I radioed the ship, asking for the lab to be cleared so I could perform an autopsy on a potentially infectious vector. 'I'm sure it's nothing, just a weak heart,' I told Queen M. 'If you prefer I can cut it open out here, take a quick look. Then the family can have him back and buried by the end of the day.'
'No,' she said. 'better to be safe. The equipment you've got out there isn't sophisticated enough to pick up anything important. Bring the boy in – and keep yourself in quarantine until you can give me the all clear. I don't want anyone but you coming into contact with that body.'
'Fine,' I told her, 'but you'll need to keep the family in isolation too.' The smile was back again and this time there was nothing I could do to suppress it. I ended the call before Queen M could hear it in my voice.
I didn't look at the man's face as I cut him open. I was sure I'd read an accusation there, that I was desecrating the only thing left of him in this world for no real reason. Chest first and yes, I could see it, the hole in his heart that had killed him. But there was no one in the lab to share the find with me, the spectre of an infectious agent that much more terrifying in a post-Cull world. I carried on cutting, as if I was still searching for something more elusive.
Getting the chip out should have been easy – cut into the thigh, through to the bone, and that's it. Except that Queen M would only have to take one look at the body and she'd know exactly what I'd done. And I was damn sure that she'd look at the body.
But the organs – those I had a good reason to poke around in. I took out the liver and the pancreas, the coiled crimson length of the gut, releasing the stench of half-fermented shit into the antiseptic atmosphere of the lab. The human body really is like an overstuffed suitcase. You look at everything that comes out of it and can't believe biology ever fitted it all in there.
I took tissue slides of each organ and looked at each of them under the microscope – his liver was like a sixty-year olds; he must have moved straight from breast milk to rum. Nothing of note in the kidneys or the testes, but then I hadn't expected there to be. Finally, I went back to the whole point of the exercise: burrowing down through the now conveniently empty chest cavity to drill a small plug out of the pelvic girdle. I took the bone, slick with blood and worse, and slid it into the pocket of my slacks, into the little zip lock bag I'd hidden there earlier.
Then I burrowed deeper still, through the flesh along the edge of the bone. I had unwelcome flashbacks to cooking for him, carving the raw meat as he looked away, pretending he was too squeamish to watch. Letting us keep up the fiction that his job wasn't the inverse of mine, making death out of life. You're better off without him, a voice said inside me, and I wasn't sure if it was the Voice, waking up from the drugged haze I'd put it in those last few weeks or just the voice of reason I was never able to hear when he was near. Love isn't blind, that's the trouble. You see all the faults and all the insurmountable problems – you just don't care.
I still didn't. That, in the end, was why I needed to get out of there. I could tell myself all kinds of comfortable lies about freeing myself from despotism, but in the end it was all about him. While I was there, I would never see him again. Out in the world, maybe – and that was just about enough.
And there, at last, it was. The chip, inserted tight into the bone but not tight enough that I couldn't pry it out. It went into my other pocket and then all I had to do was stuff all those organs back into the body and sew it up, stitches as neat as I could make them because this was the body his family would be burying, the last sight they'd have of someone they'd once loved. Not much recompense but the best that I could offer.
Then I went to see Ingo.
'Magnetism,' he told me. The chip looked tiny in the pink cradle of his palm. 'If it is strong enough, you will degauss it.'
'Great,' I said. 'Because a giant magnet is just the kind of thing we're going to find lying around on a ship.'
'No,' Ingo said, entirely seriously. 'I think you are mistaken. It is highly unlikely that there will be a magnet of sufficient size anywhere in the fleet.'
Behind his back Haru rolled his eyes and I had to suppress a smile, but it wasn't really very funny. If we couldn't solve this problem then the plan was dead. The chips had to be deactivated.
We'd met in a little room to the side of the main lab, home to the centrifuge and a collection of embryo-filled specimen jars which gave Haru an excuse to be there. He was sketching as we spoke, some kind of squid monster emerging from the machine in the centre of the room. One of its tentacles was about to grab, or possibly indecently assault, the most humourless of my lab mates. Ingo was inspecting my laptop, which I'd reported as broken. I reckoned we had another five minutes of talk before our little gathering started to look suspicious. Then we'd be back to using Haru as our go-between.
My eyes drifted back down to my own work, a fruitless tissue culture I was growing from the now half- decayed Infected. I was no closer to finding out how the hell the Cure had turned from a vaccine to a virus, and my lack of results was starting to seriously piss Queen M off. Yet another reason we had to figure out a way past the chips.
'What about electricity?' I said. 'Could we fry the things?'
'Yes,' Haru said, his hand busy sketching lightning bolts around the squid monster. 'And fry us in the process.'
'It's possible for the human body to survive a lightning strike. A current that would kill the chip might leave us alive. Right?' I said to Ingo.
He tilted his head, considering this with his usual infuriating slowness. Then he nodded. 'Yes, that is possible.'
''Might'?' Haru said. ''Possible'? These aren't the words you want to hear when you're talking about putting twelve thousand volts down your spinal column. How about words like 'definitely' and 'entirely safe'?'
'What about that kind of electricity?' I asked Ingo. 'Can we find that anywhere on the ship.'
'The engine room. Maybe.' He shrugged. 'I cannot say for sure. My work uses currents considerably lower.'
'You'll need to search then,' I told Haru. 'See what you can find.'
'Sure, why not? Maybe it will give us superpowers, turn us into Team Electro – if, you know, it doesn't kill us all first.'
Then Barbados, and Haru was showing me his sketchbook again. The pictures were getting wilder, more fantastical, as if the approaching escape was firing his imagination, or maybe just letting the darker recesses of his subconscious peek through. I wondered what Queen M would make of it all.
I wondered if he showed them to her at all, now that there was something else there – hidden in the logo of a t-shirt, the pattern of the carpet. For the last two weeks he'd been painstakingly compiling plans of the ship: each deck a different drawing. And here, in the seemingly random leaves of a tree, the outlines of the islands, each military base picked out in darker green. The waves on the ocean in another drawing were a complex circuit diagram, a wiring plan for the ship. And in each night-time picture the stars were the charts we'd need to navigate our way to freedom.
'This is everything?' I asked him.
'I've been everywhere on the ship. Even into Queen M's quarters. It's all here.'
'And nobody suspected anything?'
'Do I look suspicious?' He grinned boyishly, flashing the gap between his front teeth and, no, he didn't. He looked like the likeable nerd who didn't get the girl at the end of a John Hughes movie. Which, given how much of this plan depended on him, didn't exactly fill me with confidence.
'So we're ready to go,' he said.
'Yes,' I said. 'I guess we are.'
When I woke up at four that morning it was to find that the Voice had returned, sliding through the thoughts at the back of my mind. You need to be careful, it told me. You can't trust anyone.
But I knew that already. I took my morning dose of anti-psychotics, a lower dose than I really needed, but it was the only way I'd been able to horde enough to last me for the journey, until I could find an abandoned pharmacy somewhere on land. If I could find a pharmacy. The Voice, so blessedly absent from my mind since my rescue, had become a restless whisper at the edge of my consciousness. The panicky knowledge of its presence was like a threat that one day would be made good.
Perhaps this whole escape plan, the desperate need to leave, was itself coming from the Voice. Madness feeling like sanity.
