infection might be obvious, but how it had metamorphosed remained a mystery. A couple of years as a research assistant had taught me to perfect the art of looking busy while remaining essentially idle and I didn't think the other scientists in the room had any idea that the tissue cultures I was taking, and the slides I was carefully preparing were entirely meaningless. The only thing I managed to establish for sure was that the virus was transmitted though blood and not an air-borne contagion. That at least was something I could tell Queen M.
Kelis and Soren were back, shadowing me from the moment I woke up. Their decision, I guessed. I wanted to believe that Kelis hadn't told Queen M what happened the night before. My eyes twitched briefly, involuntarily, to the autopsy table in the centre of the room. To the convenient little grooves to carry away the blood.
I felt the tension in the lab before I saw her. I felt it most of all from Kelis, and when I looked up to see Queen M standing in the doorway of the room, I didn't know if it was because she'd betrayed me or because she hadn't.
Queen M smiled and I still didn't know, her expression as un-giving as an investment banker. 'Come and walk with me,' she said, nodding at Kelis and Soren in a way that let them know that they weren't included in the invitation.
A little trickle of ice-water seeped down my spine.
'We haven't really spoken properly since you arrived,' she said when we were out of the lab, heading up the stairs which would take us to the sun deck and the empty pool.
'I'm sure you've been very busy.' I injected a note of irony into the words. She knew I didn't like her and she'd get suspicious if I started pretending that I did.
'I used to be an academic, did you know that? Reader in evolutionary psychology at the LSE.'
My head snapped round to look at her: cornrows, beaded braids, wide, thoughtful eyes. It wasn't that difficult to believe. 'You've come up in the world.'
'Down is what you mean,' she said, then held up her hand, stopping my protest almost as soon as it had formed on my lips. 'No, it's OK. I know exactly what you think of me. You hold me responsible for those deaths you witnessed, you're imagining many more and you're completely right. I am responsible, and there were more. You think I'm a monster.'
I looked away from her again because I didn't want her to see exactly how true that was.
'But you're in a unique position,' she said softly. 'You're the only person in the world who didn't see what happened after the Cull. You can still go on thinking all those cuddly things about human nature that four thousand years of civilisation allowed us to believe. Have you heard of Hobbes' Leviathan?'
I shook my head.
'But you've heard about life being nasty, brutish and short, right? That was Hobbes, telling it like it is – when there isn't a state around, an all-powerful Leviathan, to force people to listen only to their better angels.'
'So – what? You knew how bad people could be and you decided to be worse? Becoming a monster was inevitable so you decided to embrace it rather than fight it?'
She smiled at me, the small patronising grin of a professor who's about to score points from a first-year undergraduate. 'Hobbes saw, and the Cull showed, what human beings become in the absence of a state monopoly on violence. You think I'm bad, that this society is bad, but that's only because you haven't seen the rest of the world. I have to be a dictator, or someone has to, because the only other option is chaos.'
'Those people in Paris seemed to be doing OK, till we came along.' My words were marinated in two weeks of bitterness.
'No, they really weren't. Three quarters of them were already dead. Half the women had been raped – and not always by rival gangs. That baby, the one you left behind? Her mother didn't know who the father was – it could have been any one of the men who caught her out after dark one night and spent the next seventeen hours doing exactly what they wanted with her. You think this is bad, Jasmine, you think I'm a monster, but that's only because you haven't seen the alternatives.'
It was the first real passion I'd heard in her voice. Her eyes were finally alight with something other than a cold amusement. 'They don't just stay because of the tags in their legs,' she said finally. 'However much you might want to believe that.'
'And why are you telling me this?' I asked eventually. We'd reached the top of the ship. The sun, the distant sand, even the sky was white and fierce. Unyielding.
She was looking out over the ocean rather than at me. When she turned back, her face was closed again. And though I knew the earlier openness had been real, I also knew it had been calculated. 'You are only staying because of that tracker in your leg, and that isn't healthy. I want you to believe in what we're doing here. I'm not looking for slaves, I'm looking for followers – committed ones. And I never want you to try again what you did last night. Because the next time you do, I'll kill you. And it won't be anything like as quick and pretty as the deaths you saw in Ireland.'
I smiled bitterly and didn't say anything. What was I going to say? I believed her threat absolutely. I nodded to her, not sure what I meant by it or what she'd think I meant. Then I walked quietly back inside, away from the punishing sun.
Haru was still where I'd seen him that morning, hunched over a vivid line drawing of a young girl being ripped apart by zombies. The deck 10 children's pool beside him was filled with a thin slurry of pond scum.
'OK,' I said. 'Why should I trust you?'
He looked surprised only for a moment. Then he smiled. 'Because I want to get out too, and I think you can help me. You know we've got a much better chance together.'
'Your life here isn't so bad. Why would you want to change it?'
He opened the leather portfolio that was always with him, and for a moment I thought he was going to show me another drawing. But the thing he pulled out was a photo, a little dog-eared around the edges: a young boy, maybe ten, sitting hunched in a wheelchair, frail legs twisted like pipe cleaners in front of him.
'My son,' Haru said. 'Back in Japan. Not at all the sort of person Queen M wanted in this 'Brave New World''
'Then,' I said, 'let's talk about what we need to do.'
The day after Queen M gave me her strange little pep talk, Haru introduced me to Ingo: blue-black skin, soft, deep African accent. A boyish face that was probably older than it looked.
'I run the network,' he told me, taking my hand in a firm, enveloping shake. He had long artist's fingers, but I could see that most of the bones in them had been broken some time in the past, and reset crooked. I didn't need to ask why he wanted to escape.
'The computer network?'
He nodded.
'And I'm guessing your job involves more than telling people to switch it off and then switch it back on again?'
He didn't smile. His face was so unlined that I wondered if he ever did. 'I take care of it all,' he said. 'Including the tracker system.'
'You can disable it?'
'Of course.' And he did smile then, but it was little more than an upward twitch of his lip.
'Permanently?'
He shook his head. 'She had me set up the central core so it was password protected, and she has hard copies of all the information.'
'But it was you who set up the password, so…'
'She is not stupid. There were four of us who worked on this. I was the project leader, but each of us oversaw the other's work. And she told us – if one of us saw something and did not report it, we would be punished just as if we had done it ourselves. There is no backdoor. The system is unbreakable.'
'OK then.' I looked down, disappointed. 'But you can take it down, at least for a little while.'
'Yes,' he said. 'That I can do.'
After I spoke to Ingo I waited until, a week later, I got what I needed: a fresh corpse from the plantations and an excuse to perform an autopsy on it. Twenty years old, fit as a fiddle, and dead for no reason. I caught myself almost smiling at the family when they told me what had happened; how he'd been talking about the weather one minute, dead the next. Their numb, tear-streaked faces looked back at me, hoping I'd have some explanation for their sudden wrenching loss, and the smile faded into nothing.
