The girl takes it and turns it in her hands. She makes a chirping, clicking sound, baring her teeth. This seems to signify approval. At any rate she tucks it into her belt by the ring, which she loops around three times. She studies the keychains that hang beside it with great thought, and finally selects one.
She unhooks the keychain and hands it to Stephen. Its shape isn’t clear to Khan until Stephen takes it and holds it up. It’s a plastic figurine from some long-forgotten toy franchise: a small, moustachioed man in red and blue overalls and a red hat that bears a capital letter M. His limpid blue eyes roll satirically, and his right hand is raised in a salute.
Stephen bobs his head in acknowledgement as he takes the little gewgaw from the girl. He snaps the business end open, hooks it on one of the loops of his own belt and shuts it again. He pats it approvingly, makes a convincing show of liking how it sits there.
Throughout all of this, Khan and the colonel and Dr. Penny have stood frozen. Khan can see, and she assumes the others can, that this is a ritual of first contact. Their lives—at the very least—depend on its going well.
Apparently the gift-exchange phase is complete. The scarred girl repeats the gesture with which she started all this, putting her hand first on Stephen’s chest and then on her own. You, she says. And me.
When she can see that they’ve all registered this gesture—her own people as well as the four adults—she brings the hand down so her whole forearm is extended horizontally. She holds it in that position for a few seconds. Then she extends both arms towards them, as though she wants to be picked up and cuddled or as though she’s asking for applause.
Her eyes are on Stephen again now, hard and questioning. Her fingertips flicker and her lips move, but like him she makes no sound.
Khan feels a throb of wonder so intense it’s almost a physical pain. These signs are stripped down to the barest basics, not because the girl’s understanding is basic, but because she is making no assumptions about theirs. She is keeping it simple for their benefit.
Khan sees the colonel’s stance, his wary readiness, and Penny’s bloodless face a second or two away from a scream or a sob.
Hungries that can talk! Hungries that can reason!
Reasoning is very much Stephen’s thing, but talking he does poorly. His hands are twitching. He is building up to an attempt, but Khan can’t trust their chances of survival to him getting the signals right when he is so bad at talking to his own kind.
She brings up her own arms, left and then right, in a decisive motion.
Now hear this.
The girl’s gaze flicks between her and Stephen. She doesn’t seem to appreciate the interruption. “Over here,” Khan says. Her voice breaks a little, but the words do the job. She’s got the girl’s attention.
She points to herself, to Stephen, to the colonel. Draws three vertical lines in the air. Then she lets her arm fall, as the girl did, until it lies horizontal at the level of her midriff. The horizontal line means the dead boy, she’s pretty much certain. And the girl’s pantomime plea meant give him back.
The children have come all this way for a corpse. For a burial. Running hour after hour, keeping formation, leaving their home and everything they knew behind them. Following an idea. Even more than their ability to communicate, this fact proves their humanity beyond a doubt.
“You took samples?” Khan asks Stephen, keeping her voice low and flat.
“Yes.”
“From the brain?”
“Brain. Spinal column. Heart. Kidney. Spleen. Muscle. Dermis. Epidermis.”
“Dr. Khan,” Carlisle says in a conversational murmur, “would you please explain to me what you’re doing.”
“I’m negotiating,” Khan answers in the same tone. “For our lives.”
With Stephen’s samples safe and stowed, they can afford to give up the body. It might not save them, of course: when she sees how it has been dishonoured, the scarred girl may feel like there’s still an issue to settle. And part of me wouldn’t blame her, Khan thinks. She is seeing herself and all of them, suddenly, startlingly, from the children’s perspective. It’s not a pretty sight.
She points to Rosie. Puts her hands in front of her face to mime the airlock doors opening, closing, opening.
The girl bares her teeth, head tilted to one side. Impossible to know whether she gets it, but she is listening. Watching. Waiting for Khan to lay out the deal.
Khan walks the fingers of her right hand across the open palm of her left. Points to Stephen and the colonel and Penny and finally herself.
Him. Him. Her. Me. All of us. We walk.
And then …
The clinching argument. She makes the dead-boy sign again, arm held out flat from the elbow, and slides it very slowly across the space between them until it’s almost touching the girl’s shoulder.
We bring him out to you.
The girl looks her in the eye. Hard. The way anyone would when there’s a deal on the table and they want to get a sense of how much weight your word will bear. Khan is wondering that too, but she means what she says. She’ll do it, if the scarred girl lets them go. She’ll keep the bargain, mend what was broken back in Invercrae, and take her chances on the consequences.
And it’s looking good, Khan thinks. Nobody has been eaten, or stabbed, or shot. We can do this.
But they can’t.
The tableau breaks up. Without warning and contrary to sense, one of the children is slammed backwards off his feet. It’s the boy standing immediately to the scarred girl’s right: he is there and then he’s gone, so suddenly it’s almost as though he’s being reeled in on a line. Khan registers the sound of the gunshot, as soft as one hand clapping, a full heartbeat later.
After that, things do not go well.
35
McQueen has deployed every ounce of tracking craft he possesses and got nowhere. Then, as they retrace their steps down the near side of the ridge, chance hands him what he has been searching for.
In the clearing below them, barely fifty yards from Rosie, Colonel Carlisle (along with Dr. Khan, Dr. Penny and the Robot, but you can’t expect any better of them) has allowed himself to be ambushed. They all see it. But unlike McQueen they are stopped dead by it. Paralysed. Maybe they see children, but McQueen is expecting things that look like children and he is not taken in.
He ships his rifle with the casual virtuosity of a drum majorette doing a baton twirl. It ends up in optimal balance, the sight to his eye and the rest against his shoulder. With his left arm he points to where the bullet will fall. With his right hand he pulls the trigger.
The first target goes down clean. Externally clean, at least. On the inside, that fragmenting hollow-point bullet has turned it into the kind of stuff that clogs up the drains in an abattoir. And an abattoir is what this is about to become.