Six Days by Philip Webb Page B

answers Erin a tad wearily. “It doesn’t catch illnesses, it doesn’t feel pain, it doesn’t get tired or sleep …”
    “But it has
changed
since we got here,” Peyto chips in. “It’s not the ship we set out in, is it? All perfect and clean …”
    “What do you expect?” she goes. “It’s damaged so badly it can’t self-repair. Its systems are in a critical state.”
    Just as I’m poking at the walls, I spot a rogue spiderthat’s hitched a ride on me – it spins away from my sleeve, legs akimbo, paying out thread as it goes. And when it brushes the surface of the ship, it sinks in and disappears.
    “Hey! I thought you said it doesn’t eat stuff!”
    But just as suddenly as it swallows the spider, it spits him out again right as rain. I scoop him up and he tethers to my collar. Erin smiles at me then. It’s the first time I’ve seen her do that, and just for a second she’s someone else, someone proper beautiful. Then she brushes her ruined earmuffs against the wall, and all the mud from the Thames just drains out of them. They come up fresh as dandelion heads.
    We venture farther into the chamber, and it’s much deeper than I first figured. It’s spooking me out cos by now I can’t see if I’m facing up or down. Past my dangling feet I spot where the blue light’s coming from – there’s this diamond shape made from lanterns that flicker together like they’re disturbed by a breeze, though there ain’t no movement in the air. I count up the lights on each side – seven by seven. Except there’s gaps in the grid.
    In an effort to get a better look, I lose my balance and end up nudging into Peyto. And that’s lesson number two about this new world – once you’re moving, you don’t slow down, you just float onward till you hit something.
    “Keep zigzagging across the chamber till you reach that square of lights,” explains Peyto.
    “Easy for you to say. I’m about as good at this as a pig on wheels.”
    I’m putting everything into getting my zigzag moves right, so I don’t really get a decent view of the grid of lights till I’m practically on top of it. And so it’s a shock when I see what it’s made up of.
    Each light is at the head of something that looks like a long see-through blister.
    And inside each blister, submerged in milky-blue liquid, is a body.
    A human body.
    The faces are pale and empty. And round every neck is a flinder, twinkles of blue and white light. Somehow I know they’re just sleeping, not dead. It’s the way the hair’s sprouting across their arms and legs. And the nails, curling out from fingers and toes, like ribbons. It fills me with dread to think how long they must have been lying like this, not moving, just growing, more like trees than people. Symbols flicker and swarm over the surface of the blisters, casting light and shadows on the skin below, sometimes spinning, sometimes drawing lines or nets
. Busy
.
Watching
.
    Three of the blisters are open and empty, wrinkled as walnut shells. And then it dawns on me that this was where Peyto and Erin have come from. Except there’s
three
empty blisters, not two. And I remember Peyto talking by the village well about a woman they needed to find …
    Erin comes alongside me. “This is the sleeper bay. Forty-nine of us in total.”
    “You live here, like this, asleep?”
    “These are the pods. They’re life-support capsules, like a kind of quarantine so no germs can reach the people inside,” explains Peyto. “They’re more
preserved
than asleep, kept on slow-life –”
    “You mean frozen?”
    “Sort of … It’s called stasis. You don’t live but you don’t die. Like animals that hibernate. That way the ship can replace your cells when they grow old. It’s the flinders that make it possible, though we don’t really understand how they work.”
    “What?”
    “The flinders are old, very old,” goes Peyto. “From a time when our ancestors had a greater understanding. But we lost that