The street is like a battlefield. And Greaves is a casualty, though he hasn’t been touched. The girl’s gaze bored a hole in him, through armour much older and much, much thicker than the heat dispersal suit. Her mercy twisted the knife. He stands in some relation to her, and he doesn’t know what it is.
Also he is going to die, even without the children’s intervention. His body is burning up in the suit. He won’t get back to Rosie or even out of the town before he collapses. He has a few minutes at best.
The solution comes to him—as solutions often do—in the form of a memory. Bath night. His mother testing the water in his yellow plastic baby bath with her elbow, to make sure he won’t be scalded. She wears her own face this time, not Dr. Khan’s. She murmurs something to him that he can no longer reconstruct. His verbal memory is only accurate for memories after he reached the age of seven months, when he first began to extract actual meanings from the soundscape around him.
But the words don’t matter here. The water does.
Greaves staggers across the street and into one of the side alleys that lead down to the river’s edge.
A minute later, he is on his hands and knees in the shallows of the swift-flowing Moriston, his upper body bowed so that the flood breaks over his shoulders. The ice-cold water cools him and then chills him. Saves him from his own bad design.
But the girl saved him first.
15
By the time Greaves gets back to Rosie, it is almost morning. Private Sixsmith, standing guard inside the airlock, is astonished and more than a little alarmed to see him looming out of the pre-dawn shadows to stand on the threshold like bad news.
But at least she recognises him. Greaves has removed the suit for his final approach, presenting himself in his regulation olive-drab uniform. He’s hoping that will be enough to shield him from comment, but he is saturated with sweat, shivering, exhausted. Sixsmith gives him a hard, quizzical stare as she opens the airlock doors and lets him in.
“What the fuck have you been up to?” she demands.
Checking the motion sensors, Greaves thinks. It might be a serviceable lie if he could say it aloud, but he can’t because it isn’t true. He only shrugs.
Sixsmith shakes her head, as though his idiocy and waywardness make her sad, but she doesn’t press the point. “Well, nobody else is up,” she mutters. “You’ve bloody well got away with it again, you mad bastard.” Greaves nods and says thank you. He wonders if Sixsmith knows that he waited in the dark for an hour to emerge as soon as her turn on watch began, preferring her over the much more uncertain quantity of Private Phillips.
Maybe she’s figured that out, because she doesn’t take the thanks kindly. “Just get inside,” she says. “And take a shower. You stink.”
And he takes her advice, recognising that she is right. Greaves is fastidious about his own body odour, thinking of smell as a kind of long-distance touch, unsolicited but unavoidable. He rubs the carbolic acid soap over his body until he is covered from neck to toe in stinging, prickling lather. When he washes it off, his skin is furious red, but that’s a guarantee that he is clean.
By the time he is finished in the shower, the rest of the science team are awake and queuing for their own turn, along with Privates Lutes and Phillips and Lance-Bombardier Foss. The rainfall has been high since they came north into Scotland so showers aren’t rationed quite as strictly as they used to be. The crew are making hay while the sun fails to shine.
Greaves goes about the rest of his waking-up ritual, in spite of the fact that he hasn’t been asleep. It’s not just to forestall questions. He needs to do it because each day has a shape and the waking-up ritual is one of its load-bearing components.
He brushes his teeth and shaves at the fold-out sink in the crew quarters, then goes back to his bunk to dress behind closed curtains. Though they are all routinely naked in each other’s presence, dressing is for Greaves a very private thing. The most private part of it is when he puts on the watch that Rina gave him when he won his place on Rosie’s roster. It belonged to Rina’s younger brother, Simon, who was in America when the Breakdown happened and never made it home. Greaves wears the watch every day, the strap’s loose grip augmented with an elastic band because Simon had a considerably thicker wrist than his own.
The captain’s voice box is a part of the ritual, too. Greaves pulls the string and listens to what Captain Power has to say to him. Nobody knows that he does this, not even Rina. He would feel foolish explaining it, because it is far from being a rational act. The captain’s words have no bearing on the events that will take place as the day goes on. Greaves doesn’t take them as advice, or prophecy. It’s just part of dressing. When he was younger, he would sometimes ask the captain what to do in a difficult situation, playing both sides of the conversation, giving the advice as the captain and listening to it as himself. He hasn’t done that since he was thirteen, hasn’t needed to. But hearing the captain’s voice is like putting on a little of the captain’s strength, the captain’s courage.
Today the scratchy, rumbling voice declares, “We’ve broken through into another universe!”
You’re right, Captain. We have.
Greaves goes to Dr. Fournier and tells him that he wants to be included in today’s work party. The science team is going into Invercrae and he wants to be with them. He hopes that Dr. Fournier will not ask him why. There are so many reasons, and none of them have anything to do with the day’s scheduled work.
Dr. Fournier is reluctant. “I thought you were happier pursuing your own research, Stephen,” he says. “With the rest of the team in the field, you’ll have access to the lab for once. Besides, today’s cull will be in a built-up area, which makes it a great deal more dangerous.”
“And I’ll just be one more thing to worry about,” Greaves supplies. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry, Dr. Fournier. I am very happy doing my own thing, and I know the rest of the team will be more comfortable if I’m not there.” That’s even true of Rina, he thinks: when he’s there she worries about him. He steels himself for the next sentence. He’s going to tell the truth, of course, but because of what he is omitting he will be skirting the black hole of a lie. “But today I need to take some observations of my own.”
“Observations of what?” Dr. Fournier demands.
Greaves swallows. Braces himself. Gets it out with some difficulty. “Of outlying activity. I’m looking for … hungries who don’t entirely fit the behaviour profiles we’ve seen so far. Anomalous patterns.”
The civilian commander shakes his head. “Stephen, there are no outliers. No anomalies. If there were we would have found them by now.”