The Girl With All the Gifts(18)

“Don’t be.” She starts to walk around him, remembers that she can’t keep going in this direction and turns, so she’s broadside on to him for a moment.

“I didn’t take any shot at all,” the sergeant says quickly. “I don’t report to Dr Caldwell, if that’s what you think.”

He sounds like he means it. He sounds like he really wants her to believe him.

“Well you should,” Justineau says. “It’s an excellent way of pissing me off. Don’t mess up your perfect score, Sergeant.”

Something like distress shows in Parks’ face now. “Look,” he says, “I’m trying to help you. Seriously.”

“To help me?”

“Exactly. I’ve clocked up a lot of years in the field. And I’ve survived more grab-bagger sweeps than almost anyone. I mean hard-core shit. Inner city.”

“So?”

Parks shrugs massively, is silent for a second as though he’s hit the limits of his vocabulary–which doesn’t strike her as too unlikely. “So I know what I’m talking about,” he says at last. “I know the hungries. You don’t live that long outside the fence unless you work out the moves. What you can get away with, and what’s going to get you killed.”

Justineau lets her utter indifference show in her face. She knows somehow that it will get deeper into him than any show of anger could. His agitation shows her the way to a high ground of cold disdain. “I’m not outside the fence.”

“But you’re handling them. You’re dealing with them every day. And you’re not keeping your guard up. Shit, you had your hands on that thing. You touched it.” He falters on the words.

“Yes,” Justineau agrees. “I did. Shocking, isn’t it?”

“It’s stupid.” Parks shakes his head as if to dislodge a fly that’s landed on him. “Miss Justineau… Helen… the regs are there for a reason. If you take them seriously, they’ll save you. From your own instincts, as much as anything.”

She doesn’t bother to answer. She just stares him down.

“Okay,” Parks says. “Then I’ll have to take this into my own hands.”

“You’ll have to what?”

“It’s my responsibility.”

“Into your own hands?”

“This base’s security is my—”

“You want to lay hands on me, Sergeant?”

“I won’t touch a hair on your head,” he says, exasperated. “I can keep order in my own damn house.” And she reads it, suddenly, in his face. She can see that he’s talking around something. Something that’s fresh in his mind.

“What have you done?” she demands.

“Nothing.”

“What have you done?”

“Nothing that concerns you.”

He’s still talking when she walks away, but it’s not hard to shut the words out. They’re just words.

By the time she gets to the classroom block, she’s running.





10


When there’s nothing to do, and you can’t even move, time goes a lot more slowly.

Melanie’s legs and her left arm, still strapped into the chair, have cramped agonisingly, but that happened a long time ago and now the pain of the cramp has faded and it’s like her body has stopped bothering to tell her how it feels, so she doesn’t even have the pain to distract her.

She sits and thinks about Sergeant’s anger and what it means. It could mean a lot of things, but the starting point is the same in every case. It was only when she talked about Miss Justineau that Sergeant got angry–when she said that Miss Justineau loved her.

Melanie understands jealousy. She’s jealous, a little bit, every time Miss Justineau talks to another boy or girl in class. She wants Miss Justineau’s time to belong to her, and the reminders that it doesn’t sting a little, make her heart do a gentle drop and thud in her chest.

But the idea of Sergeant being jealous is dizzying. If Sergeant can be jealous, there are limits to his power–and she herself stands at one of those limits, looking back at him.

That thought sustains her, for a while. But nobody comes, and the hours drag on–and though she’s good at waiting, at doing nothing, the time is hanging heavy on her. She tries to tell herself stories, but they fall apart in her mind. She sets herself simultaneous equation puzzles and solves them, but it’s too easy when you’ve made the problems up yourself. You’re halfway to the answer before you’ve started to think about it properly. She’s tired now, but her enforced position in the chair doesn’t allow her to rest.

Then, after a long, long time, she hears the key turning in the lock, the bolts drawn back. Heavy steel door clanging. Footsteps running on concrete, raising a whisper farm of echoes. Is it Sergeant? Has he come back to dismantle her?

Someone unlocks Melanie’s door and pushes it open.

Miss Justineau stands in the doorway. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’m here, Melanie. I’m here for you.”

Miss Justineau steps forward. She wrestles with the chair, like Hercules wrestling with a lion or a snake. The arm strap is partway undone, and it opens up really easily. Then Miss J goes down on her knees and she’s working on the leg straps. Right. Then left. She mutters and curses as she works. “He’s frigging insane! Why? Why would anyone do this?” Melanie feels the constriction lessen, and sensation returns to her legs in a tingling rush.