The Girl With All The Gifts Read Online Free Page A

after it was dead? How did she feel about the woman? And lots of stuff like that, which is kind of fun because it feels almost like the people in the story are real somewhere.
    Like she saved Miss Justineau from a monster, and Miss Justineau hugged her.
    Which is better than a million Greek myths.

3
    One day Miss Justineau talks to them about death. It’s because most of the men in the Light Brigade have just died, in a poem that Miss Justineau read to the class. The children want to know what it means to die, and what it’s like. Miss Justineau says it’s like all the lights going out, and everything going really quiet, the way it does at night – but for ever. No morning. The lights never come back on again.
    “That sounds terrible,” says Lizzie in a voice like she’s about to cry. It sounds terrible to Melanie too; like sitting in the shower room on Sunday with the chemical smell in the air, and then even the smell goes away and there’s nothing at all for ever and ever.
    Miss Justineau can see that she’s upset them, and she tries to make it okay again by talking about it more. “But maybe it’s not like that at all,” she says quickly. “Nobody really knows, because when you’re dead, you can’t come back to talk about it. And anyway, it would be different for you than it would be for most people because you’re—”
    And then she stops herself, with the next word sort of frozen halfway out of her lips.
    “We’re what?” Melanie asks.
    It’s a moment or two before Miss Justineau says anything. It looks to Melanie like she’s thinking of something to say that won’t make them feel any worse than they do already. “You’re children. You can’t really imagine what death might be like, because for children it seems like everything has to go on for ever.”
    That isn’t what she was going to say, Melanie is pretty sure. But it’s really interesting, just the same. There’s a silence while they think about it. It’s true, Melanie decides. She can’t remember a time when her life was any different than this, and she can’t imagine any other way that people could live. But there’s something that doesn’t make sense to her in the whole equation, and so she has to ask the question.
    “
Whose
children are we, Miss Justineau?”
    In most stories she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and Helen had Leda and Zeus. Sometimes they have teachers too, but not always, and they never seem to have sergeants. So this is a question that gets to the very roots of the world, and Melanie asks it with some trepidation.
    Again Miss Justineau thinks about it for a long time, until Melanie is sure she won’t answer. Then she says, “Your mother is dead, Melanie. She died when you were very little. Probably your daddy’s dead too, although there isn’t really any way of knowing. So the army is looking after you now.”
    “Is that just Melanie?” John asks. “Or is it all of us?”
    Miss Justineau nods slowly. “All of you.”
    “We’re in an orphanage,” Anne guesses. (The class heard the story of Oliver Twist once, on another Miss Justineau day.)
    “No. You’re on an army base.”
    “Is that what happens to kids whose mum and dad die?” This is Steven now.
    “Sometimes.”
    Melanie is thinking hard and putting all these facts together inside her head, like they’re pieces of a puzzle. “How old was I,” she asks, “when my mother died?” Because she must have been very young if she can’t remember her mother at all.
    “It’s not easy to explain,” Miss Justineau says, and they can see from her face that she’s really not comfortable talking about this stuff.
    “Was I still a baby?” Melanie asks.
    “Not really. But almost. You were very young.”
    “And did my mother give me to the army?”
    Another long silence.
    “No,” Miss Justineau says at last. “The army pretty much helped itself.”
    It comes out quick and low and