The Girl with All the Gifts

72

Helen Justineau comes back to consciousness like someone trudging home after a twenty-mile hike. It’s exhausting, and it’s slow. She keeps seeing familiar landmarks, and thinking that she must be almost there, but then she’ll get lost again and have to keep slogging on through her own shattered thoughts – reliving the events of the night in a hundred random re-sequencings.

Finally she realises where she is. Back inside Rosie, sitting on a steel grating by the midsection door, in a puddle of her own sick.

She struggles to her feet, throwing up a little more in the process. She goes through Rosie’s various spaces, looking for Parks and Caldwell and Melanie. She scores one out of three. The doctor’s body, stiff and cold, lies on the floor of the lab, curled up into a post-mortem question mark. There’s a little dried blood on her face, from a recent injury, but it doesn’t seem likely that that could have killed her. Then again, from what Parks said, she was already dying of blood poisoning from the infected wounds on her hands.

On one of the lab’s work surfaces sits a child’s head from which the top of the skull has been removed. There are chunks of bone and bloody tissue in a bowl beside the head, along with a discarded pair of surgical gloves crusted with dried blood.

No sign of Melanie, or of Parks.

Looking out of the window, Justineau can see that it’s snowing. Grey snow. Tiny flakes of it, more like a sifting of dust really, but coming down endlessly out of the sky.

When she realises what it is she’s seeing, she starts to cry.

Hours pass. The sun climbs in the sky. Justineau imagines that its light is dimmed a little, as though the grey seeds are making a curtain in the upper air.

Melanie comes walking back to Rosie, through the tidal flurries of the end of the world. She waves to Justineau through the window, then points to the door. She’s going to come inside.

The airlock cycles very slowly, while Melanie carefully sprays her already disinfectant-covered body with a layer of liquid fungicide.

I’m coming back. I’ll take care of you.

Justineau understands what that means now. How she’ll live, and what she’ll be. And she laughs through choking tears at the rightness of it. Nothing is forgotten and everything is paid.

Even if she could, she wouldn’t haggle about the price.

The airlock’s inner door opens. Melanie runs to her and embraces her. Gives her love without hesitation or limit, whether it’s earned or not – and at the same time pronounces sentence on her.

“Get dressed,” she says happily. “Come and meet them.”

The children. Sullen and awkward, sitting cross-legged on the ground, cowed into silence by Melanie’s fierce warning glares. Justineau has only the haziest memories of the night before, but she can see the awe in their eyes as Melanie walks among them, shushing sternly.

Justineau fights a queasy wave of claustrophobia. It’s quite hot inside the sealed-environment suit, and she’s already thirsty, even though she just drank about half her own weight in water from Rosie’s filtration tank.

She sits down on the sill of the midsection door. She has a marker pen in her hand. Rosie herself will be her whiteboard.

“Good morning, Miss Justineau,” Melanie says.

A murmur rises and falls as some of the other children – more than half – try to imitate her.

“Good morning, Melanie,” Justineau replies. And then, “Good morning, class.”

She draws on the side of the tank a capital A and a lower-case a. Greek myths and quadratic equations will come later.