Now he turns. “Wow,” Khan says, wincing. She waves her hand in front of her face with exaggerated disgust. “Who burned the toast?”
It’s a joke, not a real question, so he is not meant to answer it. But still, the pressure builds. Greaves casts around for something he can use to fend it off. Rina does not look well. Her eyes are shiny with unshed tears and her posture is rigid. These are signs he has learned to interpret, at least up to a point. “Why are you upset?” he asks her. “What’s happened?”
Rina shakes her head. She touches his forearm for a moment—one fingertip, their agreed and minimalistic hug—then takes a step back to compensate for the dangerous intimacy. “I’m fine,” she says. “It’s fine. Dr. Fournier has decided to cut the mission short. We’re going home, a little earlier than expected.”
“Home?” Greaves is confused, and then alarmed. “But we haven’t made all the stops on the schedule. There are still two more samplings before we—”
Rina is nodding. “I know, I know. But if there are junkers up here, it changes everything. It’s just not safe to keep going when we don’t know what’s in front of us. And it’s not as though we’re finding anything different. Anything we can actually use.”
Greaves swallows hard. “What if we were?” he asks. There is a tremor in his voice.
But Rina doesn’t seem to notice it. She shrugs, almost dismissively. “Well, even then, I think I’d vote for going home.”
“But the mission …” Greaves protests again.
Rina laughs, but the laugh has a catch in it. “The mission needs some fresh thinking,” she says. “And I need to get back home and have this baby. I wish it hadn’t happened like this, but I’m still glad to be going back. It just feels terrible to be relieved about something that’s so …” A vague motion of her restless hands picks up where the words leave off.
Greaves interprets: she is happy on her own account, but unhappy because Private Lutes is dead. The disparity between these two emotions makes her uneasy. He is amazed to find his own experience—the mingled guilt and excitement he feels—reflected in hers. It doesn’t happen to him often.
He wants to explore the similarities, but he is afraid to. He is still holding the biopsy needle close against his side. The longer the conversation goes on, the more chance there is that Rina will see it and ask him about it. Or else that she will want to know what he was doing off by himself in Invercrae.
As though his thought has triggered hers, Rina looks over her shoulder into the crew quarters. “They’re not very happy with you,” she tells him. It’s not entirely clear who she means. The crew quarters have emptied out. The soldiers have gone outside, most probably to replace the motion sensors and perimeter traps now that Rosie is stationary again. The colonel has gone up front and Dr. Fournier has contrived to disappear too, leaving only Akimwe, Sealey and Penny. Despite this, Greaves decides that Rina’s words must apply to all the crew, irrespective of uniform.
He wants to say he’s sorry, but that will invite further discussion. He says, instead, “I won’t do it again.” It’s a reckless promise, but the future tense pulls them both away from the dangerous waters of the recent past.
Almost.
“You can’t, Stephen,” Rina tells him gently. “Not any more. You’re not responsible for what happened back there, but if there’s a junker cadre somewhere close by then we’re in real danger. You know it was probably junkers who got Charlie.”
“We don’t know that,” Greaves points out. But he’s being pedantic. The commander of the Charles Darwin talked in her last transmission to Beacon of being pursued by a large group of junkers riding battle-trucks to which hungries had been harnessed like oxen. She said she would avoid engaging as long as she could, but would fight back if attacked. Her last words were, “They’re flanking us.”
“They’re really dangerous,” Rina insists. “People think of them as savages because they choose to live out in the wild rather than in Beacon. But they live by scavenging and they’re really good at it. They have to be, or they wouldn’t have lasted this long. They look at Rosie and they see guns, ammunition, equipment, food. All kinds of things they need. We’re worth a lot of effort, in their eyes.”
Greaves nods cautiously. He is agreeing with the explicit meaning of her words (the junkers are a serious threat) rather than with their secondary implication (there are junkers here). It’s not a lie, because he hasn’t opened his mouth, but once again he is allowing someone to believe a thing that isn’t true. His mind itches and an iron bar of tension presses against his shoulders.
But Rina seems satisfied with his reaction. Possibly she mistakes his tension for a salutary fear. “So when Dr. Fournier decided to turn us around,” she continues, “he was doing the only thing he could do. We’d have to be crazy to carry on all the way to the coast, with the junkers behind us.”
She is looking at Greaves expectantly. He nods again. “Yes,” he says. But this time he is compelled to add, “If there were junkers here, that would be bad.”
“So we’re doing the right thing. Everybody thinks so. Everybody agreed with the decision.”
Greaves glances into the crew quarters again. He finds it very hard to parse emotion, but the cues he has learned to associate with celebration are notably absent. Dr. Akimwe is sitting in silence at the table, his chin resting on his fist, his eyes wide but unfocused. Dr. Penny rubs her pursed lips with the knuckle of her thumb. Dr. Sealey talks to them both in low tones, striking matches from the box above the kitchen unit and letting them burn down in his hand before dropping them, one by one, into the sink.
These are not the behaviours Greaves would expect to see if everyone is really comfortable with Dr. Fournier’s decision. But then, agreeing with something is a cognitive rather than an emotional response. Rina has already told him what the dominant mood is.
They’re not very happy with you.
Greaves can’t make this right. Private Lutes is dead. The mission is over. There is nothing that he could put on the opposite scale that would be big enough to balance these huge, remorseless facts.
Nothing except a new and radically important discovery. A cure.
A cure for the hungry plague.
Rina tries to temper what she has already said, to spare him further pain. “Stephen,” she tells him, “they’re mostly unhappy because the mission is a washout. Today was bad, but even without today … We weren’t getting anywhere. You know that. The whole point of the sampling runs was to find an inhibiting agent. Something that makes Cordyceps grow more slowly, or stops it from growing altogether. But we haven’t managed to do that because there isn’t one. We’re going home empty-handed. That’s what hurts.”