5. Threads

The morning sun illuminates the patterns on the window, imbuing them with vibrant, vivid life. Henry Grey stretches his cramping fingers and reaches toward the glass. He is sure he can feel the blooms growing, pulsing with impatient energy, pulling every pore of his skin toward them. He wishes he could touch them, trap them, press them between the pages of a book like the albums of wildflowers stacked on his shelves at home.

He doesn't eat; the pain in his stomach makes the thought of food unbearable, and besides, he is too rich in visions to rest, too full of knowledge. He burns with it. The notebooks on his table are growing thick with his remembrances, with everything he had seen outside, with ideas that proliferate; he has to run after each thought before it bounds away from him, leaving bright trails that he must follow or lose forever.

He crouches down to unlock the doors of the little cabinet where he is keeping his specimens. The train girl had brought them to him, afraid. "They are changing, Dr. Grey," she had said. Here, this jar had held a beetle-like creature, iridescent wings and strong black pincers that had tapped and tapped against the glass. But now there is no movement within, only a dry, brown thing, slightly furred. Breathing. In the dark, they are growing. His pieces of the Wastelands, waiting to emerge, to be brought out onto the stage of the Great Exhibition. A shiver of anticipation runs down his spine. Not yet, not quite yet. He shuts the door and locks it carefully, placing the key in his jacket pocket and brushing away a long white thread. He frowns, wiping at his suit with his hands. Has he changed his clothes already this morning? He is finding it harder to remember these things. Even the image of his cottage and garden is hard to bring to mind—England fading into dull obscurity against the vividness of the Wastelands. Anyway, the thread—has someone been in his cabin, snooping? But he looks closer and realizes it isn't a thread at all, but something more like a root, extraordinarily thin, caught in the air where he has brushed it away. A hypha, he thinks, from a fungus. And look, there are more, branching out from the walls to the floor. He kneels down and watches their filament-thin tips moving, as if they are searching out new ground. A desert like the garden of the Lord, he thinks, and he scrabbles with his fingernails at the cabin wall, scrabbling to reach the growth within it, the mycelial life. He breaks a piece of the wooden board off, and more of the thin white hyphae are revealed. "Extraordinary," he says, ignoring the pain in his bloodied fingers.

A knock on the door sends him to his feet. He grabs a couple of cushions from the bed and stacks them against the wall to disguise the damage.

"Who's there?" No answer, so he opens the door a crack. "I do not wish to be disturbed—" but Alexei pushes his way into the cabin, shutting the door quickly.

"You promised you would be careful," he hisses. He is unshaven, his eyes bloodshot.

"My dear boy—"

"You've poisoned us all."

"I have done nothing of the sort!" Grey feels a flush on his cheeks.

The engineer wipes his forehead and looks around the cabin. "You've got to get rid of it… whatever it is… before it does any more damage."

"There is really no need for this… this overreaction. I have not poisoned anything. Look." He guides the engineer over to the table, where the insects are safe in their little cocoons, inside their glass jars. "This is all I took, there is nothing here that you need to worry about. Nothing that is still alive." He watches the engineer, certain—almost certain—that he will not recognize a chrysalis.

Alexei stares at the jars, then up at the window, where the mold on the outside of the glass is shifting, pulsing with light. His shoulders sag.

"Can this really be my doing?" asks Grey, speaking as he might to a small child. "It is on the outside of the train, surely nothing to do with us. And is this not what we wanted? To discover for ourselves what these changes mean, how they can be understood? Did we not speak of what the Company is hiding from us? When we reach the Exhibition it will be our names that will be spoken. We will be remembered, my dear boy, as the men who unlocked the mysteries of the Wastelands, hidden for too long by a Company grown fat from its secrets."

But the engineer shakes his head and backs away. "I shouldn't have listened, it's my fault."

"Come now, it is natural to feel overwhelmed. Every great man who finds his purpose amidst a great undertaking must tremble in the face of his task. But the truly great are steadfast."

"But for this, we must actually reach Moscow, Dr. Grey. You understand that, don't you? We must pass the Vigil." The young man flings himself out of the cabin as abruptly as he came. The pressure of the journey is weighing on him, thinks Grey. Poor boy.

After the engineer leaves, Grey crouches down again by the wall, where the hyphae are bursting out, uncontainable. He glances around, imagining that every set of footsteps along the corridor signals an imminent crashing open of the door, but though he tries to stuff the thin tendrils back into the wall, there are too many of them, and they are growing too quickly. He feels a stab of panic. It will be impossible to hide them, impossible to explain that this is not his doing, but then he sits back on his heels and watches as they shift, as they reach tentatively out of the wall and onto the carpet, and he wants to laugh with astonishment, with joy. There is life all around him, new Eden breaking into the train itself.