“Maybe it is, at that,” Sealey murmurs. An acceptable risk, he means. If Greaves can bottle the same lightning twice—grab another genius insight out of the ether the way he allegedly did with the e-blocker gel—then humankind might not die collectively in a ditch after all. As a fully paid-up member of said club, Sealey would see that as a win.
But the odds are pretty long. Greaves might be the genius Rina says he is, or then again it might be that he just got lucky that one time. And Rina isn’t even thinking about that right now. She knew Greaves when he was just a mostly broken little kid. She was there when his parents died, and through the queasy aftermath when he was an elective mute. When everyone thought he was mentally handicapped rather than a weird little alien wunderkind with no human emotions.
Is it possible to slide through those judgements without them sticking to you? Sealey seriously wonders. The general feeling now is that Greaves is on the autistic spectrum, but how much of his weirdness is down to his brain’s basic wiring and how much of it is a trauma artefact?
It’s an academic question, but it’s got real-world consequences. Rina more or less twisted the arm of everyone back in Beacon to get Greaves onto the mission roster. She knew how much he depended on her, feared how quickly he might fall apart without her.
The supervisory group took a contrary point of view. They saw Greaves as a child first and foremost, and as a gifted hobbyist rather than a serious practitioner. Then they looked at his psych assessments and saw something worse: a maladapted obsessive, damaged goods, and (e-blocker notwithstanding) a potential liability out in the field. Rina won her point in the end by making it a two-for-one deal: you want me, you take him, too.
To be fair, she didn’t do that just to protect him. She genuinely thinks that Greaves can pull off a miracle here—a cure, a vaccine, a weapon, a better mousetrap. But all of that is predicated on the idea of his being different. As though his intellect cuts across the world at an angle nobody else is even aware of.
Rina wouldn’t admit to any of this—to thinking of Greaves as a Hail Mary play—but Sealey knows full well she’s watching the boy. Waiting for the clouds to part and a dove to descend from heaven.
It could be a long wait, in Sealey’s humble opinion. He’s no psychologist, but he doesn’t see Greaves as being on the spectrum. He sees him as a luckless kid who started out normal—pretty bright, no doubt about it, but normal—only to get bent all out of shape by horrendous tragedy. Then found himself trapped in Rina’s hopes for him. At the orphanage in Beacon, where the teachers had given up on him because they were just volunteers making it up as they went along, she took Greaves in hand. Fed him books the way you’d feed a baby bird worms and broken up bits of bread. Turned him into what he is now.
Which is what? An eccentric genius, or just an ill-equipped explorer swaying on the rickety rope bridge between sanity and madness? The way Greaves acts, the things he does … it is extraordinary. But that’s just another way of saying he’s got his own coping mechanisms. It’s not proof of anything. And yes, there’s that one astonishing breakthrough, but Sealey doesn’t know anyone who accepts Khan’s version of that story. A child genius finds an enzyme that leaches the sharp-smelling acids out of apocrine sweat and breaks them down into water and carbon dioxide, cooks it up in a saucepan and brings it to his best friend, biologist and epidemiological expert Dr. Samrina Khan, to help him test it out. Occam’s razor suggests a different sequence of events.
No matter. Rina has her perspective and she won’t be shifted from it. Possibly she’s the only person on Rosie’s roster who actually worries about Greaves. Sealey has tried many times to have this conversation with her, but it never takes.
Gamely, but without much hope, he tries again. “He’s a member of the crew, Rina. Your co-worker, not your son. You’ve got to let him make his own choices.”
She looks at him as though he’s just stuck out his hand to catch a ball that’s already on the ground. “Thank you, John,” she says. “That’s an admirable summary of the blindingly obvious.”
But she doesn’t say it with biting sarcasm. She says it with a catch in her voice. Her lips are twisting as she tries to hold in a flood of tears. So instead of bristling or snapping back he wraps his arms around her. She gives way to her misery in absolute silence, her head buried in the angle of his neck and his shoulder. She’s pulling him forward through the gap in the slats so he feels like he’s going to lose his purchase and fall headlong on top of her, then probably roll out sideways and give the whole game away. His T-shirt (which doubles as pyjamas) is slowly but surely getting saturated with her tears.
Rina slips straight from crying into exhausted sleep. Sealey realises then how hard this day has been on her. Her concern for Stephen is wholly real, of course, but it comes on top of a whole set of other concerns. She might catch a reprimand for her unauthorised pregnancy that will stop her career in its tracks. Or the baby might do that all by itself, reprimand or not. She might have to give birth out here in the middle of nowhere. She might lose the baby.
He wishes he was better at this stuff. He’s in his thirties but he can still count the relationships he’s been in on one hand without running out of fingers. And none of them lasted. Maybe this one wouldn’t have either if it hadn’t been for a lack of condoms and self-control.
It was leaving Beacon that caused that one fateful lapse. After being cooped up behind the fences and minefields for so long, getting out on the road—even inside an armour-plated sardine tin—felt like freedom. He and Rina found the only way to celebrate that didn’t need to be applied for, signed off on, rubber-stamped, rationed or reported.
Now they’re stuck with the consequences. And with each other.
Sealey backs away from that thought in alarm. Rina is amazing and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone. He is in awe of her courage—the way she decides on a course of action and sticks to it, no matter what the world throws in her way. He admires her honesty, which turns white lies into red roadkill. Most of all, he loves her optimism, which is something he himself is really bad at. Rina never considers the possibility that the world might already have ended. She talks about the future without irony, and even plans for it. As part of that, she has decided to keep their baby. She told him this in a way that left no room for argument.
Sealey thinks about what Beacon has become and is inclined, sometimes, to question the wisdom of that decision. But he has kept his doubts locked down. The last thing he wants to do is to leave her in any uncertainty, ever, that he’s on her side. Has got her back. Will be there for her, when the time comes. Will stand up and be …