The Girl With All the Gifts(110)

“That… that was you?” Caldwell asks her. “On the radio?”

Melanie indicates with a nod the walkie-talkie sitting beside her on the work surface. “I kept trying all the different channels. It took a long time before you answered.”

“And then… then you…?”

“I lay down underneath the door. You stepped out over me. As soon as you went past me, I came inside.”

Caldwell takes off the helmet and sets it down, very gently, on a work surface. A few feet away is the squat bulk of the microtome lathe, an exquisitely engineered guillotine. If she could trick Melanie into walking close to it, and topple her on to its cutting bed, this could be over in an instant.

Melanie frowns and shakes her head, seeming to guess her intentions. “I don’t want to bite you, Dr Caldwell, but I’ve got this.” She holds up a scalpel, one of the ones that Caldwell used in the dissection of the hungry specimen and hasn’t yet found time to disinfect. “And you know how fast I can move.”

Caldwell considers. “You’re a good girl, Melanie,” she essays. “I don’t think you’d really hurt me.”

“You tied me to a table so you could cut me up,” Melanie reminds her. “And you cut up Marcia and Liam. You probably cut up lots of children. The only reason I ever had for not hurting you was that Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks probably wouldn’t have liked it. But they’re not here. And I don’t think they’d mind so much now, even if they were.”

Caldwell is inclined to believe this. “What do you want from me?” she asks. It’s clear from Melanie’s agitated manner that she wants something, has something on her mind.

“The truth,” Melanie says.

“About what?”

“About everything. About me, and the other children. And why we’re different.”

“Can I take off this suit?” Caldwell temporises.

Melanie gestures for her to go ahead.

“I have to do it in the airlock,” Caldwell says.

“Then keep it on,” Melanie says.

Caldwell gives up on the idea of retrieving the phosgene. She sits down on one of the lab chairs. As soon as she does so, she realises how exhausted she is. Only willpower and bloody-mindedness have kept her going this long. She’s close to crashing now–too weak to resist this hectoring monster child. She has to gather her strength and choose her time.

She’s expecting Melanie to interrogate her, but Melanie continues to read the notes: the observations Caldwell has jotted down about her two sets of brain tissue samples, and about the sporangium. She seems particularly fascinated by the sporangium notes, lingering over Caldwell’s labelled diagrams.

“What’s an environmental trigger?” she demands.

“It defines any factor external to the sporing body that causes or predisposes towards the onset of sporing,” Caldwell says coldly. It’s the tone she uses to put Sergeant Parks in his place, but Melanie takes it very much in her stride.

“Anything outside?” she paraphrases. “Anything outside the pod that makes the seeds come out of the pod?”

“That’s right,” Caldwell says grudgingly.

“Like the Amazon rainforest.”

“I’m sorry?”

“There are trees in the Amazon rainforest that only shed their seeds after a bushfire. The redwood and the jack pine do that too.”

“Do they?” Caldwell’s tone is brittle. It’s actually a perfectly good example.

“Yes.” Melanie sets the notes down. She’s looked at each page exactly once, stopped when she got to the front of the stack again. “Miss Mailer told me, back at the base.”

She holds Caldwell’s gaze with her unblinking, bright blue eyes.

“Why am I different?” she asks.

“Narrow down the question,” Caldwell mutters.

“Most of the hungries are more like animals than people. They can’t think or talk. I can. Why are there two kinds of hungries?”

“Brain structures,” Caldwell says.

But she’s at war with herself. Part of her wants to guard the secret, to give away no more than she’s asked, to force Melanie to dive deep for every pearl. The other part is desperate to share. Caldwell longs for an auditorium of geniuses, sages both living and dead. She gets a child who’s neither, or both. But the world is winding down, and you take what you’re given.

“The hungries,” she says, “including you, are infected with a fungus named Ophiocordyceps.” She assumes no prior knowledge, because there’s no telling what Melanie has understood, or failed to understand, from those notes. So she begins by describing the family of hot-wiring parasites–organisms that fool the host’s nervous system with forged neurotransmitters, hijacking the host’s living brain and making it do what the parasite needs it to do.

Melanie’s questions are infrequent, but right on topic. She’s a smart kid. Of course she is.

“But why am I different?” she presses again. “What was special about the children you brought to the base?”

“I’m coming to that,” Caldwell says testily. “You’ve never studied biology or organic chemistry. It’s hard to put this stuff in words you can understand.”