Fit new end connectors, again using the tapping-bit.
And release the puller. This is far and away the most dangerous part: if he has miscalculated the tension, the tread will snap and he will be standing right in front of it—perfectly positioned to be slapped across the face with a gauntlet of modular steel plates moving at eighty to one hundred metres per second.
He has not misjudged. The puller slides free and the tread holds.
Greaves’ inner clock tells him he has been out here for forty minutes. Lacking any visual confirmation of the extent of the damage, Sixsmith had estimated that repairs would most likely take around three hours. Greaves resets the notional timer with a half-painful prickling of tension. He has told nobody what he intends to do now. He has allowed them to believe that he will finish repairing the tread and then return immediately to the airlock.
But he hasn’t actually told a lie. That Rubicon glistens in the dark in front of his eyes, still and deep and treacherous.
Greaves puts down the puller, the cylinder, the toolbox. He walks away from Rosie into the dark and the silence, following one of the two flattened paths left by the vehicle’s treads. This is wilderness, uneven and unpredictable, but the going is relatively easy as long as he sticks to the path. He makes good progress.
After half an hour, he is back among the trees. He can feel the residual heat from that afternoon’s fire but the smell doesn’t reach him. He wonders whether it would include scorched flesh as well as charred wood and vegetable matter. He wonders whether he has come here on a fool’s errand.
But the bodies are intact. The flamethrower was pointed at the canopy and the east wind spread the blaze away to the west, leaving them untouched. And the living children, as far as he can see, have not yet returned to claim their dead. Greaves sits and waits until the moon comes out from the scudding clouds, letting him see to work.
Seven of the children died in the afternoon’s encounter. He draws off cerebrospinal fluid from each of them, inserting his sampling needle into the subarachnoid space between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae.
He fills every vial in his kit. He will need as much CSF as he can get. He thinks that if he is going to die tonight it will be now, as he robs the dead. If any of the children are watching, they will be full of outrage and vengeful fury. But he can’t let that stop him: there is too much at stake.
Rina. Rina is at stake.
Also there is the other thing, the smaller thing, but not so small now that he is looking down at the small, curled bodies. He checks to see that the scarred girl is not here. He wants her to be still alive.
He looks at each face in turn as he works.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
His chest, where she kicked him back at the water-testing plant, aches a little. It’s as though they are still touching.
As soon as the last vial is full, he turns and walks away. He imagines the children watching him go: in the branches, sitting in long lines with the smallest way up high so the bigger ones further down can keep them safe if anything fierce climbs up from the forest floor. It’s nice, for a second, to imagine that phantom company. But the fact that he is still alive proves that he’s all by himself out here after all.
PART THREE
BIRTH
44
With the treads repaired and Greaves back on board (he did the job inside the three hours that Sixsmith predicted, with five minutes to spare) they continue south. Acting on the colonel’s orders, Sixsmith is aiming to pick up the main road again at Pitlochry. Once she is on tarmac, she will floor the accelerator. In the meantime, she coaxes Rosie with fretful patience over the rugged ground, giving the new tracks plenty of time to bed in. Outdistancing their pursuers will have to go on the to-do list for tomorrow. That’s the bad news.
The worse news is that the feral kids are still out there. Nobody sees them through the day, and everyone on board is starting to get their hopes up, but as soon as it starts to get dark Foss dons the night-vision goggles and dials the sensitivity up all the way. Abracadabra. The dusk is full of sprinting fairy lights. The children are behind Rosie and off to both sides of her, maintaining a wide, loose formation despite the rough terrain. Effortlessly keeping up.
The mood on board is volatile. That’s a polite word for it anyway, Foss thinks. The Robot’s little trick with the track puller has bought him a little bit of leeway from the haters. The prevailing sentiment now is that when he locked them out he was just panicking because Dr. Khan had been injured. Everyone except for McQueen seems prepared to accept that in mitigation—and even McQueen is on record as saying that the kid scores higher on a ball-count than might have been expected. He hasn’t forgotten the spiked radio, though, and he has told Foss privately that he is going to be the Robot’s shadow for the rest of the journey. Eyes on the prize all the way, until they get back to Beacon, drive in through the front gates and actually park. “There’s something going on in there,” he says, when Foss tries to joke him out of this promise. “You’ve only got to look at the kid’s face.”
Which is true enough. But then there’s something going on behind all of their faces.
In Akimwe’s case, it’s grief, simple and bottomless. Foss had always assumed that he and Phillips were just shagging out of convenience and proximity, which goes to show how little she knows. Akimwe is down fathoms deep and not coming up again soon.
Fournier is sunk about the same distance, but his medium is self-pity and—in Foss’s opinion—terror. He stiffens at loud noises, his voice breaks unexpectedly when he’s talking and his eyes seem perpetually wet with unshed tears. It’s just as well he spends most of his time in the engine room because he’s a one-man funeral.
McQueen is a ball of compacted rage.
Khan is sleepwalking and looking for a way to wake up.
The colonel is … what? Waiting, maybe. Like he sees where all the rest of them are heading and he means to step along and join them in his own good time.
Only Sixsmith seems to have her mind on her job, and given what her job is that’s just as well. The tracks won’t slip again while she is at that wheel.