By this time, the hungries have found the bird and locked their gaze onto it. They surge forward as one. Greaves has to do the same. If you don’t keep to the moves in this dance, you will pretty soon wish you had.
They’re very fast, the walking dead, the ontologically departed. But the pigeon is fast, too. As the room erupts all around it, it takes wing again, heading back the way it came.
Fastest of all is the girl. She runs right under the bird, gathers herself and jumps. She hits Greaves full in the chest and scales him in an instant. One foot goes into the crook of his arm, the other onto his shoulder.
He clamps down a yell. It’s not that she has hurt him. She is so light it seems she must be hollow-boned, like the bird. But he has a strong aversion to being touched, especially with no warning. He feels, for a second, as though some bubble that enclosed him has burst. As though he is naked to hostile space.
The girl pushes off, vaulting and turning in the air.
Catches the bird in flight with one outstretched hand.
She lands, somehow, at the top of a wall with nothing but open sky above her. Her feet are braced against smooth concrete. Her free hand snags a steel stanchion that was left exposed when the roof fell in.
She pivots on that hand and she’s over.
She’s gone.
The wild, vain clapping of the pigeon’s wings reaches Greaves a second later, is stilled again a second after that. For a moment or two, his mind performs a weird synthesis. It’s as though he just saw her fly, and the wings he heard were hers.
The hungries’ reaction is more dramatic than Greaves’. It’s also quicker, since it’s not mediated by any conscious thought. They throw themselves against the base of the wall the girl leapt over. The first ones to reach it claw at the damp cement as though they could rip their way through, until the ones coming up behind press them against it, crushing and breaking them.
Greaves takes the opportunity, with all eyes turned away from him, to extract himself from the room a little more quickly than he would otherwise have dared. A flight of steel steps takes him up onto what used to be a car park. Now it’s a jungle of head-high weeds with a single path trampled through it.
All this while he is thinking: What is she? How did she move among the hungries without eliciting any response from them? And how did she move so fast, faster even than those flesh-and-blood machines? In the filing cabinet of his mind he puts her—unwillingly, but with quickening excitement—into a category of one. She is an anomaly. Anomalies explode old theories and engender new ones. They are dangerous and glorious.
Greaves can’t help himself. Despite the risk, he runs to the end of the path, onto a wide apron of asphalt that seems to have been more resistant to the encroaching wilderness. An old security post stands here, with all its windows broken. A traffic barrier that wasn’t up to the job it was made for lies in pieces on the ground.
There is no sign of the girl. But if she ran in this direction there is only one place she could have been heading for. At the bottom of the valley, a mile and a half away and two hundred feet below him, is the town of Invercrae. It’s the next place on Dr. Fournier’s itinerary, and the science team will be heading there tomorrow.
Greaves can’t wait that long. Not with a question as big as this pressing on his mind.
He will go tonight.
8
Greaves returns to the Rosalind Franklin by the exact same path he took when he left, apart from a careful detour around a pack of wild dogs feeding on the carcase of a squirrel. The expedition has seen packs like this everywhere they have visited, and though they almost never attack humans Greaves doesn’t like them or trust them at all.
Once he gets close to Rosie, he is careful to follow his outward route step for step. He carries a map of the traps and movement sensors in his head and has chosen his angle of approach accordingly.
He comes in from the front. He sees Colonel Carlisle sitting in the cockpit, reading a book (Greaves has seen the book before: it is R. T. Mulholland’s biography of Napoleon Bonaparte in a thoroughly used Wordsworth Classics edition). Carlisle glances up as Greaves passes and they exchange a nod of greeting. Though he is punctilious about regulations on his own account, the colonel has no desire to be anyone else’s conscience. It might be different if he were in overall command, Greaves surmises. But this expedition has two commanders. They embody the current uneasy status quo in Beacon, where the civilian government pretends to be in absolute control but depends for its continuing existence on the actions and interventions of the Military Muster. Carlisle is the military commander; Fournier the civilian one—deliberate obfuscation, twisting the loose ends of their mission statement to make a M?bius strip.
Greaves walks on around the side of the massive vehicle to the central airlock. There is no way of getting in here without being seen: the airlock is almost always guarded, and even when it isn’t the act of cycling it from outside will activate telltales and alarms all over the lab and crew spaces.
The airlock is open. Dr. Khan stands just inside, her restless gaze scanning the trees to left and right. When she sees Greaves, she steps aside and lets him enter. There is a rigidity in her posture that he sees at once: she is tense, afraid. She puts out her hand to touch the back of his wrist, but only with her index finger. She is allowed to touch him; he has made a special and complex accommodation in his mind for her and her alone, but she knows him and the tip of one finger is as far as she ever takes that liberty. Small though the point of contact is, a tremor in her arm communicates itself to him. Dr. Khan is perturbed.
“I’m fine, Rina,” Greaves assures her. He is so contrite about having worried her that he almost reaches up and touches her fingertip with his own. But his hand hovers, unable to complete the gesture.
“I can see that,” she says. “Thank God. But where were you, Stephen? Were you making observations again? Close up?”
She has him. Knowing that a yes will make her unhappy Greaves tries to say no. He starts to stammer, locks his jaws on the word he is physically unable to speak.