'They will be, eventually.'
'By new recruits?' I asked, but that seemed to be it for him, conversationally.
At the end of the corridor was a larger room with marble stairs leading up and down from it and glass-fronted shops lining the walls, long-emptied of their goods. No money economy here, I guessed. At the foot of the stairs was what I'd been looking for, one of those cross-sectional maps of the ship that long-ago voyagers had used to orient themselves.
Jesus, it was huge. The ship must have carried a good thousand or more passengers when it was a cruise liner. I had a sudden, unwelcome vision of the way it must have been for them when the Cull struck. No time to make it to shore. A ship of the dying. Suddenly desperate for homes and families they never realised they'd said good-bye to for the last time. Queen M's crew must have had a strong stomach to clean all that out. The decks would have been literally running with blood.
But maybe Queen M's crew didn't mind the sight of blood too much.
We drifted along the corridors and decks of the ship like ghosts, my two shadows wafting along behind me. The whole place was eerily quiet. If I'd been a superstitious type, I might have thought it felt haunted.
I found the casino next, still fully stocked, piles of chips on green baize tables.
'Queen M opens this every Friday night,' Kelis told me. 'People come from all the ships.'
I picked up a blue hundred-unit chip and spun it in my fingers. 'And what do they gamble for?'
'Duties,' Soren said. 'Jobs no one wants.'
'Like body-guarding cleaned-up junkies?' I asked, but only Kelis smiled.
I wandered for a while among the tables, threw some dice on the craps board, spun the roulette wheel. It seemed appropriate, somehow, that it landed on double zero. Everything you'd gambled lost.
But perhaps not everything of mine was. Somewhere, maybe, I had a husband. Did I want to tell them that? He was – well, he was a useful man in anyone's army. If I told them about him, there was a chance I could talk them into looking for him, bringing him back here.
I opened my mouth to tell Kelis – then slowly closed it again. No. I still knew too little about what was going on here.
After the casino I found the ship's kitchens, deserted at this time of night but still obviously in use. Kelis and Soren watched impassively as I pulled open store cupboards and refrigerators, poked my nose into spice racks and big bowls of dried herbs. They didn't go hungry here, that was for sure. A walk-in cool room was hung with animal corpses; tiny rabbits, birds, and something so big that I thought it could only be a horse.
I found four separate dining rooms, six bars, a theatre and a cinema. There was an indoor pool and a gym that looked like it still got plenty of use.
After a while, Kelis and Soren seemed to get into the spirit of it. When we hit a corridor we knew was unoccupied we went into the cabins, saw what was in the wardrobes, the dressing tables. They'd cleaned the corpses out when they'd taken the ship, but left the possessions behind. All these relics of unfinished lives. In one room there was a digital camera, the battery still miraculously charged. Morbidly, unable to stop myself, I flicked through the pictures in its memory. Almost all shots of an older woman, standing on a series of interchangeable beaches, sometimes with a chubby, grey-haired man beside her. In the last photo the two of them looked scared, but I didn't think they knew yet exactly what lay in store for them. I put the camera down and we didn't go into any more rooms after that.
Instead I headed down, below the water line, into the bowels of the ship. For the first time I sensed reluctance from my two guards, but neither of them said anything until I'd bottomed out into a drab metal corridor that looked like it belonged on a submarine, not a cruise liner.
'Time we went back,' Kelis said.
I ignored her and walked further down this corridor that seemed to lead nowhere.
Her hand clamped on my arm like a vice. 'Far enough.'
I turned to look at her, but there was no humour in her face now. 'Why?'
Soren shifted, just a little, and for the first time since we'd set out that night I got a glimpse of the gun he kept tucked in the waistband of his trousers. 'No reason,' he said. 'I want to go back to sleep.'
'So go,' I said. 'I can find my way back.'
Kelis slowly released my arm, but she didn't look away from me. 'Believe me Dr Kirik, there's nothing down there you want to know about.'
After a second I shook my head and smiled as if it was no big deal. But I tried to memorise the route to that forbidden corridor as we wound our way back to my cabin.
Not that I was given much chance to use it. It seemed like the entire crew of the ship had something wrong with them and had just been waiting for a doctor to show up and fix it. Another day passed, and then another, and then a week and I still hadn't been allowed a single second in the ship without my two bodyguards doggedly following at my heels.
Then, on the eighth day, everything changed. I woke to the sound of pounding on my cabin door. They didn't wait for me to answer and a second later I opened my eyes, disoriented, to find Soren's blue ones looking down at me. His very blond lashes blinked three times over them without either of us saying anything.
'So, I guess you want me to get up,' I said eventually.
He nodded, taciturn as ever. I wondered suddenly what he did when he wasn't traipsing around after me. He was one of those people you couldn't really imagine relaxing, knocking back a few drinks with his friends or sunbathing with a good book. He didn't look like a man who ever really enjoyed himself.
'Why?' I asked him. 'Has something happened?'
'No,' Kelis said. I realised for the first time that she'd been hovering by the door all this time, brown skin almost the same colour as the mahogany panelling on the wall behind her. 'It's time for you to really earn your keep.'
A catamaran took us to the island and from there a car drove us to the airport, just two strips of tarmac cut through the trees. There were twenty others with us, and this time there were none of the bright colours, the play-acting at pirates. This time it was clear that I was travelling with a regiment from someone's private army.
Soren was dressed all in black. There were ammunition belts slung over both his shoulders and he was carrying more guns than he had limbs. It was almost absurd, but I could see the way one of his thumbs was tapping a jittery rhythm against the barrel of the largest rifle and the small drop of blood forming on his lip where he couldn't seem to stop chewing it. Anything that made Soren nervous made me very nervous.
Kelis' face was as calm as ever, her body entirely motionless. Only two spots of colour, high in her cheeks, told me anything about what was going on inside her. I'd been given combats to wear, an ugly olive green that clashed horribly with my red hair. I felt ridiculous, a little girl playing at being a soldier.
They'd given me a medical kit but they hadn't given me a gun.
The small jet took off from the runway, wheels bumping alarmingly along the pock-marked surface, without anyone having said a word to me about where we were going. After an hour though, as the sea crawled on endlessly beneath us, I was sure that we were travelling east, crossing the Atlantic.
'May as well sleep,' Kelis told me. 'We'll be nine hours yet.'
Going all the way to Europe then. Bringing me closer to my husband, a small, hopeful voice said in my head.
But not, in the end, close enough. I woke up seven hours later to a rising sun and the approaching coastline of a country that I knew wasn't England.
'France,' Kelis said.
'OK,' I answered. 'Why?'
'Recruitment drive,' one of the others told me, a middle-aged white man with leathery skin and a thin, mean face. He'd introduced himself as Curtis, though whether this was his first or his last name I never found out.
I remembered what Queen M had told me, that people were the scarce resource now. I thought about pirates and the British navy of old, and the weapons that everyone but me was carrying – and I began to guess what we were. A press gang.
Paris approached. More golden than I'd remembered it; like a vast human honeycomb. There were blots of darkness in the gold, relics of a recent burning. As the plane sank lower I saw that whole streets and neighbourhoods had been reduced to rubble. Strange, how people can face a disease that wants to kill them all and
