9. Captivity

Henry Grey's clothes and shoes have been taken from him and burned. He has been scrubbed until his skin is pink and prickling. And now he has been confined to a cabin in the infirmary. The bed is narrow and hard and the padded walls deaden sounds and make his own breathing seem maddeningly loud, but it is the lack of a window that scratches at him. He had begged to be allowed to remain in his own cabin, promising not to leave under any circumstances until the period of his quarantine is over, but the Captain and the doctor had been adamant.

"It is for your own safety," the doctor had said. "Since you were exposed to the air, without your helmet, and to water."

"I assure you, I feel completely well."

But the doctor had been too busy measuring the size of his forehead and bleeding him and shining a tiny torch into his eyes. "Merely as a precaution," he had said. He had worn a mask over his mouth, and he smelled of disinfecting lotion.

Later the two Company men had come to see him, although they had stood outside the door, which had a little sliding hatch at head height, and they had spoken to him through the gap. They had expressed, in tortuously bureaucratic terms, the Company's apologies for any current discomfort, and reminded him of the forms he had completed before boarding, waiving the Company of responsibility for effects arising from his exposure to the outside. And then they had asked question after question about how he had managed to get out of the train and who had helped him and what he had hoped to do, and he had drawn himself up and declared that an Englishman would not be intimidated.

And now he is alone. The only thing he can cling to is that the girl had had the presence of mind to demand his suit almost as soon as they had thrown themselves onto the train, while everyone was watching the great creature from the forest. He had handed it to her dumbly, its pockets heavy with the precious few specimens he had had time to collect, and he had watched her vanish and return, empty-handed, moments later. Remarkable, for his saviors to come in such unexpected shapes. A scrawny train-girl, a Wastelands creature.

He stretches out on the hard bed and after a while he feels the cool water around him again. Birds scream above him, searching. Perhaps they are blinded by the shifting patterns of sun on the water, because they don't seem to know where he is. Their sharp beaks plunge wildly around him but he is vanishing, drowning; weeds are reaching up to wrap around his wrists and ankles, to drag him down into darkness the sun cannot pierce. And then—strong arms around him; the weeds have turned into hair, dark and shining beneath the water, then curling around him in slick tendrils as he is hauled back into the air and onto firmer ground, returned to life. In his memory he opens his eyes but sun and shade fragment her face into disparate pieces he cannot put together. He calls out in frustration and moments later hears a click as another hatch slides open, this one in the wall adjoining the doctor's cabin.

"Dr. Grey? Are you well?"

He opens his eyes and sees the doctor's face peering at him through a grill. "Just a bad dream," he says, shortly.

"Can you describe your dream, Dr. Grey?" He hears a rustling of papers, the doctor turning the pages of a notebook. "Anything at all, any detail." The doctor makes no attempt to keep the eagerness from his voice. His little eyes watch Grey, greedily. It makes his stomach turn.

"Well, I do remember certain details, although they are very indistinct…"

"Anything, Dr. Grey, anything. Before you forget…"

"A woman—"

"Yes?"

"She was dressed just like my mother used to, but as I approached her she turned into the very image of Her Majesty the Queen…" He is pleased to see the flash of disappointment in the doctor's expression, and hears the notebook being put away.

"Could it be the effects of the Wastelands? My dear mother has been in her grave these past twenty years."

"It certainly could, indeed," says the doctor, in the tone of one praising a slow but well-intentioned child. "Good, good. Well, I am here if you need me, don't hesitate to call if you start to feel not quite yourself."

The hatch closes, and Grey folds his arms over his chest, warmed by a glow of petty satisfaction. But the doctor's words echo in his head. Does he feel quite himself? He's not sure anymore, not sure if he remembers how he is meant to feel. The pain in his stomach is a constant companion. But there is something else, a tug at his ribs, a pull that he has been feeling since the night of the storm and the apparition he had seen.

He sits upright so quickly that blackness hovers at the edges of his vision. He had seen her, she was real, however much the rail girl tried to convince him otherwise. She had been on the train and in the water. She had followed him—she had made sure he was safe. He stands up from the bed, unable to bear his own stillness any longer. The tug at his ribs grows stronger, as if something is pulling at him on a line so thin as to be invisible, yet strong as knotted rope. The energy in his legs makes them ache. He has read accounts of this—an elation that comes with unexpected salvation, of a life returned. He has always put them down to weak sentimentality, but what he feels now is not simply gratitude or joy but a fiercer burning. A life returned is a life borrowed; more fragile and brighter than he ever could have imagined. A life no longer his own. He can feel it burning away all doubt, all hesitation. "A new Eden," he whispers. "A new Eden."

He will have his specimens for the Exhibition. There will be time to study them, to consider how best to display them. But they will be only the beginning—a gateway to the knowledge he will bring.

The doctor brings him his evening meal and with it more questions, more tests. The answers trip off his tongue in easy, fluent lies. Enough to keep the doctor convinced of his eagerness to help, yet nothing so interesting as to keep him here any longer than necessary. Afterward, the Company men, again, and this time he gathers that they have been saying that his excursion outside was planned, permitted. That it was the Company, indeed, in their eagerness for scientific knowledge, who provided the brains behind it. He was only the tool.

"And what am I… Excuse me, what are we supposed to have achieved in this endeavor? Will they not ask to see the fruits of my labors? Or ask what I have learned? All I have to show are torn clothes and scratches, and I remember nothing of the outside." Only the hum of bluebottles and the iridescent wing cases of beetles; webs dripping with red sap; the white feathers of the huge birds; the peaty smell of his rescuer, her hair brushing against his skin.

The Company men smile thinly and say they are sure that a man of his learning can extemporize if necessary.

"And may I ask the reason for this pretense?" He is fairly sure that he understands why they are doing it, but he wants to hear them say it. He dislikes this obfuscation, this hiding beneath layers of words and meanings, but he cannot help feeling a certain glee—the Company's own greed led to their hoarding of knowledge, their determination that no one else would learn of the Wastelands' riches. Well now, let them watch what he can do.

"We do what is best for the train, Dr. Grey," says Petrov.

"Best that our passengers believe that everything happens for a reason," says Li. "Of course, should they find out anything to the contrary, it would be within our means to take further punitive action, on a legal basis, of course."

The Company men regard him sternly and Grey replies, "Yes, yes, of course." But he is thinking—Yes, perhaps everything does happen for a reason, and a flush of elation suffuses him again. Perhaps it does.