Mike Carey - The Girl With All the Gifts

There’s a rustling of papers. “Sixteen should do fine for the lower end,” Dr Caldwell says. Her heel taps on the floor of the corridor a few times, but she’s not walking because the sound doesn’t get louder or softer. Her pen clicks.

“You want this one?” Sergeant asks. His voice sounds really close.

Melanie looks up. Dr Caldwell is looking in through the grille in her cell door. Her eyes meet Melanie’s, for a long time, and neither of them blinks.

“Our little genius?” Dr Caldwell says. “Wash your mouth out, Sergeant. I’m not going to waste number one on a simple stratum comp. When I come for Melanie, there’ll be angels and trumpets.”

Sergeant mutters something Melanie can’t hear, and Dr Caldwell laughs. “Well, I’m sure you can supply some trumpets at least.” She turns away, and the click-clack-click of her heels recedes along the corridor.

“Two little ducks,” she calls. “Twenty-two.”

Melanie doesn’t know the cell numbers for all the kids, but she remembers most of them from when a teacher has called someone in the class by their number instead of their name. Marcia is number sixteen and Liam is number twenty-two. She wonders what Dr Caldwell wants them for, and what she’ll say to them.

She goes to the grille and watches Sergeant’s people go into cell 16 and cell 22. They wheel Liam and Marcia out, and down the corridor–not towards the classroom, but the other way, towards the big steel door.

Melanie watches them as far as she can, but they go further than that. She thinks they have to have gone through the door, because what else is down at that end of the corridor? They’re seeing with their own eyes what’s outside the door!

Melanie hopes it’s a Miss Justineau day, because Miss Justineau lets the kids talk to each other about stuff that’s not in the lesson, so when Liam and Marcia come back she’ll be able to ask them what Dr Caldwell talked to them about, and what they did, and what’s on the far side of the door.

Of course, she hopes it will be a Miss Justineau day for a lot of other reasons too.

And it turns out it is. The children make up songs for Miss Justineau to play on her flute, with complicated rules for how long the words are and how they rhyme. They have great fun, but the day goes on and Liam and Marcia don’t come back. So Melanie can’t ask, and she goes back to her cell that night with her curiosity, if anything, burning even brighter.

Then it’s the weekend, with no lessons and no talking. All through Saturday Melanie listens, but the steel door doesn’t open and nobody comes or goes.

Liam and Marcia aren’t in the shower on Sunday.

And Monday is Miss Mailer, and Tuesday is Mr Whitaker, and somehow after that Melanie feels afraid to ask because the possibility has opened up in her mind, like a crack in a wall, that Liam and Marcia might not come back at all, the same way Ronnie didn’t come back after she shouted and screamed that time. And maybe asking the question will change what happens. Maybe if they all pretend not to notice, Liam and Marcia will be wheeled in one day and it will be like they never went away. But if anyone asks, “Where did they go to?” then they’ll really be gone and she’ll never see them again.

“Okay,” Miss Justineau says. “Does anyone know what today is?”

It’s Tuesday, obviously, and more important than that, it’s a Miss Justineau day, but everyone tries to guess what else it might be. “Your birthday?” “The king’s birthday?” “The day when something important happened, years ago?” “A day with a palindromic date?” “A day when someone new is coming?”

They’re all excited, because they know it’s got something to do with the big canvas bag that Miss Justineau brought in with her, and they can see that she’s just as excited to show them what’s inside. It’s going to be a good day–one of the best days, probably.

But it’s Siobhan, in the end, who gets it. “It’s the first day of spring!” she shouts from behind Melanie.

“Good for you, Siobhan,” Miss Justineau says. “Absolutely right. It’s the twenty-first of March and, for the part of the world where we live, that’s… what? What’s the big deal about the twenty-first?”

“The first day of spring,” Tom repeats, but Melanie, who’s kicking herself for not seeing this sooner, knows that Miss Justineau is looking for more than that. “It’s the vernal equinox!” she says quickly before anyone else can.

“Exactly,” Miss Justineau agrees. “Give the lady a big hand. It’s the vernal equinox. Now, what does that mean?”

The kids all clamour to answer. Usually nobody bothers to tell them what date it is, and of course they never get to see the sky, but they’re familiar with the theory. Ever since the solstice, way back in December, the nights have been getting shorter and the days have been getting longer (not that the kids ever see night and day, because the rooms in the block don’t have any windows). Today is the day when the two finally balance. The night and the day are both exactly twelve hours long.

“And that makes it kind of a magical day,” Miss Justineau says. “In olden times, it meant the long dark of winter was finally over, and things would start growing again and the world would be renewed. The solstice was the promise–that the days wouldn’t just keep on getting shorter until they disappeared altogether. The equinox was the day when the promise was fulfilled.”

Miss Justineau picks up the big bag and puts it on the table. “And I was thinking about this,” she says slowly, knowing they’re all watching, knowing that they’re aching to see what’s in the bag. “And it occurred to me that nobody ever showed you, really, what spring is all about. So I climbed over the perimeter fence…”

Gasps from the children. Region 6 may be mostly cleared, but outside the fence still belongs to the hungries. As soon as you’re out there, they can see you and smell you–and once they get your scent, they’re never going to stop following you until they’ve eaten you.

Miss Justineau laughs at the horrified expressions on their faces. “Only kidding,” she says. “There’s actually a part of the camp where the soldiers didn’t bother to finish clearing when they set up this base. There’s lots of wild flowers there, and even a few trees. So…”–and she pulls the mouth of the bag wide open–“I went over there, and I just grabbed what I could find. Would have felt like vandalism, before the Breakdown, but the wild flowers are doing okay for themselves these days, so I just thought what the hell.”

She reaches into the bag and takes something out. It’s a sort of stick, long and twisted, with smaller sticks coming off it in all directions. And the smaller sticks have smaller sticks, and so on, so it’s a really crazy, complicated shape. And all over it there are these little green dots–but as Miss Justineau turns the stick in her hand, Melanie can see that they’re not dots. They bulge right out from the stick, as though they’re being forced up from inside it. And some of them are broken; they’ve split in the middle and they’re sort of peeling into ever-so-slender green lips and brackets.

“Anyone know what this is?” Miss Justineau asks.

Nobody speaks. Melanie is thinking about it hard, trying to match it up with something she’s already seen, or maybe been told about in class. She’s just about to get it, because the word means what it says–the way the big stick breaks into smaller sticks, and again and again, so there’s more and more of them, like breaking down a great big number into the long list of its prime factors.

“It’s a branch,” Joanne says.