“I think so. It’s better not to cut it too close.”
He withdraws again. Khan wraps the towelling robe—Akimwe’s, opulently thick and fleecy, scavenged by Stephen from the doctor’s locker—around herself and climbs awkwardly and gingerly out of the bunk. The baby is asleep again and she considers leaving him behind, well tucked in and bracketed by pillows so he can’t fall out of the bunk. But it’s too soon for them to be away from each other, her and this little separated part of her. She lifts him up, cradling his head, and posts him through the collar of the robe, holding him in there against the well-stoked furnace of her body, out of the world’s cold airs.
There is nobody in sight. Presumably Fournier is asleep in his bunk, or in the engine room, and the soldiers are at their stations. Stephen is already walking astern and she follows him, padding softly on bare feet. The floor vibrates and rocks under her with Rosie’s forward movement. She uses one hand to anchor herself, the other to hug the baby to her. If she falls, she will do her best to roll and land on her back, protecting him with her body.
Someone is up in the turret but Khan only sees boots in the gun-platform stirrups. Whoever is up there doesn’t hear them, or at least doesn’t look down.
The lab is a dark cave. It stinks of preserving chemicals and (a soft undercurrent) of the things they have failed to preserve. Stephen doesn’t turn on the lights at first. He draws the door across very slowly, avoiding any noise that might be heard over the sounds of the engine, the road and the wind.
Khan waits in the dark until the fluorescents shudder on. Then she waits in the light. Stephen prepares a hypo, taking minute care. Measuring, filtering, measuring again. Finally he turns.
“Roll up your sleeve,” he mutters.
But she can’t. That would mean using both hands; would mean letting go of the baby.
“How long do I have?” she asks instead.
Stephen stands rigidly still. The hypo points at the ceiling and both his hands are clasped around its base. He looks like a knight in a pre-Raphaelite painting, pledging his sword to the service of God or some other random cause.
“How long?” she says again.
“There are two more doses after this. About the same size or a little smaller. They might last six or seven hours each. Maybe even eight, but that would be pushing it. I don’t think they’re … I don’t see them lasting that long.”
A day then, at the outside. She looks at her watch, finds that it’s a little after three in the morning. She will still be human when the sun comes up. She should even see it go down again. After that, all bets are off.
“Someone has to look after the baby,” she says. That’s the most urgent thing. The only urgent thing. Slipping away from herself will be the easiest proposition in the world. It’s staying here that’s hard. But how can she die and leave her newborn son unprotected? The world is a threshing machine and she would just be letting him fall into the blades.
“I wanted,” Stephen mutters, “to run some tests. On … John. After I’ve injected you.”
Khan steps back, both hands enfolding the tiny form. He moves, and he makes a sound; a soft, half-vocalised breath. But he doesn’t wake. “No,” she says. “His name isn’t John, and no.”
“Just to see,” Stephen insists.
“To see what?”
He hesitates, chooses his words. But he chooses very badly. “What he is. To make sure.”
“He’s human,” Khan snaps. “As human as I am.”
Stephen doesn’t pick up the warning in her tone. “I think being human means something different now.”
Which is basically what he said already.
I didn’t cure you. And I won’t. Because the main ingredient of the cure would be the children, and I can’t do that to them.
Can you imagine, Rina? Half a million people in Beacon. Half a million doses of vaccine, just to start with. If I bring this home, if I tell them … We’ll scour the whole country, from one end to the other. Probably we’ll have to send some raiding parties across the Channel, too. And then when that isn’t enough—not nearly enough—we’ll start a breeding programme. Capture female hungries alive and impregnate them. Take the babies, and …
Mulch them down. Liquidise and synthesise and mass produce.
Build massive battery farms full of insentient brood mares. Fill them and empty them again and again.
Perhaps if it were just hungries they were talking about it would be bearable. But Khan remembers the potlatch in the forest. The scarred girl accepting the plastic voice box, then taking the keychain from her belt and handing it to Stephen. She looks down at his waist, sees that it’s still there: the little plastic man saluting her with his expression of arch amusement.
Marco? Mario? Something like that. A child’s toy, manufactured by the billions in an age when everything—life, food, comfort, safety—came without effort.
The children are human in every way that counts. Growing up in the wild, with no adult role models except the hungries, figuring it out for themselves. It’s a miracle they have come so far so fast. That they have formed a family instead of beating each other’s skulls in and eating the best parts. Clubs and knives and slings and stones notwithstanding, Lutes and John and Phillips and Penny notwithstanding, they’re nobody’s monsters.
What would be monstrous would be pulping their brains and spines to make medicine. Khan understands why Stephen can’t bring himself to do that, even for her.
“I never thought I’d be sorry you had too much empathy,” she says. She tries to smile, to take the sting out of her words. If the smile looks from the outside as bad as it feels on her face then it must be a pretty awful counterfeit. “Pretend I didn’t say that,” she says, “I get it. You’re not into genocide. I just … I wish …” She runs out of words and finishes the sentence with a shrug.
When her hand falls back onto the counter, Stephen rolls up her sleeve and injects her. For a moment she thinks about stopping him. If her life is over, why shouldn’t it be over now? But this grubby miracle gives her a few more hours with her newborn son. A few hours to get to know him, and—if there’s a way, if there’s any way at all—to save him.
“I want to run some tests,” Stephen says again.
Khan bends her head to touch the baby’s forehead with her lips and nose. He gurgles breathily, stretches out his tiny hands to touch her cheeks. “Forget it,” Khan mutters.
“Rina, we have to know.”
“Why?”
“Because it will make a difference.”
She almost hates him for that circumlocution. “Not to me,” she says, between her teeth.