Chapter 1
People describe numbness like it hurts. Like it’s an absence you can feel the edges of, a phantom limb of the heart. They’re wrong. Numbness is nothing at all. It is a flat grey field that goes on forever in every direction, and you stand in the middle of it, and you don’t even mind.
I have stood in the middle of mine for twenty-six years.
My flat has one window, and it faces a brick wall. Rain slicks the brick most mornings, and I watch the water crawl down the mortar lines whilst the kettle screams itself out behind me. I never time the kettle. It boils, it clicks off, it cools, and some days I make the tea and some days I forget I wanted it. Neither outcome registers as loss.
My degree hangs above the radiator in a frame I bought at a charity shop. Bachelor of Science, Marine and Molecular Biology, First Class Honours. Seven years of my life, if you count the doctorate I abandoned when the funding dried up. The paper cost me my twenties. It cost me friendships I let starve because culturing cells felt easier than answering texts. It cost me my family, though that ledger runs in both directions; my mother stopped calling around the same time I stopped noticing whether she called.
I want to be clear about something, because it matters. I am not sad. Sad people want things to be different. I want nothing. I move through the world the way water moves through a pipe, taking the shape of whatever contains me, exerting no pressure of my own. If a bus jumped the kerb and erased me some grey Tuesday, my last thought would be mild surprise. Not fear. You have to value a thing to fear losing it.
The job listing arrives through a recruitment portal I forgot signing up for, sandwiched between a lab technician post in Slough and an advert for teeth whitening. There's no company name. No salary listed, which means the number is a negotiation they intend to win. What the listing does have is a warnings section, bolded, longer than the job description itself.
Successful applicants will be required to reside on-site for a minimum contract period of twelve months. No external leave will be granted. Communication with outside parties will be monitored and restricted. The role involves proximity to biological material classified as extremely hazardous. Applicants should understand that previous staff fatalities have occurred.
I read it twice. Somewhere, I understand that the paragraph is designed as a filter, a wall built to turn away anyone with a life worth returning to. A partner would disqualify you. A mother who called on Sundays would disqualify you. A healthy respect for your own continued existence would disqualify you most of all.
I have none of those things. The wall has no purchase on me. I slide through it like smoke.
The application takes eleven minutes. Under emergency contact I type my landlord’s letting agency, because the form won’t submit with the field blank. Under reason for applying I write something about the research frontier and unique opportunities. The true answer would not fit the character limit, and anyway the true answer is a shrug.
They call the next morning. A woman with a voice like a dial tone asks whether I have fully understood the residency requirement. I say yes. She asks whether I have dependents, ongoing medical needs, or persons who would raise concern at my extended absence. I say no, no, and no. I hear her pen tick three boxes, and understand that my emptiness has just been assessed as an asset for the first time in my life. There is something almost funny in that. I don’t laugh, but I note the place where a laugh would go.
The interview happens four days later in a serviced office in the city, a rented room with a rented plant. There are two men and the dial-tone woman sit across a table from me. One of the men never speaks; he watches me the way you watch a gauge. The other asks about my research background, my comfort with invertebrate physiology, my familiarity with secretion assays. Then he sets down his pen and asks the only question anyone there actually cares about.
“Miss Kerrigan. If you accept this post, you will disappear from your life for a year. Possibly longer. Is there anything in that life that will pull at you?”
The rented plant sits in the corner, plastic pretending at life. Rain moves down the window behind his head in long threads, and I watch one thread swallow another and think about the brick wall outside my flat.
“It's Morgana, please, and no,” I say. “There’s nothing.”
The silent man makes a note. I have no way to see what he writes, but I can read the shape of it in his face.
They give me nine days to dissolve my existence, and my existence dissolves without protest, which tells me everything about how little of it there is. The lease is monthly. The furniture belongs to the landlord. My belongings fit into one suitcase and one box, and the box goes into a storage unit the company pays for. I stand in the roller-door light thinking that everything I own looks like evidence from a very boring crime.
I tell no one I am leaving, because the list of people who would notice has one name on it, and the letting agency only cares that the flat is clean.
On the last night I lie on the stripped mattress and stare at the ceiling and conduct an inventory of feelings, the way you pat your pockets before a journey. Fear of the fatality warnings: absent. Excitement at the mystery: absent. Grief for the life I am leaving: absent, though to grieve it I would need to locate it first. There is only the flat grey field, and in the far distance of it, so faint I nearly miss it, one small unfamiliar thing.
Curiosity. About what could possibly be worth all those warnings.
It is the largest emotion I have felt in years, and it is roughly the size of a match head. I turn it over twice, file it away, and sleep without dreaming, the way I always sleep.
The car comes at six. It's black, unmarked, and the driver is hidden behind a screen. We leave the city and the motorway and then the A-roads, and the land empties out mile by mile until it is only moor and weather. Nine hours, one silent fuel stop, no phone; they took it at the door with a receipt, as if I’d want it back.
The sea announces itself before I see it. A change in the light, a salt weight in the air through the vents. Then the road bends around a headland and the water is suddenly everywhere, iron grey and huge, hammering the base of cliffs that drop away on our left like the edge of the known world.
The facility grows out of that cliff as if it has been extruded from it. Low, concrete, windowless on the seaward side, ringed in fencing that tries to look agricultural and fails. No sign. Buildings that important never say their own name.
The car stops at the gate. Somewhere below us the sea keeps hitting the rock with a sound I feel in my sternum, patient and vast, over and over, like something enormous asking to be let out.
I step into the wind. It cuts straight through my coat, and I stand there whilst the driver lifts my suitcase out, and I look at the grey building against the grey sky above the grey water.
The match head flares. Just slightly. Just once.
Something in there is worth dying for, according to the paperwork. I walk towards the gate to find out what.
