A small detail catches her attention. She pulls an older boy away from one of the three kills to allow a skeletally thin girl half his age a space at the dinner table. The boy glares at her, utters a long and inflected growl, but doesn’t press the point. He is an outlandish figure, even in this company. His blond hair has been hacked away from the sides of his head leaving a soft, unruly mohawk stripe down the centre. Splashes of black paint around his eyes make their whites stand out with the vividness of shattered porcelain, and he has drawn vertical white lines like the teeth of a skull around his real mouth, turning it into a perpetual grimace even when it’s closed.
Greaves is enthralled by all this, so excited it’s all he can do to make himself breathe. The children shift in his mind, semiotically adrift. They are hungries, but not hungries. They have the feeding urge that defines the condition, the preternatural strength and speed, but they are social beings with some degree of intelligence. Cordyceps wipes the mind like a slate and then writes on it the single word: FEED. As a hungry, your mental landscape is blindingly simple. In the presence of food, you eat. When it’s absent, you shut down and wait.
So the children, as he thought when he first saw the girl, as he has been hoping ever since, are something new. Something unprecedented. They have found a middle ground that was never there before. He needs (oh, he needs so very badly) to find out what that middle ground is.
The meal is short. The metabolism of a hungry is highly efficient, needing only a small and occasional intake of live protein to survive. One by one, the children eat their fill and then relinquish their place. The scarred girl kneels and eats a second time, from a different carcase, perhaps to reinforce her status. Around her the children gesture and murmur. Greaves has no doubt whatsoever that this is language: after-dinner conversation is flowing, and the mood is mellow.
He is so rapt in his observations he has forgotten that he wasn’t invited to this feast. But he is reminded of the fact, forcibly, when he sees that one of the children—the blond boy who was displaced when the girl thought he had had his fair share—is staring at him. Has been staring for some time, but his hooded eyes have become lost in the broad black smear of his war paint so that Greaves isn’t conscious of the gaze until the boy turns his head to face him directly.
Greaves feels an urge to freeze on the spot, but he has already been frozen all this time. He has honed his stillness, with long practice, to perfection. The suit holds in his heat and his smell. He can’t think of any signal he has let slip that might have given him away.
But then again, he realises as the boy takes a step towards him, that logic only applies to hungries. It wouldn’t hold with a human child of any age. In the heat-control suit, he is an outlandish sight, and part of the basic equipment of human beings is curiosity—the desire to test out the immediate environment and come to an understanding of it.
He has assumed that the children will react like hungries rather than like people. He has underestimated them, and he is about to die for it.
The boy advances, pauses, advances again. He is about ten feet away now. He tilts his head on one side as he studies Greaves in his strange get-up, his face hidden by a featureless mask, his kit bag dangling from his shoulder like an ornament on a Christmas tree.
(A stray memory intrudes: brightly wrapped parcels under the tree at home in Witley, before home became a complex abstraction best represented by the face of Dr. Khan. It was the best Christmas ever, because one of those parcels held Captain Power. Greaves suppresses the chain of ideas. He wants to live, and that will take full concentration.)
The boy takes another step. Other children are following him, but cautiously and at a distance. They have no idea what Greaves might be. He doesn’t smell like food, clearly. He might be taken for a hungry but then he didn’t come running when the dogs passed by. The odd paraphernalia hung about him invite exploration.
He wonders how far he would get if he ran. Not far at all, he thinks. Even without the encumbrance of the suit he would be slower than the children. If running served any purpose at all, it would probably be to end any ambiguity about what he is. The dogs ran, and the dogs were food. It’s a short chain of reasoning with a warm meal at the end of it.
The boy raises his hand and reaches out.
The scarred girl is suddenly in his way, crossing in front of him to examine Greaves from right up close. Then from closer still. She takes two steps and thrusts her face up against his, standing on tiptoe.
Through the micro-pore mesh she stares into Greaves’ eyes.
Greaves experiences a curious dislocation. If anyone from Rosie’s crew, anyone from Beacon were doing this he would flinch away violently from the imposed intimacy. He would hate it. A child’s gaze would be less unsettling than an adult’s, but only fractionally.
The only thing that makes this bearable is that the girl is still uncategorised in his mind. There is no defined place in his highly organised mental landscape where he can set her down and feel that she fits. She might be nobody, devoid of meaning or value. But it doesn’t feel like that. If anything, it feels like the opposite. She is supercharged with potential meanings, none of which can be subtracted until he knows her better.
The skull-faced boy is carrying a carpenter’s claw hammer with a black rubber grip and a head that still shines in places through a thick crusting of old blood. He tilts it to the vertical, pressing the spread fingers of his left hand lightly against the upper end of the shaft as though he is bringing some finely tuned piece of equipment into perfect alignment.
Greaves improvises. He raises his hands (bringing a grunt of astonishment from all the children) and performs the pass and re-pass from his magic trick. The girl’s eyes widen, then narrow.
There is nothing in his hands. Nothing up his sleeve. Nothing between him and death except the hope that she might remember.
“We need to go to light speed,” he says, imitating the captain’s inflection exactly. But his voice is muffled by the material of the suit and he is not, at the end of the day, the hero of the spaceways, the galactic engineer.
The boy raises the hammer. He grimaces, not with effort but with the anticipation of effort. He steps up level with the girl.
She thrusts him aside, without ceremony. Over his squeal of reproach and outrage, she speaks a single syllable. There are no consonants in the sound she makes, but there is plenty of authority. She is still staring at Greaves, barely acknowledging the skull-faced boy. The boy accepts the command or the rebuke, whatever it was. He steps back, ducking his head in abasement. There is a grimace on his face, as though his submission is something sour that he can taste.
The girl speaks again. She turns from Greaves, but gives him one final, sidelong glance. Her hands move, imitating the pass and re-pass. Then she steps away from him, very deliberately, and signals to the other children to follow her.
Nothing to see here. Let’s go.
They move away quickly, walking between or over the still-twitching bodies of the hungries they felled in the hunt.