainties are inside her, not out in the world. She’s a hungry, with a driving need that will always come back no matter what she does. She has to be kept in chains, with a muzzle over her face, so she won’t eat anybody.

And they lived together, for ever after, in great peace and prosperity.

That was how the story she wrote ended, but it’s not how this real-life story will end. Beacon won’t take her. Or else it will take her and break her down in pieces. Miss Justineau’s happy ending isn’t hers.

She’ll have to leave Miss J soon, and go off into the world to seek her fortune. She’ll be like Aeneas, running away from Troy after it fell and sailing the seas until he comes to Latium and founds the new Troy, which ends up being called Rome.

But she seriously doubts now that the princes she once imagined fighting for her exist anywhere in this world, which is so beautiful but so full of old and broken things. And she already misses Miss J, even though they’re still together.

She doesn’t think she’ll ever love anyone else quite this much.