38. Daylight

2020 January 5
Sunday

“It’s January some time. The fourth or the fifth or the sixth. Don’t know. Think it’s a Monday. Or a Tuesday. Don’t care. Anyway. This is my diary.”

Bare mattress. Stained pillow. He doesn’t know where the bottom sheet’s gone. It doesn’t seem to matter. Not his problem. Easy to pull most of it back together. When it matters. If it ever does.

Dictaphone’s on the pillow. Harmony’s. When she said he had to have one, he expected a tape recorder. He doesn’t really know why. Seen them on TV, maybe. But this one’s more like one of those MP3 players a few kids still had at primary school. Just five buttons and a small screen. It rattles. It probably shouldn’t rattle.

He plays it back sometimes. Listens to his voice. It helps him sleep.

Sonia used to talk to him at night. When he was restless. Helped him sleep.

She left.

“Another day. Another day, another day, another day. Same as. No. Not the same. Got angry. At breakfast. Got a right to it. Kept here, told shit, fed shit. Hah. But still. Got angry. Threw something. Punished. Usual consequences. Should have thrown it at Martin. Like Aaron used to. Little shit. Fucking teacher’s pet. But yeah. In the cell, no food. Same threats, same punishments. I keep doing the same things. You keep doing the same things. Nothing changes. I behave; I get food, I get light. Don’t behave; no food, no light.

“You don’t even hurt me any more. Not really. Not like Dec. He could take it, couldn’t he? Fucker was covered in bruises. Took it smiling. Showed it off. Like he was proud of how much he got hurt. Thought it was stupid at the time. Didn’t say it because you don’t, do you? But I thought it was stupid. And a bit of a show he was putting on. Don’t know if the show was for us or for you. But yeah. Mainly stupid.

“And then you started locking me in the dark.”

They used to tase him. Not so much since Will went for Maria. And then he hurt himself. In the cells. Trying to show them. Trying to show her.

Didn’t work.

Stupid.

Since then, since the dark, it’s been the same.

All the same.

Except now he has to do this.

“Don’t behave; no food, no light. Now, no diary; no food, no light. Don’t know why you want to know what I’m thinking so much, Harmony. Isn’t the point to keep us here until we break? S’what Will said. But Will changed, too, didn’t he? Will and Raph. And Dec’s gone. So maybe they broke. Maybe Will was right. Or maybe they started behaving. Don’t know. Don’t care. Not gonna.”

They stopped hurting him, so he hurt himself. But he couldn’t keep it up. Pain feels different now.

Another thing Will said: people are machines. Machines are simple. And the girls have the manual. The right chemicals and everything changes. Just got to wait it out.

Machines are simple.

“What you want from me. It’s impossible. Maybe just for me. Will and Raph. Broken or… or something else. And the others, Stefan and that. I’m not as stupid as Raph thinks I am. I’ve been around. I know about trannies. Was one lived on the estate. It’s in the brain. And it’s always in there. Like with Stefan. Obvious. Should have seen it. Know what to look for. But people don’t change. Unless you break them.”

People don’t change. Sonia thought he would. He didn’t realise until close to the end. She said what she thought she saw in him wasn’t there.

Was never there.

Couldn’t be found.

So she left.

He went after her.

He was always that guy. The one who throws the first punch. The one who ups the ante. It was in Dec, too. But Dec tried too hard. Boasted too loud. Made everything into a show. Thought it was supposed to be fun.

You lose control. You lose everything. Not fun.

“I’m not Raph. Not Will. You can’t make me give in to this. Can’t break me. I’m not Stefan. Not Aaron. It was never in me in the first place. Don’t know about Martin. Or Adam. Shit. They might be the smartest ones here. Or even dumber than Dec. Don’t know. Don’t know much of anything. Don’t know how you think shutting me in the dark and pumping me full of chemicals is going to change who I am. But I know this.”

Yeah. He knows who he is. What he is. What he always was. Always will be.

He went after Sonia.

She moved on. Too quick. Like she planned it. Like he didn’t matter.

And he worked it out right there: he didn’t. Blood on his knuckles and he didn’t matter.

“You can take my food. You can take my light. You can take my body. You can even take my fucking balls, like you said. But I have something I can take from you, Harmony.”

He puts the bed back together. Pulls the duvet out from underneath. Pillowcase. Even finds the bottom sheet. He puts it all together and climbs in.

There’s a light on the dictaphone. Dim but enough. He doesn’t need to see much under the duvet. As long as he can’t be seen.

Electric shaver in the bedside drawer. Took it half apart already. Found what he needs. Not exactly easy to use. Not exactly sharp. But he’s a machine, isn’t he? Like all of them. Machines are simple. Cut the wires.

It’s going to hurt. But pain is different now.

 

* * *

 

Frankie throws down the triangle and racks the pool balls again. She’s three-two; Frankie’s won three games, and Frances, the slightly more respectable version of herself she likes to think Val sometimes sees, has won two. On the chalkboard on the wall, the one with the barely rubbed-off remnants of other people’s games still marked on it, Frankie’s been recording her scores in a cramped corner. Reflective of her intentions here: stay out of the way, minimise her presence, try not to change anything important. Leave a fixable trail.

What pretentious horseshit. And hopelessly naive.

She hits the cue ball too hard and with an unintended spin. It leaves the felt for a moment and cracks hard into the racked balls; Frankie almost pockets the black on her first shot of the game.

Pathetic. The girls back home would laugh. Nerves are shot, are they? Conscience playing up, is it? Too scared to shoot straight, are we? Poor old woman. Poor old woman who’s going to bloody well rot, if not here then in some other ignominious place, unloved and unwanted.

“Now that,” she mutters to herself, “is pretentious horseshit.”

Just a bad shot, that’s all.

She’s tidying up the game — another win for Frances, the sanctimonious bitch; three-three — when the door unlocks and the girl who first let her into the building stands there. Waits for her.

Tabitha. She looks harried, but who wouldn’t after a day like today?

“Maria didn’t kill you, then?” Tabitha says, contriving to sound only mildly interested in the answer.

“She’s not the first to have a go,” Frankie replies, and that’s true, though before yesterday it’d been decades since someone had a pop, and on balance, she prefers calm. She’s also not entirely sure why she’s playing it so casually arrogant with Tabitha, except that to show empathy for Maria would still feel like spitting on her undug grave.

Maria deserves better than Frankie’s understanding.

And then Tabitha laughs, and Frankie decides right there that she likes her. But she has to know:

“Is she okay? Maria?”

“She’s fine,” Tabitha says. “Sleeping it off. One of the boys attacked her, a bit over a month ago. She was in hospital with a concussion. We thought she’d recovered completely; obviously not.”

“That’s… a lot of information to just give me,” Frankie says, frowning.

“If you’re staying,” Tabitha says, “then you’ll hear it sooner or later. You’ll hear everything. Dunno what information security was like under your Dorothy, but this lot are terrible gossips, and they don’t always check who’s listening, first.”

Frankie almost asks how they’ve managed to keep the place quiet these last fifteen years, but she doesn’t waste Tabitha’s time with it; it’ll be the same old. Dorothy’s regime was the same: tight-lipped outside the building, but once you’re through the doors, you get read into everything almost by default.

When you have so few people and so many responsibilities, secrets are difficult to keep.

She asks instead: “So, I’m hanging around, then?”

“No idea,” Tabitha says, and beckons her. Frankie lays down the pool cue — she’d been grasping it to her chest like a defensive weapon, she now realises — and joins her in the doorway. “But you need to eat,” Tabitha continues, “and I’m not having my dinner in here with you. It’s depressing. And Yasmin and Julia used to fuck on that table. So come on.”

 

* * *

 

Frustrating to be stuck in here, watching the screens, listening to a mix of all the basement microphones — set to low, because there’s only so much of a headache Indira wants to go to bed with tonight — while upstairs a grand, practically operatic drama plays out. The cast of characters could certainly have been ripped from the pages of any of the plays or TV shows she’s auditioned for:

Valérie Barbier, the long-lost friend, back from the dead!

Trevor Darling, the missing soldier, recovered but grievously altered by his ordeal!

Frankie Barton, the enemy-turned-co-conspirator, key to their escape!

And they leave in their wake the bodies of their captors, a stolen car, and a burning English manor house!

Easy to picture the moment of the double-cross, when Frankie turned on Dorothy Marsden, when together they killed the soldiers and lit the fire — or knocked over a candle on their way out, or something — and took a vehicle, making their escape into the night. Frankie’d have a speech, maybe, or Valérie; something about crying havoc, and—

No, wait. She shouldn’t put Shakespeare in someone’s mouth. That’s hack stuff! And, gosh, wasn’t Christine offended that Indira complained when they had the guy in the Star Trek movie start spouting off. You don’t borrow from the bard when you’re riding around inside a great big bloody spaceship!

But Valérie would say something. Something deeply resonant. Something to get the blood boiling. And then she’d fire her gun and triumphantly execute her torturer. That’s the sort of thing you close an act on. Fade to black. Next scene.

Goodness. It’s an exciting time to be in the business of Ahem. And here Indira giggles to herself, because she and her fellow sponsors, when they talk outside the Hall, often mumble at this point, or fake a cough, or otherwise obscure the precise nature of the business they are in. What do you do for a living? Oh, I’m deeply involved in the rehabilitation of Cough. Ah, charitable work; most admirable.

But she’s not outside and she’s not even with her fellow sponsors. She’s stuck here, watching a bunch of barely moving girls and boys on a screen, narrativising her thoughts out of boredom.

‘Narrativising’? Is that a word? She should ask Christine. She won’t know, not right off the bat, but she likes solving things, and it’s been a while since they sat down and just talked, and it’s not like Indira needs an excuse, not really, since Teenie will make time for her, and Indira tries very hard not to exploit that, and the poor girl’s been so on the go lately that anything more than a hello and a quick hug feels like encroaching on what little time she has left to spend with Paige — and to sleep! But maybe a little interaction like that wouldn’t be so bad? An opportunity for Christine to look something up for her, to help her in a (really) small fashion, for them to connect as sisters… That seems adequate recompense for having to sit down here, watching the bloody screens while things are happening, like she’s on punishment duty or something, like she’s some foolish little thing like Nell who can’t control her temper.

Bored.

Bored.

Bored.

“O Romeo, Romeo,” she whispers, tapping her fingers idly on the security desk, “wherefore art thou, Romeo! Deny thy father and refuse thy name. Or, if thou wilt not, be— Oh!”

Something’s happening. Not much, but she’ll take it over literally nothing. Ollie, who’s been sleeping on a bare mattress whenever he’s out of the cell and back in his room, has reassembled his bed. Not super notable, but it’s a change in behaviour and thus must be noted and investigated and — yay! — it’s a chance to talk to someone!

Her phone’s out on the desk in front of her, and she snatches it up and calls Jane. It takes her a little while to pick up, and Indira watches on the screen as Jane picks her way out of the lunch room, where most of the boys and girls are still eating their ersatz picnic, and into the corridor. She brushes fingers with Amy on her way past, and isn’t that adorable?

“What’s up?” Jane asks.

“It’s Oliver,” Indira says, leaning down so she can speak quietly into the mic. “He’s remade his bed.”

“Okay. And?”

“And that’s unusual. And Harmony’s asleep, or she blimming well should be. Can you check on him?”

“Yeah. Sure. Can I bring backup?”

“Obviously. Take Lisa; I don’t want—”

“Yeah, got it,” Jane interrupts. “No newbies.”

She hangs up, and Indira quickly dials Tabby, who picks up considerably faster than Jane did.

“Yeah?” she says. She sounds like she’s eating.

“Jane and Lisa are looking into something downstairs. Can you supervise down here? Just for five minutes?”

“I’m already supervising,” Tabby replies, annoyed. “I’m on Frankie duty.”

“Bring her with you,” Indira says, “and leave her with me on your way down. I’m armed; I’ll drop her so hard if she tries anything.”

And if she doesn’t try anything, then she can answer a few more questions, can’t she?

 

* * *

 

Fucking Ollie. So he made his bed for once; who cares? Things were nice and settled in the lunch room, and the girls were even getting on with the boys — with Steph’s and Bethany’s help — and Jane had just been starting to relax, so of course something new has to happen! Ollie couldn’t’ve just slept face-down on his bare mattress like a fucking weirdo, like he always does?

Protocol, though. Changes in habits have to be checked up on. Maybe it’s a good sign. Maybe he’s starting to take care of himself and his space. Maybe he’s finally coming around. Maybe he doesn’t want to be left behind by Raph.

Raph, though. She’s actually quite proud: he’s doing well. He doesn’t like any of it — though he will, she’s sure; it’s just a matter of getting him to the point where he can admit it, and she’s slowly bleeding away his arrogance and his cocksure front, drop by drop — but he’s not fighting her any more, so this is the point where she gets to stop being his adversary and become something else. Whether it’s a friend or merely a more pleasant jailer is mostly up to him.

Ah, here’s her relief. Tab jogs down the last few remaining stairs, smiles at her on her way past, and takes up Lisa’s place in the lunch room. Immediately starts talking to Melissa. And that frees up Lisa, who joins Jane in the corridor.

Time to check on Ollie, then. Fortunate that the journey to his bedroom is so short, and that she’s been so occupied with her irritation, because Ollie’s still a big lad and she doesn’t like to think about how ugly it could get. She checks, and Lisa, like her, has her taser armed and ready.

She does the double-tap on the biometric reader that causes the door to open on its own, slowly and quietly.

It ought to creak, really, for the vibe.

There he is: a lump under his duvet. Nothing of him is visible; he could be asleep, or he could be waiting for them. With Ollie, either is equally possible.

She directs Lisa to stand ready with the taser, and she reaches out and pulls at the duvet.

It doesn’t come away cleanly. It sticks, and she has to yank on it, and when she does, when it falls away, it’s clear why it stuck, what it was that stuck it in place, and as Lisa gasps at the bloodstained sheets and at Ollie’s prone form, Jane looks straight up at the nearest camera and yells, “Get help!”

 

* * *

 

It shocks them both, and Frankie takes a moment to be reassured by that, because if Indira — who’s turned out to be far more disarmingly charming on her own than when she’s surrounded by her fellow sponsors and is putting on a professional façade — isn’t expecting the sudden display of bloody sheets on the security monitors, it means everything Frankie’s heard about Beatrice’s Dorley is more likely to be true, that they don’t go through people at the rate Dotty’s did…

And then she’s grabbing Indira by the shoulders.

“You’ve got to let me go down there,” she says, as firmly as she dares.

“Wh— What?” Indira stutters. “Why?”

“Look: he’s cut his wrists. I’ve seen that.” Frankie doesn’t shake her. “You know I’ve seen it more than you have. Let me down. I can help!”

Indira takes another moment, and then her expression clears and she nods. “Yes,” she says, shrugging Frankie’s grip off her shoulders and reaching for the security screen. A few taps later — and a quick press of her thumb to a reader, Frankie notes — she says, “There. All the doors between here and there are unlocked. Go.” And then it’s Frankie’s turn to hesitate. It lasts until Indira slaps her on the forearm. “Go!”

“Right.”

The layout’s the same. It’s got to be, right? Beatrice poured new cement into the cracks and rebuilt the doors and had the wiring redone and sorted out the shitty air-con but the layout’s exactly the same, and Frankie relies on this as she barrels down the stairs as fast as she can, all fatigue having fled. She feels like she’s facing down Jake with his gun again, like she’s tasing the soldiers again, like she’s defying Dorothy again, and that feels right, because this lad’s cut his wrists, and he’s cut them the dangerous way, and that means she doesn’t have long, that she’s fighting another inescapable fate. Same way she’s been fighting Trev’s and Val’s and her own.

Throwing herself into another problem feels good. She’s come to hate all this sitting around, waiting.

She makes the main corridor without falling, and doesn’t have the time or breath to laugh at herself. ‘Another inescapable fate’. Being pretentious again, are we? Maybe just embrace it. Like Indira said, while they were waiting for Jane and Lisa to sort themselves out, when they thought Ollie’d just changed his sleeping habits… Everything that’s happening; it’s all a bit operatic, innit?

Left turn into the residential corridor. She ignores the door that used to be Beatrice’s, though she briefly wonders what she thinks when she comes down here, when she faces the place her life was ripped from her; probably why she had the wood-effect laminate plastered over this whole corridor, so it looks less like a torture facility and more like the toilets at a dilapidated Little Chef.

Ollie’s room is right ahead, and Lisa and Jane are waiting with him. Still got the sheets in their hands!

“Out of my way!” she yells, and they both just bloody well look at her.

“Let her through,” Indira commands over the speakers, and they step aside immediately. They’re frowning and confused and possibly a little belligerent, but they’re out of the way, so it doesn’t matter.

Right.

She crouches down by the bed — Christ, her knees are going to kill her for this — and examines the scene before her. Quickly she finds the implement he used. Huh; smashed-up electric shaver, looks like. Not all that sharp. Must’ve hurt. Still, it works for her purposes. She locates the bloodiest and thus probably the sharpest part of the shaver, pulls up a section of undersheet from the bed, snaps it taut under her knee, and stabs through it, opening a hole large enough to get her fingers through. She tears at it, pulls away one ragged strip and then another, and then throws the shaver behind her.

“More strips,” she commands, but she doesn’t stop to make sure the girls are doing as they’re told. Instead she starts wrapping his cuts as tightly as she can.

The material immediately stains red, so she wraps it tighter.

She’s seen this before.

Again and again.

Sometimes she saves them.

Sometimes she doesn’t.

Sometimes—

No. And fuck you, Frances; this is going to be one of the ones you save.

 

* * *

 

Keeps. Hurting. Stupid thought. Why even. Think it?

Obvious.

Ragged cuts. Both wrists. Second. More ragged than first. Course they’d keep hurting.

Not fair. Dropped the blade. Curled up. No more pushing. No more fighting. No more taking. No more.

And still. They hurt.

Like nothing else.

Pulse has a feel.

And it’s.

Fucking.

Weakening.

This.

Is.

.

 

 

No.

Fuck this.

Think. Don’t be weak. Don’t be stupid.

Breathe deep.

Feels like. Like he could throw up. Fighting for air. Drowning in it.

This pain. It’s vital. It’s old. It’s got him.

Old pain. Oldest. When he was six. When his mum. When she hit him. Slipper shouldn’t hurt so much. But every strike. A lesson. Every strike. A humiliation. Every strike. A death.

Dad was disappointed. Take it like a man.

Mum hit him.

Sonia left.

Mum hit him.

Sonia left.

Mum hit him.

Sonia left.

Take it like a man.

He hit her.

Eyes open. Chest heaving. Arms burning. Sheets are pulled back. When did that happen? Is he still here? In the bedroom? Under that fucking dorm? What’s it called? Dor-something?

He shouldn’t forget things. But he can’t think.

When he was six. Cheek red where she hit him. No school for a week. No TV for a week. No computer for a week. No leaving his room. For a week.

Alone.

Inside.

In the dark.

Reliving the pain.

Reliving the end.

Reliving it all.

When he was fifteen. In a fight. At school. Easy win. Boys slamming both hands on the desks, calling his name.

When he was twenty-three. In a bar.

Pulse a rhythmic thump, weak and yet strong, fading and yet so loud in his ears he can hear nothing else. It’s the beat that’ll fucking kill him, and he can hear nothing else. It’s strongest in his ragged wrists, and it feels like he could raise them to his head and hear nothing else, make the beat his universe, the thump-thump-thump-thump of spending all that he is to hang on.

To hang on for one more minute.

The beat of music in a bar.

The beat of hands across his face, too weak to fight back.

The beat of hands on school desks, voices chanting his name.

The beat of music. When Sonia left. Music. In the bar. Where he hit her.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

But. There are. Other noises. Can’t hear. Can’t understand. Opens. His eyes again. Too much. Too bright. Too loud. Can’t think.

Pressure. Going numb. But the pressure. Around his wrists. That doesn’t. Make sense.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

Thump.

It’s. Resolving. Not too bright. Any more. He can see if. He squints. If. He concentrates.

Old woman. Old. Who?

White. White hair. White skin. Frowning. Concentrating. Sticking her tongue out and up. Gran did that. When she was knitting. Before her fingers curled up.

The old woman. Yelling something. Can almost hear it.

“Oi! Indira! I’ve got his wrists bound, but it’s with bloody bedsheets! We’re tourniqueting below the elbow but you need to get your nurse or doctor or whoever the fuck down here right now! Whoever’s taking care of Trev! Fetch them! Now!”

Try to sit up. Need to. Look at her better. Even sounds like Gran. Angry. Right all the time. Would ask him. About Mum. About the slipper. Would say. You can stay with me. If you need. Until her fingers curled up. Until she went. Into the home. Until. She died there.

Try to sit up.

Try.

Nothing left.

“Who. The fuck. Are you?”

Everything he has. Into that. So fucking. Quiet.

“What did he say?”

That was one of. The younger girls. Jane. Raph’s girl. She’s frightened. Terrified. Why? No more Ollie. No more problem.

“Who cares?” The old woman. Again. “Where’s my tourniquet?”

“Oh. Shit. Right here.”

“Ollie?” She’s talking. To him now. He can’t look at her. Unclear. White hair. White skin. Like Gran. But not. She’s strong. “I’m going to raise your arms, okay? I’m going to raise them, and then Jane and Lisa are going to hold them there, okay? Fucksake, I said, and then Jane and Lisa are going to—”

“Crap. Right. Coming. Is this tight?”

“Yes. Ollie, I’m going to wrap this tight, okay? One around each arm. It’s going to feel uncomfortable. And a bit strange.”

He nods. Like it matters.

And then. More people. Indian woman. Reminds him of a teacher. From primary school. Smiles like her. She’s crouching by. The old woman. They’re talking. Too fast. And too quiet. To hear.

“Right.” It’s the new one. “Ollie, we’ve got you. You’re going to be okay. Frankie, right? You’re my nurse. You’re with me. Everyone else, get out of the way and wait for instructions.”

The new one. And the old one. Like the teacher. Like Gran.

A little bit. Of safety.

At last.

 

* * *

 

“It’s Ollie,” Pippa says. “He’s tried to kill himself.”

And Christine’s first thought, which she immediately scrubs from her head, is: It’s only Ollie.

No-one is only anyone.

Her second thought is to reach out for Paige, instinctively, but her hand comes up short because she’s not here. She’s gone upstairs to check on the second years or to have a shower or something. Because that was the fear, the terror she had to live with early on: that one of the others in there with her was going to try it, was going to try what Ollie tried. And she feared the most for the boy who was to become Paige, because he’d been so closed off, so silenced, so hesitant to speak, Christine always thought she could see the shadow of her family, scolding her or hurting her or otherwise keeping her quiet.

Eventually, they connected. Eventually, Paige grew up and out from the silenced boy, stretching limbs that had never before been stretched, becoming a person who had never before been permitted, and Christine no longer feared for her. But right now, Christine sees Paige as she was, and her heart clenches like a fist.

She suddenly does not wish to mourn Ollie’s lost potential.

“How did he do it?” she asks, a question which seems urgent right up until the moment she asks it. Yeah, well done, Christine; not helpful.

Pippa just shrugs.

“Does this happen a lot?” Valérie Barbier asks, and, no, that might be the poster child for unhelpful questions.

“No,” Pippa says, “it does not.” A bit too loud, a bit too insistent, and Christine has to wonder, did she struggle with the temptation? Did someone else in her intake? The whole way this place works is supposed to be that the desire to survive, to see another day — whether it’s to fight those bitches who imprisoned you, or to further distance yourself from the monster you used to be — outweighs all else, and judging that, walking boys and girls along that threshold, is something they’ve supposedly gotten pretty good at, here at Dorley Hall.

Indira says that sometimes boys are closer to the edge before they’re picked up than after. She says those, once given refuge, are often the quickest to turn themselves around. The world isn’t battering at you constantly any more; it’s just this one irritating woman, and she keeps trying to feed you and make you into her Sister. That’s not so bad, really.

It worked on Christine.

“Should we… help?” Valérie says, and she starts forward, towards the stairs down.

Christine holds one hand out to block her, points with the other. “No,” she says. “Look.”

Two soldiers, both women and presumably straight from the hamlet of portacabins out back, are jogging through the dining hall. One of them’s holding a folded stretcher, and the other’s carrying a squared-off case. They ignore the collection of rapt, worried faces as they pass, heading for the basement.

“Did anyone call Harmony?” Pippa asks.

“Dunno,” Christine says, shrugging. “Maria’s got seniority this shift; is she feeling better yet?”

“No. Worse.”

“Never rains,” Christine mutters. She spots an unattended laptop on one of the nearby tables, one of the standard models they issue from the locker in the security room, and she beckons Pippa and Valérie to follow her. She can at least settle her most pressing concern without bothering anyone else.

She opens the laptop and logs in, and after it loads her standard desktop it takes only seconds to bring up the security console. A tap brings up the shift information. “Tabby’s on duty,” she says. “Dira, too.”

As the others absorb this, Christine pulls out a chair and almost falls into it, pathetically grateful that two of the people she trusts most to handle almost any situation are currently in the middle of handling it.

And that means she doesn’t have to get involved.

There’s a scrape to Christine’s left as Pippa pulls up a chair, and a delicate, almost inaudible noise as Valérie places another chair to her right. Pippa points at the corner of the screen, at the window with the camera view, currently slowly cycling through each feed from basements one and two.

“Can we see him?” she asks.

“You sure you want to?” Christine says.

“Yeah. Please? I just— I need to know. One way or the other.”

Honestly, so does Christine. It takes a second to find the right feed. She full-screens it. It’s hard to see what’s going on; she’s got the split feed up, which divides the two room cameras across the left and right sides of the screen, and both views are crowded. There’s not been so many people in one basement bedroom since… Shit, since Steph accidentally said Melissa’s name out loud and ended everyone’s quiet life.

Valérie leans in, taps at the screen, and inadvertently zooms the view so it’s focused entirely on one barely moving head. “Is that Frances?” she asks, as Christine fixes it.

What?

The figure she pointed to suddenly moves, steps up and away from the bed and backs out into the corridor to let in the just-arriving soldiers, so Christine quickly backs out to the camera list and adds a couple of corridor views. On one of them, clear as day, is Frankie Barton.

“Yes,” she says, bringing up the timeline view and scrubbing back. In one corner of the screen, the camera above Ollie’s bed flips back through the last several minutes, and they watch events play out in reverse. “What is she even doing down there?”

“Indira must have let her,” Pippa says.

“Yes, but why?”

“Maybe she didn’t want to give you another job.”

“Not funny,” Christine says, glaring at her.

“Sorry.”

“Look,” Valérie says, “he’s moving. Your boy.”

“Oliver,” Pippa says absently.

“If he’s alive now, and well enough to move, and the blood loss has been stemmed, he will probably live.”

“Seen a lot of this, have you?” Christine snaps, still trying to control her irritation at Pippa’s comment. She definitely needs her fortnight off. Will she even get it, with all this happening now?

“Yes,” Valérie says, and that’s enough to make Christine feel like shit all over again.

 

* * *

 

Frankie finds herself evacuated from Ollie’s room, watching the buzz of activity inside, with the two sponsors, Jane and Lisa, standing to her left and right, and she can’t decide if they’re bracketing her for security reasons or if they genuinely haven’t even processed that she’s here. Lisa, to Frankie’s left, reaches around Frankie to tap Jane on the forearm, and then silently points to the door at the end of the corridor, where another girl — not one Frankie’s met, nor one she recognises from Dorothy’s files — is waiting for her. From the way she flies down the hallway and into her arms, though, Frankie’s going to guess girlfriend.

That’s sweet.

Lisa obviously thinks so, too, because she leans against Frankie and sighs.

“You got someone waiting for you?” Frankie asks.

Lisa shakes her head. “No. Might see if Julia wants to say hi later, though, when she gets home.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No, I’m her—” Lisa starts, and then almost jumps, stands away from the wall, looks at Frankie for a moment as if Frankie is a wild animal, or an eldritch horror, or a TV licence inspector, and then moves to a ready pose. One hand on her weapon. “I’m her sponsor. You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

“Only what I’ve heard, love,” Frankie says, shuffling a little farther down the wall, giving Lisa her space. “We did it differently in my day.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Lisa folds her arms. “Why are you here? Really?”

“Nowhere else to go.”

“Why’d you help him?” She jerks her head back. Behind her, in Ollie’s room, the soldiers are preparing the stretcher, and the doctor, whose name Frankie also doesn’t know, is checking the dressings. The floor is covered with discarded, bloody strips of bedsheet.

“Believe it or not, I didn’t want him to die.”

In Ollie’s room, one of the soldiers — who replaced Frankie as nurse as soon as they arrived — says, “Fatima, he’s out again.”

“Shit,” the doctor mutters. “Alright. We’re moving him now. You lot in the corridor: out the way!”

“Our cue,” Frankie says, and Lisa thumbs open an empty bedroom and they both back into it to let the soldiers pass, with Ollie loaded up onto the stretcher. Frankie gets a good look, and they were right: the lad’s out cold. Not even a flutter on his eyelids.

For want of anything else to do, and because she doesn’t know where Tabitha’s gone, and she doesn’t know who, in her absence, is supposed to be keeping an eye on her, when the doctor leaves Ollie’s room, two-handing her medical kit and dangling a bag off one hand, Frankie reaches for the bag, relieves her of it, and follows her.

 

* * *

 

Christine doesn’t have time to comment on the way Frankie’s followed Doctor Rahman up and out of the basement, through the dining hall and out into the hallways at the back — following the soldiers, who went that way less than a minute ago, hauling an unconscious Ollie — and she barely has time to note Pippa’s reaction (confusion) and Valérie’s (a laugh she quickly covers with her hand) before Harmony comes charging down the main stairway into the dining hall, dressed for sleep and trailing Pamela.

“What’s going on?” she shrieks.

And then there are running feet behind Christine, and Monica rushes past her — Christine doesn’t see from where — and intercepts Harmony before she can go any farther. They have a whispered conversation, with occasional slightly louder interjections from Pamela, whom Monica keeps waving into quiet, and then Harmony yells, “He’s not conscious?”

She practically collapses into Monica’s arms, and Monica, with help from Pamela, leads her across the dining hall and into the kitchen.

“That went well,” Pippa mutters.

“I am confused,” Valérie says.

“Ollie’s sponsor. Only came off shift a little while ago. I thought she was asleep.”

“I assume,” Christine adds, “that she woke up and checked the sponsor channel on Consensus before anyone could break it to her more gently.” Awful way to find out. Presumably someone was going to go up and tell her in person, but got beaten to the punch by happenstance.

Par for the course.

“The usual ess-show,” Pippa says, as if reading Christine’s mind.

 

* * *

 

The smattering of portacabins out in the woods is much more extensive than Frankie expected, and she adds another zero to her assessment of how much money Peckinville has access to, and/or how much it allocates to the Dorley project. They’re laid out in three connected buildings, each one put together from multiple units; Frankie guesses there’s space to sleep fifteen or so people, in addition to the facilities to keep them clean, fed, and from going mad with boredom out here in the woods, since she can’t imagine Elle Lambert wants her soldiers spending time in the Hall and socialising with Dorley women. The medical building, a three-unit-wide slump at the edge of the hamlet, is sparsely appointed but clean, and as she follows Doctor Fatima through the door she spies Trev, sitting up in another bed and watching as the soldiers gently lower Ollie into the bed next to him.

“Hey, Trev,” she says, ambling over. “Got your head screwed back on all right?”

He shrugs gingerly with just one shoulder, the one that won’t interfere with his dressings if he moves it. “Can’t complain. What’s up with him?”

She sits on a chair next to his bed and leans in, covering her mouth. “Suicide attempt,” she whispers. “Unsuccessful one, so far.”

“Oh,” Trev says. “Good. That it was unsuccessful, I mean. What are you doing here? I thought you’d be under lock and key.”

“I helped.”

“With the suicide attempt?”

She laughs. “Nah. After. Bound his wrists, did a couple of tourniquets.”

He feigns surprise. “Ah, turning over a new leaf, then?”

“You little shit,” she says, laughing again. “I’ll have you know, I’m a very caring, compassionate—”

“If you two are going to keep talking,” Fatima says, turning away from Ollie for a moment, “you can get the hell out of my— my— my portacabin.”

“You okay to walk, Trev?”

“He’s fine,” Fatima says. “Just make sure he comes back later. I want him here overnight.” She’s waving an arm in their direction — universal sign language for piss off — but she’s not looking at them any more. All her concentration’s on Ollie.

Fair enough.

The two of them exit quietly, share a few observations about the setup out the back here — Trev points out the camo netting overtop all the buildings, which Frankie hadn’t noticed — and then find themselves stymied by the conservatory door out of which Frankie originally followed the doctor. In her absence, it has shut and locked itself. They knock on the glass for a bit, and wave at any security cameras that might be in the area, before giving up and circling the building.

“Nice location,” Trev says.

“I’ve always thought so.”

“Never seen it during the day.”

“Oh yeah. You were on the washout squad, weren’t you?”

“Just a delivery boy.”

“Very moral.”

“Weird to be back?” he asks.

“Trev,” Frankie says, and then they’ve rounded the corner and the lake is right there.

Christ.

What was she going to say?

Who knows.

The lake. She could walk to it in five minutes. Less. She’s brought them both to a stop and he’s looking at her but she’s just staring at those still waters and remembering a time she considered walking right into them, letting them close over her, letting the light slowly fade out.

It’s too much.

Having to be back here means having to be back here, and it’s not just the rooms that have bad memories and it’s not even the grounds; it’s her, it’s the woman she escaped when she left, it’s the woman she spent all that time at Stenordale trying not to become again, it’s the coward and the sadist and the woman who knew exactly what to do or to say to hurt someone.

Spent a long time telling herself she didn’t have a conscience. Calling it guilt or expedience or boredom or taking a bloody chance on something. And now it pulls at her, it sinks to the back of her mind like tar, suffocating every thought.

She’s leaning against the bare brick wall. Just looking out at the water. It’d be nice to think she’s clear of any cameras or microphones, but she’ll never be that lucky. Used up all her luck getting away from Dorothy a second time without getting a bullet to the brain or a knife in the back.

“Frankie?” Trev says.

“You know what I was,” she says, “when I was here?”

He settles against the wall next to her, as if they’re watching the sunset together and not preparing to count Frankie’s sins, nor admiring the font in which she almost baptised them. “You were young,” he says.

Frankie snorts. “Among other things. You shouldn’t associate with me, you know. Neither should Val. You got a whole building full of nice, normal women in there. Not a one of them ever did what I did.”

“Aren’t they similar, though? I mean, in methods, even if not—”

She slaps a hand against the bricks. It shuts him up before he says anything stupider.

“Only three girls I had a hand in made it out, Trev. One’s Beatrice. Another’s Val. And the third, I don’t know what happened to her. She never contacted me again. I just…” She mimes a plane taking off, though that wasn’t how they managed it. “…I just got her out.”

“When was that?”

She shrugs. “Nineties. Forget when.”

“She didn’t go to the police?”

“’Course not. Told her not to. When Beatrice got out, she wound up at a shelter in town. We found her immediately. She only got away because it was me who went after her; I forget, did I tell you this story?”

“About Beatrice, yeah. Not about the other girl.”

“Yeah, well. No police. I said, get away. I’d been withdrawing money for months and living on Tesco Value pot noodles. Gave her all of it. And off she went. Fuck, Trev, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have contacts. Didn’t have nothing. She could’ve died on the streets for all I know.”

“You still did a good thing.”

Still waters. Could walk it in minutes. This time of year, the cold might make it easier…

“I did not,” she says, closing her eyes. “I spent years and years saving my own skin. Opportunistically saving three people doesn’t make up for… Christ, Trev. I can’t even count them. And you know the worst thing? I could know. I could know how many, right now. They’ve probably got the info here. Beatrice’d tell me. Hell, she probably will anyway, when she decides to lock me up. And I’ll know exactly how many. I’ll know.”

Trev doesn’t say anything. Frankie doesn’t open her eyes. And the lake, not quite still, whispers to her.

 

* * *

 

When it became clear no-one was going to tell them what was going on, they all decamped to the common area, flicked on the TV, and ignored it. Well, Steph ignored it, and so did Bethany, and as for the others, Steph can’t really bring herself to care too much about them right now. Because something’s happened, and she hasn’t felt so out of the loop, so isolated, since before Pippa discovered her secret.

Something’s happened to Ollie. And though Jane and Lisa are back now, replacing Tabby, who vanished back upstairs without a word, no-one’s said a damn thing. They’re all huddled over at the far side of the room, talking amongst themselves.

“Steph?” Bethany whispers, and Steph immediately shakes herself out of it and rolls over, so she can face her. She’s pale, even more so than they all are, down here, away from the sun. “You think Ollie’s…?”

“No.”

“Awful certain of you,” Raph says. He must have overheard Bethany, and Steph recoils from that; whispers between them are for them, not him, recent convert to the team of not-making-trouble-any-more though he may be.

“You got anything useful to say?”

“Actually, yes. And it’s good news. Should lighten the mood.” He pushes up from the cushions he’s been slouching into, and swings himself around to address everyone. “Jane zeroed my student loans. I just realised.”

“What?”

“Well, I was thinking about if Ollie dies—”

“He won’t.”

“Steph,” Raph says, “they carried him out on a stretcher. We all saw.”

“We saw something,” Will corrects him, looking away from the TV. And it’s true: the windows set into the doors here are both thick and small; from a distance, it’s difficult to make out the face of someone you know well. All they know for certain is that two women went past, carrying something. Probably Ollie. Probably not Adam.

“Doesn’t matter,” Raph continues, blithely waving a hand. “Point is, Jane zeroed my student loan. Thanks, by the way,” he adds, calling across the room. She ignores him. “Look. I was thinking about if Ollie’s dead, and then I realised, I’m dead, right? Effectively. Or I’ve vanished or whatever. I’ve been put on a bus. My name’s in the end credits one last time, and then everyone forgets about me next season.”

Steph feels like she just crashed face-first into several conversational hurdles. “What?”

“It’s a TV Tropes reference,” Will says. “And he’s using it wrong.”

“Fuck you, Will,” Raph says.

“You’re using it wrong.”

“Fuck. You. Will.”

“You’re an idiot. Put on a Bus is when it’s left with a chance they might come back. What you’re talking about is Dropped a Bridge on Him.”

“What the hell are you two talking about?” Steph asks.

“It’s a website,” Bethany whispers, taking her hand, “It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m dead,” Raph says. “I don’t leave this place the same way I entered, right? None of us do. Different names. Different birthdays, probably. And you know what that means? Two years and one semester of student loans I never have to pay back.”

Bethany snorts. Will says, “And you think that’s worth losing your balls? You?”

“I’m just trying to look on the bright side. And it’s for all of us, isn’t it? All of us who got snatched out of the university grounds, anyway. Get out of debt free!”

“I didn’t get loans,” Bethany says quietly.

“And I’m not dying,” Steph says. “Not effectively. Not at all. I’m coming back as me.”

“Really?” Raph says, and Bethany taps Steph on the knee, a quiet rebuke.

Steph shrugs; it’s not as if it could stay a secret forever, and she’s long since forgotten who knows what. “I’m on a slightly different programme,” she says.

“Weird,” Raph says, seeming neither excited nor bothered by the revelation.

“Martin didn’t get loans, either,” Will says. “And Ollie and Adam, they didn’t get picked up from Saints. They weren’t students. Neither was Declan, actually. I think.”

“So it’s just us?” Raph says, and holds up a hand. “High five?”

“Shut up.”

“Please?”

Raph keeps his hand upheld until Will turns away, back to the TV, and pointedly ignores him. Bethany quietly laughs and buries her amusement in Steph’s shoulder.

“Raphael,” Jane calls across the room, “stop helping.”

“This is part of my process!” he shouts back.

“There are so many tasers in this room,” Amy says, just loud enough for Raph to hear, and he smiles at her, nods at her, and turns back to Steph and Bethany.

“You all right, Raph?” Steph asks, keeping her voice low, trying to suggest they keep the conversation, however it turns out, between the three of us.

“Just bored of moping,” he says. “I mean, they could have killed us, yeah? We could’ve been dead by now. And, fuck, they could have done to us what they did to Declan, whatever that was. They’ve had our lives in their hands for months, and we’re still here. Eating their food and wearing their clothes.”

“Taking their hormones,” Bethany adds.

“What are you saying, Raph?” Steph says. “That you’re grateful?”

“Fuck no. They still took us, didn’t they? But like I said, I’m finding bright sides. Fed up of sticking my head in the ground, waiting for Declan to do something stupid or Will to try and hurt someone or Ollie to— to do whatever it is he just did. And it’s actually kind of interesting, really, isn’t it? If they’re going to do this shit to us anyway, whatever we do — as long as we don’t push them too far — then why not sit back, let it happen, and see what we all end up like? I think I’ll be one of those nerdy librarian women.”

“You— You want that?”

“No. But women like that are hot. So, what I mean is: fuck it. Caring is out. Whatever happened to Declan is out. Whatever just happened with Ollie and whatever the fuck Adam’s doing to himself in his room; all out. Apathy is in. Sit back and smell the bean bag chairs.”

“Why couldn’t you’ve realised this months ago?” Jane says. She’s walking over, and she leans on the back of the sofa. “Would’ve saved me so much work.” Before Raph can retort, she adds, sounding as exhausted as she looks, “Come on, all. Turn off the telly and sit up at the tables. Tab’s coming back down, and she’s got an announcement to make.”

 

* * *

 

Tabby came up, handed out a few instructions to the assembled women in the dining hall — mostly to get them to disperse — grabbed Pippa, and went back downstairs, leaving Christine blissfully alone in an emptying room.

Almost alone: Valérie, the fifty-three-year-old serial abuse survivor, to whom Christine still does not know how to talk, and who seems quietly amused by everything going on around her, will be back from the bathroom in a minute. She considers messaging Paige, but decides she’d rather keep her out of this whole kerfuffle. Better for her to encounter it all later, when the excitement is over, when people have calmed down.

She tabs through the camera feeds one more time. Steph and the others are assembling in standard ‘disclosure’ formation in the common room, presumably so Tabby can brief them. Adam’s sleeping; she winds back a few hours and finds him variously reading, staring at the ceiling, listlessly playing a game, and sleeping again. Ollie is out of Christine’s range; she’ll have to check with Jan about whether they’re supposed to be meshing their security systems.

“Where did everyone go? Did I miss anything?”

Christine quickly closes the laptop. Valérie Barbier might be an old friend of Aunt Bea’s, but until Christine knows exactly what her clearance level is, she’s not showing her any damning video evidence of the underground torture facility they are not, legally, allowed to operate.

Well, she’s not showing her any more evidence. Dear lord, she’s so dumb.

“In my defence,” Christine says to herself, “it’s been a long year.”

“Hmm?”

“Oh. Nothing.”

“You are right, though,” Valérie says, settling against the edge of the table gently enough that Christine, whose hands are still resting on the laptop, barely feels it, “it has been an extremely long year.”

“Ah,” Christine says, recalling that, no matter how stressed out she’s been lately, no-one has yet pointed a gun at her. “Shit. Sorry. I should have—”

She’s interrupted by a playful poke to the shoulder. “Don’t worry!” Valérie says, and she shuffles up closer to Christine. “Don’t be so stiff around me, okay? I do not intend to spend the rest of my life reliving the atrocities of its first half every time someone is not sufficiently deferential to my pain and suffering. Okay?”

“Okay,” Christine says. She’s caught between parsing Valérie’s statement and being infuriated that Valérie is, like Paige, apparently another woman who can appear effortlessly elegant while lounging artlessly on the furniture, while Christine — for example — has anxiously hiked up her legs under her bottom, and would probably have curled up like a snail if she had a shell. “I get it, I think. Different degrees, but, you know…”

“Of course you do. We were both taken from our lives, Christine. For different reasons and for… different durations, but with similar outcomes, yes?”

Christine grins. “I think Paige would say you dress better than I do, but yes. Pretty similar.”

“This Paige; your… girlfriend? Ah. I see by your blush that she is. Good. I would like to meet her.”

“Really?”

Valérie stands. “Yes. You have so many extraordinary women here. I would like to get to know all of you. It is so much better to talk to new people than it is to be very, very tragic.” She nods in the direction of the kitchen. “Cup of tea? And then perhaps you can finish showing me around.”

Christine, nodding, accepts a hand up and out of her chair, which proves helpful when her partially numbed legs aren’t quite up to the task of holding her all the way up. So Valérie holds her firmly by the upper arm, and Christine follows her into the kitchen, feeling like, perhaps, the last of her awkwardness around her is finally dissipating.

And why not make some tea? Why not take her back upstairs and show her around the rest of the building? It’s not as if there’s much else incriminating above ground except for the bloody mugs.

In the kitchen, Monica’s sitting with Harmony. Pamela, who Christine’s pretty sure went in with them, isn’t around, so presumably she checked the same feeds Christine did, confirmed that Martin’s taking in events with his usual confusing equanimity, and then vanished up the front stairs and went back to bed. Probably a good thing. Harmony, meanwhile, has the look of someone who might, if she were being watched by anyone less intimidating than Monica, have to be handcuffed to the table to keep her in place.

“Valérie,” Monica says, “hello again.” And then she points from herself to Harmony. “I’m Monica, and the stressed-out one there—”

“—shut up—”

“—is Harmony. Don’t worry about remembering all our names on your first day.”

“I make a point of remembering names,” Valérie replies. “It was enforced.”

Monica frowns at that, and Harmony looks like she might cry again; Christine hides her smirk by rushing over to the sideboard and fetching mugs off the mug tree, though she’s interrupted by Valérie, who seems to think the job of making tea is hers. She grabs the kettle before Christine can.

“Would you girls like a cup of tea?” Valérie asks. They both nod, and as she turns back to the sideboard and fills the kettle all the way to the top, she says, “And don’t worry about the boy. Frances was with him, and she’s seen more of that kind of thing than even I have. He’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

“Frankie being present isn’t all that reassuring,” Monica says. “We all know what she used to do.”

“Well, obviously,” Val says, and Harmony whispers something that sounds like, Can’t believe fucking Frankie was there and I wasn’t. She’s fiddling with the thick-strapped watch she habitually wears; it looks odd on her slim wrist. “And now she’s here again, isn’t she? She’s very motivated to help out.”

“I suppose,” Monica says, nodding slowly.

“And she’s— Ah! Speak of the devil!”

Valérie says it just before someone knocks on the kitchen door, and through the windows, Christine can see Frankie. Shit; how did she get out there? At least she’s not alone; the other girl is with her. No, Christine reminds herself, the guy. The one who’s going to be detransitioned, or retransitioned, or whatever. Seems strange to do so without at least giving womanhood a proper try, but Christine’s long since accepted that just because she’s reasonably normal for Dorley doesn’t mean she’s representative of most people who were assigned male at birth.

She lets them in.

“Thank you!” Frankie says, theatrically rubbing her hands together and huffing her red cheeks. “It’s cold!”

“It’s not that bad,” Trevor says.

“Hark at him. He’s got proper clothes on and he says it’s not that cold. Meanwhile, I’m still in Val’s castoffs. Actually,” she adds, turning to him, “I didn’t notice, but you look less—” she gestures voluptuously above her chest, “—shapely than usual. Sports bra?”

“Uh. Yes. And the, uh—”

“Baggy clothes, right. You want a tea?”

Valérie points to the boiling kettle. “I’m handling the tea, Frances. Sit. We will warm you, and then we will get you some fresh clothes.” She glances at Christine. “If that is acceptable?”

Christine doesn’t get to answer, because Monica asks, very suddenly, the question on everyone’s mind: “How did you get out?”

Frankie doesn’t seem bothered by the interrogation. She pulls back a chair and slumps into it. “I was with the lad. Ollie. The one who hurt himself. Went with the doctor, in case there was anything else I could do. Turned out I was just in the way — story of my life — and Trev looked like he was getting bored in there, so I fetched him up and we headed back. Only the conservatory door was closed, so…”

“You came around the front,” Monica finishes. “You didn’t think about, say, running off?”

“In this weather? Besides, why would I show up one minute and run off the next? How’s that tea, Val?”

“I’m sorry,” Valérie says, leaning against the sideboard, “is your last name Smyth-Farrow? Or Marsden? Do you think you can snap your fingers and tea will appear?” She taps a teapot Christine didn’t know they had. “It is brewing, you ingrate. You’ll get it when it’s ready. Show of hands for milk.”

It takes everyone assembled — Frankie aside — a moment to realise she’s addressing all of them, and then everyone raises their hands. She repeats for sugar; only Frankie’s hand remains up.

“Yes, yes,” Valérie says to her, “I know what you like. Enough sugar to sink the Titanic. See how the rest of these young women take better care of their teeth?”

“Val,” Frankie says, “if my teeth haven’t fallen out by now, they’re never going to. I could eat rocks.”

“Disgusting,” Valérie comments. “Help me pass these out.”

Frankie stands up, fetches from Valérie the only mug with sugar in, and two others. Christine can’t help but notice that poor Trevor gets the mug labelled I got the surgery that makes you worse, and she hopes he doesn’t notice. And then she realises Valérie must have switched out the mugs Christine got out originally; she hadn’t thought novelty mugs would be entirely appropriate in the present atmosphere, but Valérie disagrees. Valérie hands her a mug of her own — it says An Englishman’s word is his bond; the rest is surplus to requirements — and they both quietly sit.

Monica seems about to say something, but she immediately quietens, and when Christine frowns at her, Monica nods to the seat next to her: Harmony’s quietly shivering.

Christine, carefully, reaches over and takes her hand, and Harmony grips it hard enough that it hurts a little.

“Frankie,” Harmony says, quiet and hesitant, “how did he seem?”

Frankie leans forward, her face blank. “He’s yours, isn’t he?” Harmony doesn’t nod, but the twitch that crosses her face seems like it’s enough for Frankie. “Well, he was conscious when I got there. I’ll not lie, he cut himself deep. Could have been really nasty. But your girl in the security room, Indira, she saw quickly how he wasn’t behaving like normal, she said how he never makes his bed like he did, so she sent in two of the others, and as soon as I saw on the screen what was up, I asked her to let me help. I’ve, uh, seen a lot of—”

“She knows, Frances,” Valérie says quietly.

“’Course she does. Well, okay, I’d say I got down there in a minute or so, and I got his wrists wrapped, good and tight. Got a tourniquet on each arm, too, just below the elbow. That’s to stop the blood flow. You gotta do it in two places, see? Gotta stop the bleeding and then you gotta—”

“Frances.”

“Right. He was still conscious for that. He was looking at us, looking at me. Knew we were talking. Tried to respond, but he was a bit out of it for that. Then the doctor was there. Forgot to get her name in all the commotion. Fatima Something, I think.”

“Rahman,” Monica says. “Doctor Fatima Rahman.”

“Thanks, love. So, Doctor Rahman, she got my makeshift wraps replaced with proper dressings, a proper barrier so he couldn’t bleed no more, and they improved on my tourniquets, too. He lost consciousness after that, but, Harmony, love, it wasn’t necessarily from blood loss. Could have been shock. Sometimes it’s enough. Or sometimes people go unresponsive, but they’re still conscious. I’ve seen it.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Mon, please…” Harmony whispers.

“Then they took him out to the medical cabin out back,” Frankie says. “Got him settled. Trev and I, we both saw.” Trevor, both hands around his mug — covering the lettering, fortunately — nods when Harmony looks over at him. “He didn’t have time to get in too much danger, and they’ve got blood supplies out back, I assume?” Frankie says this to Monica, who curtly bobs her head. “He’ll be fine. Nice little setup, by the way. Quite plush for a bunch of trailers.”

“Supposed to protect us from your lot,” Monica says.

“Not been my lot for a while, Monica.”

“I’ve done it all wrong with him,” Harmony says. She’s not looking at anyone now, and the hand Christine’s holding seems suddenly like her only human connection. “Should have been kinder. Should have given him a light when he asked for one. Should have anticipated this. But I thought I was so fucking clever. I thought I was… Fuck.” She bangs the hand Christine’s holding on the table, but it’s gentle enough that it doesn’t really hurt. “Shit,” she says. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Christine says.

“You’re doing your best, Harmony,” Monica says. “You are; don’t argue. Everyone knows it. And we all know how difficult this job can be. We know that sometimes they have to get close to losing everything — absolutely everything — before they understand what they have to gain.”

“True enough,” Valérie says.

“It never goes this far, though,” Harmony says.

“It does,” Monica insists. “You know it does. It hasn’t for a while, sure, but it happens. As much as we all try to make sure it doesn’t, it happens. And this time it feels bigger, Harmony, because he’s yours.”

“And because there’s everything else happening at the same time,” Christine puts in.

“I want to see him,” Harmony says, letting go of Christine and pushing back out of her chair, her mug of tea untouched.

“And you will,” Monica says, grabbing her forearm before she can out of reach. “But you’re no good to him right now. You need to sleep, Harmony.”

“Sleep? How can I sleep?”

“I’ll get you something to take with your tea. And then you can get some sleep, and then you’ll take the first overnight rota.”

“Rota?”

Monica nods. “Two people are going to be with him at all times. Right now, it’s Doctor Rahman and Jan; later, it’ll be you and whomever you like. He won’t be alone, Harm. I promise.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

 

* * *

 

Jane had them all sit up at the metal tables, facing towards the TV, and maybe that’s why Bethany, as soon as she sits down, grabs hold of Steph’s hand under the table and doesn’t let go: it’s too much like disclosure day. Too much like the day that ultimately ended Aaron.

They haven’t talked about that day much. Haven’t talked much about Bethany’s old life at all, not really. It’s been a boundary Steph’s kept to, because as much as she desperately wants to talk with Bethany about the things that still hurt her, that ambush her when she’s awake and that come for her in the night, she knows that sometimes it just doesn’t help to talk about things. Sometimes, you just need to put as much distance between them and yourself as possible.

Pippa and Tabby enter as the others are grudgingly take up their seats. Pippa waves to Steph — Bethany, head down, doesn’t see — and joins Jane and the others. Raph, oddly, has chosen to sit with Steph and Bethany, and he nods awkwardly to Steph as he sits down; Will and Martin take the next table over; and that’s it. These are their reduced numbers: no Ollie, no Declan, no—

“Hey,” Will says, “where’s Adam? Isn’t he even going to come out for this?”

Tabby’s leaning against the wall by the door, and she stands to her fullest extent before she starts to answer, and walks closer as she talks, rounding the metal tables and ending on the other side of the couches, near the TV.

“Edy will talk to Adam,” she says. “Later. Right now, he doesn’t know anything’s happened at all. It’s easier that way.”

“What’s going on with him, anyway? He won’t even talk to me any more.”

“And you’re surprised by that?” Raph says. “After what you did? What we did?”

Bethany flinches at the memory but says nothing.

“I’m not surprised,” Will says, “but he should talk to someone.”

“He’ll talk to Edy,” Tabby says. “Look, Will, I know you miss him—”

“Nah.”

“—but he’s got a lot on his mind, and Edy’s the only one who can really understand him.”

“What’s he got on his mind that the rest of us don’t?” Will asks. He’s tapping his fingers slowly and arrhythmically on the metal table. “Aside from Steph, I s’pose.”

“And you,” Bethany points out quietly.

“Look,” Will says suddenly, turning around in his seat, suddenly animated, “whatever you think you know, you—”

“William,” Tabby says. When she has him successfully diverted — and Steph has to be amused; the Will she knew when she first arrived would never allow himself to be controlled with a word — she continues, “There’s no shame in it.”

“Look, forget about me,” he says. “We’re talking about Adam. He’s completely checked out. Fuck it, Tab; where’s he gone?”

Tabby smiles at him. “Never lost a religion, have you?”

Will snorts. “Obviously not.”

“Just give him the time he needs, Will. Please. And that,” she adds, stepping away from his table and raising her voice, “goes for all of you. Adam’ll be back when he’s ready.”

“Fine,” Raph says. “Okay. What about Ollie?” Steph glances over; he’s more tense than he probably wants anyone to think he is. Strange. She thought he hated Ollie. She thought Ollie hated him.

Ollie hates everyone, though.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” Tabby says. “You’re big boys and girls. The fact is, he tried to kill himself. He took apart his electric razor and cut through his wrists with it.” The hand holding Steph’s suddenly freezes. Steph leans over, presses her shoulder into Bethany’s. “Fortunately, we got there in time. We have a doctor onsite. She’s with him now, and he’ll have round-the-clock supervision.”

“For how long?” Raph asks.

“Until the sponsors say otherwise.”

“When’s he coming back down here?”

“When the sponsors think he’s ready. He’s not getting a holiday,” Tabby adds, holding up a finger to address a complaint no-one seems about to raise. “He’ll be in restraints and under watch.”

“We’ll get him a TV, though,” Jane says. “Or a tablet. Something to watch things on.”

“Yeah.”

“So he’s going to be okay?” Steph asks, very aware that Bethany hasn’t moved except to take shallow, anxious breaths since they started talking about him.

“He is.”

“Then, um, can we go? I’m tired,” she improvises, painfully aware of how obvious she’s probably being. She forces a yawn. “I could really do with a nap or something.”

“Oh,” Tabby says, surprised. “Sure, I suppose. Knock yourself out.”

“Don’t take that literally,” Raph says, as Steph and Bethany climb out of the metal chairs and walk stiffly out of the room. Steph can hear Jane scolding Raph and Tabby talking to Will and Martin as they leave, but Bethany doesn’t say a word until the doors swing shut behind them and they’re alone in the corridor.

“Thanks, Steph,” she whispers.

 

* * *

 

Frankie’s quietly drinking her tea — from a mug labelled There once was a young man from Saints / Whose behaviour was quite the disgrace / So we faked that he drowned / And kept him below ground / In the end we gave her a new face — and listening to Val and Trev talk to Monica. Mostly boring stuff about the current intake, though Val is listening with every impression of fascination. Trev just looks tired. Understandable; Frankie doesn’t understand how any of them are still going. When did she last sleep? In the car? Why are they all still walking around?

Might just be that everything’s new again. Everything’s exciting. Hopeful.

For them, anyway. Trev’s going to be a man again, eventually, and the Smyth-Farrows aren’t going to be able to touch him. And Val, well, she’s a free woman for the first time since she was a teen; she’s soaking up every tiny detail. Doesn’t seem to bother her that this was the place she was first tortured, the place she was made into who she was. Woman’d give a whole team of psychiatrists the best day of their lives if she let them poke around inside her brain.

Frankie, though, still doesn’t know her fate. And the worst thing about a plan with a good chance of dying is that when you survive it, you have to live through all the bullshit you’d hoped to avoid, by virtue of being fucking dead.

The lake is still tempting. It’s certain.

“Heads up, Frances,” Val says, pulling Frankie’s attention away from the grain of the wood and back towards the people again. Val’s gesturing with her mug — which says If at first you don’t succeed, castrate him and try again — and in the doorway through to the dining hall are two people: a short — very short, for this place — Black girl with glasses and tightly tied-back hair, and…

Yeah. Beatrice Quinn.

It’s time, then.

“Hi, Beatrice,” Frankie says. “Properly, this time.”

Beatrice, to her credit, completely fucking ignores her and turns instead to the girl at her side. “Abigail,” she says, “you’re happy with our arrangement?”

The girl, Abigail, nods. “Yes, Aunt Bea.”

“Then go get something to eat. If you need to microwave any of it, please use one of the other kitchens. Oh, and Abigail,” Beatrice adds, before Abigail can quite vanish around the doorframe, “do tell Amy Woodley that I need to talk to her some time. It’s not urgent and she’s not in trouble, but we do need to speak about some people of… mutual concern.”

“Will do, Aunt Bea,” Abigail says, and waves to the room. “Hi and bye, all.”

“Hey, Abby!” Monica yells after her. “Tell Amy we’re going to start charging rent if she keeps hanging around here!”

“No!” Abigail yells back, and then it’s just Beatrice and the rest of them.

“Ladies,” Beatrice says, sitting down at the far end of the table from Frankie, “the room, please.”

“Come on, Valérie,” the one called Christine says, and Frankie has to be impressed; she’s got the pronunciation down pat in just a few hours. “I can finish giving you the tour and we can go find Paige. Trevor? Wanna come?”

Trev abandons his second cup of tea and follows them out, though he turns and winks at Frankie before saying quietly to Val that he thinks he’ll just find a quiet corner for now, and read.

And then Frankie and Beatrice are alone together.

“We need to catch up,” Beatrice says.

Her voice, now that Frankie has her alone and can concentrate on her, is not as Frankie remembers it from the day she took back the Hall. Nor is it how it was earlier today, when Frankie first saw her again. It is low, on the lowest end of alto, and delicately controlled, and it is quiet. It reminds Frankie of someone else, of one of the aristo women who visited Dotty’s Dorley occasionally, and who was so absolutely convinced of her own superiority that it seemed to rub off on everyone else. She would whisper and the room would quiet.

When Frankie knew Beatrice — when Beatrice was David or Dee — she was as coarse as Frankie herself; this mode of speech is learned.

Who from? Elle Lambert? Whatever; Frankie finds herself wanting to walk back the accent she’s adopted and talk like she used to, before decades of association with Dorothy, the social climber, softened her. She wants to rub it in: I remember where you come from.

It’s an unhelpful impulse. She squashes it. Who cares if Beatrice sounds different? Maybe it started when she met Lambert; maybe it’s from before, from the sketchy period of her life about which no-one seems to know. And so what if it’s an affectation; the voice is a tool, and Beatrice is using hers to tell Frankie that she is at her most formal and least tolerant.

Besides, you shouldn’t be a cunt to someone just because she reinvented herself, especially when it was you who did it to her in the first place.

“Tabitha spoke to me,” Beatrice says. “And Valérie and I talked of it a little. Much more in the future, I imagine. I understand that you claim you are responsible for my freedom?”

What to say to that? Frankie makes do with a shrug. Any more might ignite Beatrice.

“I am told you let me run,” Beatrice says, “and that when I hid at the homeless shelter, you followed me and pretended not to find me. And yet…” She leans forward on the table, chin resting on the back of a hand. “And yet I remember my earlier excursions. I’m sure you do, too. Do you recall threatening to pull down my skirt in public?”

“Yeah,” Frankie says. “I do.”

“Help me square this circle, Frances.”

Hah. No-one calls her Frances except Val. Those two must’ve got close, quick.

Doesn’t matter. Think! What should she say? How should she say it? Forget about the fucking lake. Forget about her stupid conscience. Suddenly she’s invested in her own survival for the first time in a long while, and she’s not exactly sure why; maybe she wants to live long enough to see Dorothy burn; maybe she just wants to see a nice, wholesome Dorley intake. Maybe she never had the death wish she thought she had. Maybe she was just — what did Trev say that one time, that therapy phrase? — processing her emotions.

Maybe she’s just a coward, same as usual.

Sod it. Just lay it out.

“There were too many of us around, Beatrice,” she said. “Karen and Tilly and Sharon and the rest. They always had someone on you. And we were all watching each other, too.”

“Why allow me out at all?”

“Boredom. Experimentation. The others, they wanted to see how you’d turn out if you got a taste of the good life before we shipped you off.”

“And you?” Beatrice asks carefully.

“Six of one,” Frankie says. “Felt sorry for you. Thought you needed an outlet. But also… Yeah, I was interested. Never liked turning out basket cases.”

“How altruistic.”

Frankie hardens her voice. “The ones who were stable… They lived longer.”

“Don’t talk to me about the others. Tell me what you did to get me out that I didn’t do myself.”

“All of it. Sorry, but it’s true. Oh, you wanted it, yes, and that was all well and good, but you needed the opportunity and it needed to be safe. Or not safe. You were still being thrown to the wolves. Just not our wolves. Anyway, on the night you got out, it was late. Really late. And there weren’t many of us about. And we were having work done on the premises, so there was more gaps in the net than usual. I mean, you were practically the only person in the building that night. Above or below ground.”

“And the keys?”

“Yeah. Meant you to have them. You’re not a good pickpocket.”

“You’ll understand if I find this hard to believe.”

Frankie’s turn to lean forward. “Yeah. Obviously. I know I have no credibility, and I know my history. Talk to Val about me. Talk to Trev. They’ll tell you: I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not. I’m a monster, Beatrice. I know it. Always covered my own hide first. A few opportunistic acts of kindness don’t change that. Hah; all the same,” she adds, “I was half expecting old Dotty to gut me when I came back empty-handed. But you weren’t Val, happy to say. She might have found you interesting for a little while, but there was never any money wrapped up in you. Caught to spec, you might say. Speculatively mutilated. She forgot about you easily enough after you were gone. Or made herself forget.” Frankie should probably stop talking at this point; she doesn’t know why she can’t. “I think if she’d punished me, it would’ve given the game away. She wouldn’t’ve been ‘Grandmother’ no more, just a woman, growing older, losing control.”

Beatrice stares at her for a moment, expressionless, and then nods.

“I don’t trust you, Frances,” she says. “And I will never trust you. There is nothing you can do, no life you can save, that will endear you to me. But you helped Valérie. You helped Trevor. You even helped Oliver. I know someone useful when I see her, and I am not in the business of throwing people away. I prefer not to be, anyway.” Silence again for a short while. Frankie lets it grow to fill the space. Eventually, Beatrice continues, “You can stay here. We’ll find you a room. You won’t be a prisoner, but I wouldn’t advise that you stray too far from this building.”

“Yeah, no,” Frankie says. “Doubt I could get a mile away from this place without being knifed by some Silver River bastard.”

“You’ll tell us everything you know, obviously.”

“Well, yeah.” Frankie taps a finger on the table. Creates a little time. “Can I make a request? No room on the ground floor, please. Or the first floor.”

“May I ask why?”

“I got as many bad memories here as you do, I think.”

 

* * *

 

Apparently Liss, Shahida and Amy are still being debriefed — and relieved of their temporary weaponry — so after a quick chat with Christine and Valérie, who subsequently vanish up the central stairs in search of Paige, Abby makes herself busy assembling a selection of takeaway food. There’s always a stack of miscellaneous and mismatched trays in the corner of the dining hall, and she’s borrowed two. Liss or someone can help her carry it all upstairs.

She’s not looking forward to facing Liss and Shahida. She ran and she knows it, and so do they, and while she has all kinds of good and reasonable arguments as to why she ran, she knows they’re all bullshit. And so do they.

Part of the arrangement: sort your shit out. Not the greater part of the arrangement — which mostly involves negotiating, writing and signing an updated NPH, so one or other of the elves back at head office can propagate little bits of proof throughout the country’s disorganised electronic infrastructure — but, Aunt Bea pressed on her, an important part. Don’t let people leave you, Bea said, and don’t leave people. Don’t waste chances, or you’ll wake up in your fifties and still be alone.

Unsettling to see Beatrice Quinn seem so vulnerable.

She’s looking around the place, refamiliarising herself with it all — it’s not long since she was here last, but things at the Hall change quickly as much as they stay resolutely the same, and if you don’t keep up, you feel out of the loop pretty quick — and thus has her back turned when the girls come pouring out of the stairwell to the basement. She hears them coming, but doesn’t have time to turn around before a pair of pale forearms lock around her waist and a chin props itself on the back of her head.

“Hi, Liss,” she says.

“Hi, Abs,” Melissa says.

Liss always likes to say she fits perfectly there, but it’s not quite true; there’s only ten centimetres between them, so she has to stand on her toes so she can properly wield her height advantage against Abby. It would be easy, therefore, for Abby to press back lightly with one foot, knock Melissa off balance and turn the tables on her, but they’re not there yet. They may not ever be again.

The thought is depressing enough that Abby leans into Liss’ embrace instead.

“I’m sorry I didn’t—”

“Shush,” Melissa says, releasing her and giving her a chance to turn around. Abby does so, and finds Shahida and Melissa’s other friend, Amy, waiting a respectful distance away. Amy waves, Shahida smiles. Melissa looks radiant. “Don’t say anything dumb, Abs. I’ve missed you.”

“I ran from you.”

Melissa frowns, mock-disappointed. “What did I just say about dumb things? Anyway, I ran first. I wasn’t fair to you. And,” she adds, before Abby can correct her horrendous mischaracterisation of their relationship, “I don’t want to talk about that now. Because, Abs, I’m so tired. So I have a suggestion.”

“My idea, actually,” Amy says. She’s investigating a mostly empty pizza box, and when she looks back at Abby it is to cheekily pop a slice of pepperoni into her mouth.

“Shut up, Amy,” Melissa says, without looking behind her. “Let’s go upstairs. The four of us. My room or yours. Because I want to reconnect, Abs, and I want to apologise, and I want to talk into the night, but right now all my body wants is to eat and sleep. So let’s pick a room and put on a movie and eat until it knocks us all out.”

“Yeah,” Abby says, nodding, “let’s do that.” Behind Melissa, Shahida seems to sigh in relief.

“Wanna steal some food?” Melissa says.

Abby taps the trays she’s been assembling. “Way ahead of you.”

 

* * *

 

Bethany’s way too warm. Her own stupid fault, sure. But now Steph’s leaning up against her and she looks and sounds really comfortable and if she’s going to remedy the situation before, e.g., her organs start boiling in her belly, she’s going to have to move her and spoil everything.

Back in the common room, Bethany couldn’t deal with it. Any of it. And Steph was so good. Didn’t ask questions. Just let her get the fuck out back to Steph’s room, and let her wrap herself in the duvet until she looked, per Steph, ‘like if ET had better skin’.

Bethany hasn’t seen ET, but she’s seen screenshots. Memes. References in TV shows. Little alien bastard looks like a Peperami; she hopes she looks better than a fucking Peperami. And then that’s a stupid thing to think of, because she used to get Peperami at the tuck shop at school, and that takes her right back to the thing she’s been trying to avoid ever since she heard about what Ollie tried to do to himself.

Fuck Peperami and fuck ET. Think about something else, Bethany.

Like how hot you are right now.

Shit. Comforting being cocooned; comforting having Steph on her lap. But she’s going to die of heat stroke, and the heat brings other things with it, so:

“Steph,” she says. A light snore answers her, so she bucks her thigh to nudge her, and says, “Stephanie.”

Steph makes this adorable little moaning noise, which is lovely to hear but not especially useful, so Bethany shifts around with greater and greater urgency until Steph finally, and with much groaning, wakes up, straightens up and stretches.

“Oof,” she says, reaching around to the small of her back and pressing on herself. “That sure was a sleeping position.”

Normally Bethany’d be in there with a stupid comment, but it’s getting difficult to think about that stuff. It’s getting difficult to think about anything else. So she shrugs off the duvet and stands up as soon as Steph’s completely out of her way, the better to walk off some of the energy that’s been building up.

“Beth?” Steph says. “What’s up?”

She shakes her head. Not ready. Not ready yet.

“Okay,” Steph says. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“No,” Bethany says, stopping for a moment. “No, I do. I just— Fuck.” She starts pacing again. “Okay. So here’s the thing. Here’s what’s been on my brain. And I shouldn’t even be thinking about it, you know? Because I made myself stop thinking about it years ago. Like a week after it happened, honestly. But now it’s just there, right in the way of everything, and I just— Fuck. Fuck.”

Steph reaches for her, and Bethany takes her hand, lets herself be pulled back in. She sits down on the edge of the mattress, between Steph’s knees, and leans back onto her. At least she’s not so boiling hot now.

“You really don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want,” Steph says.

“No, that’s just it. I don’t want to talk about it, but I have to, because I keep fucking regressing, you know? Fucking backsliding. Back into him. Back into Aaron.” Steph’s reaction to that is obvious, even though Bethany can’t see her face; neither of them have said that name for a while. Bethany ploughs on. “Because of fucking Ollie, right? Stupid fucker has a go at his wrists and doesn’t even have the good grace to go all the way and cut his fucking hands off or something, and now all I can think about is— is—”

“Bethany—”

“Is when I tried it.”

Steph’s hands freeze on her, just for a moment, and then she gathers her in, holds her tight. Steph’s cheek presses against Bethany’s, and she doesn’t even care that she’s still sore from laser; she presses right back.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she says. “I didn’t cut. No, I was clever. And stupid. But mostly clever.”

“What happened?” Steph whispers.

And Bethany tells her.

There’s a school. And a long, hot summer, one that’s come early, one that won’t break. And a boy.

Aaron.

He’s been at that stupid school for long enough, and with long enough ahead of him, that it feels inescapable. And that’s dumb, because it is, you know, quite literally escapable, in that he can leave the grounds if no-one spots him slipping out through the gap in the fence by the side gate, and he can go see Elizabeth, but there’ve been more people around lately, because of the hot weather, because of the genetic need these braying bastards have to gather on any vaguely flat spot of land and throw cricket balls around — mostly in service of impromptu games; occasionally at Aaron — so he’s been more trapped in here than ever before, trapped with the boys who never let up and who are in infinite fucking supply. And today he’s bruised and he’s probably broken a toe and he’s definitely been kicked in the balls because he refused to cooperate with some bullshit Henry Tarquin Roger Beefcake Landfucker the Third demanded of him, and it’s too hot in the halls and too hot in the dorms and too hot in the places he goes to hide and he just wants out.

Imagine being able to call your mum. Imagine calling her and having her express sympathy. Imagine having her pull you out of the school that assaults you and tries to make you suck the older boys’ dicks and doesn’t even teach you anything useful or important because she loves you and she wants the best for you. Imagine being anything other than a chess piece in training, getting made ready to be put on the board and advance its father’s desire to step forward from the back ranks and, shit, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t play chess, maybe castle something? Or rook something?

Who cares.

Laughter from the other end of the corridor. Hugo Fuckstick Manorshit the Ninety-First and his cadre of lesser aristocunts, probably. Or it could be any of the others; a parade of names Aaron’s aggressively refused to learn, a shapeless, undifferentiated mass of arrogance and sadism.

Yeah.

Move.

He does: he jumps up from the bench he’s been lolling on, here in this relatively untrafficked spot, and jogs off down an adjoining corridor. It’s possible Rowland Harry Peasantdefiler of Ipswich or whoever sees him leave, but it’s hot for everyone, not just Aaron, and he can be fucking fast when he needs to be, and the posh fucker probably doesn’t want to chase him just to end up only with the second most satisfying outcome, which is all he ever gives any of them these days. Better a swollen eyesocket or a week-long limp than the alternative.

He picks up the pace, anyway. Takes a couple of turns. He’s into the staff areas now, he’s pretty sure, so he slows up again, moves more carefully, but there’s no-one around.

He hasn’t been here before, and it takes him a few minutes to orientate himself. He does so, finally, by locating the dean’s office, which he knows well, because he’s been hauled in there time after time to have it explained to him that boys will be boys, that it’s just the rough and tumble of education, that if it was the dean’s day, then bigod he’d have Aaron over his knee with a strap just for wasting his time.

Fuck this place.

And fuck the dean, too.

He kicks at the door, and he’s surprised to find it swings open. Does the man not lock up when he’s not around? Is he so certain of his authority? Is he that arrogant?

It’s at this point that Bethany starts shaking, and she has to take a break. Steph holds her, strokes her cheeks and her hair and gifts loving, gentle kisses on every exposed part of her, reminds her that she is here now, that she’s safe, that she’s not even Aaron any more, and that none of the fuckers can get to her any more, that the doors here lock tight and that the only people who can open them are people she trusts. Maria’s upstairs and Steph’s here and the others, the ones Bethany’s come to know, like Edy and the other sponsors, like Christine and Paige and their friends, are all here and they have all chosen, despite everything, against all odds, to like her and to protect her.

Silence is comfort. But eventually, she has to carry on.

“The boys found me. Don’t even remember which ones. Just that it was three of them. And I couldn’t get away, not in a space like that. They, uh, they—”

“You don’t have to say it,” Steph murmurs, her face pressed against Bethany’s neck, her hands locked around Bethany’s belly.

“After. After. They left. And I was bleeding. Sweaty. Disgusting. Uniform ripped again. Wasn’t in the dean’s office any more. Was in some old room. Old classroom or something. Took me a while to get up again. Had to, though. It was getting late. And I wasn’t sleeping in the dorm. No fucking way.” She swallows, tries to lubricate her throat, because it’s as if the memory has crawled inside her, has scratched and ruined every open surface inside her body. “I took the wrong door out. Ended up in some other office. Some teacher’s. And on the side, there was a big bottle of gin. Almost full. So I took it. Took it and left.” Steph’s still got her tight, and Bethany reaches for a hand, peels it away from her stomach, takes it in both of hers. “Had a place. Old coal shed. Had a few bits there, made it okay to sleep there. Not exactly comfortable, but better than nothing. I didn’t use it much; one night away from the dorms and the shitheads didn’t care, but I couldn’t just disappear. Learned that the hard way. Another story, though. Just— Steph, promise me you won’t think less of me for this?”

“Never,” Steph says, and kisses her again. “Whatever it is, never.”

“I had pills. Took a bunch. A lot. Took them with the gin. And kept drinking. Kept going. Hoped I’d just… never wake up.” She’s captured by the memory now, and she has to follow where it leads, or she’ll never escape it. “It’s all I wanted. To close my eyes and never open them again. Wanted it peaceful, you know? But I was stupid. Drank too much. Threw it all back up. All of it. Remember it so clearly. Still hot, even at night, and it stank, and in the morning it stank even worse. And I was so disappointed, you know? I wanted it so badly. And I fucked it. No-one even found out. Didn’t get in trouble for stealing the gin. Didn’t get in trouble for being away from the dorm. Just went to classes the next day with a splitting fucking headache like nothing happened.” She slumps. “And that’s the story. That’s the worst thing I ever did. To myself, I mean. God knows I did—”

Steph silences her with another kiss. “Stop it,” she says.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Why would I think less of you for that?”

A shrug. A need, suddenly, to become small, to hide, but Steph’s holding her, and the need passes before she can act on it, before she can get away. Probably better. “I don’t know. It just feels like something you should, I don’t know, judge me for.”

“Never,” Steph repeats.

“No,” Bethany insists, twisting but unable to break Steph’s grip, because it’s rising inside her again like bile, like her failure to end it before she could hurt anyone else, like the older boys’ hands on her, “you should. This should be it. You should think less of me!” She’s aware she’s raising her voice, but it’s irrelevant. Boys in boarding school uniforms wait for her at the edges of her vision. “You should hate me!” She pushes forward against Steph, trying to make her let go. “Not just for this! For everything!” It’s all indistinct now. The words in her mouth, the things she can see, the rising heat she can feel. A stultifying summer. Dead grass under cleats. Unmoving, bruised, used bodies. She’s still talking, still leaning into Steph, but the words are losing their shape and it’s all coming out, all of it, years and years and years of shit, enough that it will never end, that it will pour out of her forever, that she will never again be anything but a conduit for the misery and heat of the endless summer.

 

* * *

 

The third floor of Dorley Hall is a transitional space, one which marks a concession made by Aunt Bea and her backers when they had the building renovated: they couldn’t give over just the two top floors to ordinary students of the Royal College, whose genders had been coerced only the normal amount, but nor did they want to lose access to or demolish the more lavish flats that were already in place up there. The solution was to partition the third floor, such that somewhere between a third and a quarter of it is shut behind thick, soundproofed doors and accessible only via thumbprint, and the rest is given over to (mostly) women students from across the country.

An upshot of this is that though the third floor opens straight into one of its two common areas, just as the fourth and fifth floors do, this first common area is truncated, and as such, isn’t much used. Which is fortunate for Abby, as she and the others are going to need to get a large amount of takeaway food from the stairs to her room without getting it predated upon, a task which is considerably more difficult on the upper floors.

“Welcome,” she says, backing through the main double doors, “to the third floor. Keep your arms and legs inside the cockpit and, uh, place your bets now as to how dusty my room’s going to be.”

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” says Liss, following her through with the second tray. “They had a service do the rounds on, what, Thursday?” She turns around for confirmation, and Shahida nods. “Yes. Thursday. They did all the rooms on three, four and five. Pretty sure they’ll have done yours, too.”

“God,” Abby says, “I really hope I didn’t leave any knickers out.”

She has to admit, letting herself into her room, the place would be a strong incentive to stick around even without Christine and Melissa and the others. It’s large, recently renovated, and even manages to be quite quiet, despite sharing a floor with students, largely due to that near-deserted first common area, but also because the residents of the cis floors at Dorley Hall tend to be more studious than your average university student. A side-effect of the various hardship grants, Abby’s always assumed; Saints attracts a lot of the kind of people whose university attendance has been expected since birth, but the residents here, by and large, worked for it.

And, no, she didn’t leave any underwear hanging off the handlebars of her fold-up exercise bike.

“Wow,” Shahida says, taking Abby’s tray out of her hands and finding a clear space to put it down as pretext, apparently, to look around every inch of Abby’s room. “This is huge!”

“Dorley girls get preferential treatment,” Melissa says, setting her tray down on a side table, “and corner suites, if they ask for them.”

“Why didn’t you get a corner suite, Liss?” Amy asks.

“I’m just not important enough.”

“Layout’s different on first and second,” Abby says. “All the rooms down there are basically the same. Up here, it’s more like a trad dorm, but they still had to work with the original room dimensions. So!” Relieved of her tray, she does a little pirouette, ending with her hands spread. “I got the best corner suite on the floor, because I am important. Well, I was. I think Monica does most of what I used to do these days.”

“Christine does, actually,” Melissa says, and fends off a guilty look from Abby. “Sorry. She wasn’t complaining about it, she really wasn’t. It just came up. Monica’s been having a hard time lately, and you know what Christine’s like…”

“Yeah,” Abby says, “I do. I’ll, um, talk to her about that.”

“She’s probably got it all automated by now,” Amy says, flopping down on the shorter of Abby’s two couches. “Have you seen what she can do with a laptop?”

“Yeah, I have. You know the story of how Steph got basemented, yes? Christine brought me in on that. Day one. Or day two, maybe. She was talking to Steph in person while she was still in the cells. Just wandering around our most secure areas like the doors were made of paper. I think, if she wanted to, she could have played a tune on the biometric locks.” She roots around in a drawer and finds what she was hoping to find: a box of decaffeinated tea bags. “Anyone want a tea?"

“Yes,” Melissa says. Abby’s room doesn’t have a kitchen, but she’s got a microwave, kettle and hot plate all set up next to the TV, and Melissa’s been microwaving the food, one tupperware container at a time. She passes the first one to Shahida and starts work on the second.

“I don’t,” Amy says, her head lolling on the couch cushion. “I want to sleep.”

“Tough,” Shahida says, sitting down with her dinner. “I want to eat.”

“Nobody sit on the big couch yet,” Melissa says. “Abby can turn it into a bed.”

“That’s a point,” Amy says. “Who sleeps where? There’s four of us and only two beds.”

“I’ll take the little sofa,” Abby says.

“Abs,” Melissa protests, “it’s your room.”

“I’m shortest. And it’s fine; I’ve slept on it lots of times, remember?”

Melissa nods, smiling. “I do.”

“Liss takes the bed, then,” Shahida says, “and Amy and I’ll have the sofa bed.”

“Hey!” Melissa says, handing a tray to Amy. “Don’t exile me all the way around the corner. You and Amy take the sofa bed, Abby can take the sofa, and we can put some sheets down and I’ll take the floor between.”

“You don’t want to sleep on the floor, Liss,” Abby says.

She shrugs, pauses on her way back to the microwave. “It’ll be about as comfortable as the beds were in the basement,” she says, straight-faced. She leans forward and adds, “You know, the ones you condemned me to.”

Abby, holding two decaf teas in (plain) mugs, says, “I have my hands full; someone throw something at her, please?”

“Ow! Bitch!”

“Thanks, Amy.”

“No problem,” Amy says, and shifts her weight so she can dig around under her bottom. “I have more cushions, if she needs punishing again.”

“I hate you all,” Melissa says.

“I know,” Abby says, handing the mugs off to Shahida and Amy. “Mind giving me a hand with the sofa bed? Assuming you remember how it works.”

It’s not a difficult job, just a cumbersome one, and involves moving the coffee table. They get it done quickly, retrieve their food and their drinks and then the two of them flop down onto the sofa bed. Despite Shahida and Amy’s presence, it all feels very familiar to Abby. As if Melissa had never left; as if Abby had never left. As if neither of them made any of the mistakes that spoiled it all.

“Liss…” she says, about to bring it all up, despite herself. But Melissa can spot her a mile away.

“No,” Melissa says, with a forkful of food halfway to her face. “Whatever you’re about to say, bottle it. I’m serious!” she adds, when Abby tries to protest. “We are going to have a proper talk, all three of us. But it’s going to be tomorrow. Because tonight…” She doesn’t finish, just wriggles her shoulder places in the cushions.

“Yeah,” Abby says, nodding.

“Wait,” Amy says, as Shahida flicks through the streaming app, looking for something to watch, “what do you mean, ‘all three of us’?”

“You’ll be out of here and into Jane’s arms first thing in the morning, won’t you?” Shahida says without looking, still frowning at the screen.

“I wish. I have to go to work tomorrow.”

“Gasp,” Shahida says, deadpan.

“Get a job, Shy.”

“Uh,” Abby says. “Jane Jane? Our Jane? Jane Shearer?”

“Yes, yes and yes,” Melissa says with her mouth full.

“They’re adorable,” Shahida says.

“So adorable they stopped Rach turning us all in.”

“That was Pippa, wasn’t it?”

“Rachel and Pippa?” Abby says, feeling rather behind events.

“Yes,” Amy says, at the same time that Melissa says, “No.”

“Pippa just let her stay over,” Shahida says, “because Rachel didn’t want to disturb her wife by coming home late. They were having—” she screws up her nose, “—a bit of a fight.” Abby makes sympathetic noises, and Shahida adds, “Oh, no, it’s fine; they made up. I got a very graphic text from Belinda thanking me for taking Rachel away on an errand — thankfully an unspecified one — because she tried really, really hard to make up for it.”

“That’s good,” Amy murmurs, sliding a little farther down in the couch cushions, “I’d hate to think of Belinda’s pussy going unserviced.”

“I still have that pillow you threw at me, Amy,” Melissa says.

“Save it,” Shahida says, “give her a few minutes and she’ll say something even more gross, and you’ll be sad you wasted it.”

Amy says, “Fuck you, Shy,” and leans her head against Shahida’s shoulder.

“So,” Abby says, “you and Jane, then?”

“Yes. I mean, I think so. We’ve only known each other a few days, really, so I don’t know if we have a future, but… I think I’d like one.”

“Amy Woodley,” Shahida says, “liking girls. Not on my 2020 bingo card.”

“Yeah, well. Boys suck.”

“We know,” Abby and Melissa say at almost the same time.

Amy snorts, and has to wipe a little food off her lower lip. “I forget, you know,” she says, and points at Melissa. “Even with you, I forget.”

“She’s basically the same as she was,” Shahida says. “She’s just… not sad any more.”

“Call marketing,” Melissa says, nudging Abby with her shoulder. “We have a new slogan.”

“Oh!” Amy says suddenly, grabbing the remote from Shahida and scrolling back up. “Stop right there.”

“You want to watch Mean Girls?” Shahida asks. “Again?”

“Yes. C’mon, Shy, it’s not like we’re going to pay attention to it, anyway.”

“Why do you like it so much?”

“I just… I dunno. It’s funny.”

“It can’t still be funny after the twentieth time, can it?” Melissa says, leaning over Abby.

“Oh shit,” Shahida says, frowning. “You like Regina George, don’t you?” Amy says nothing, but her blush is visible even in the dim light. “Amy! You’ve been a dyke all along!”

“I just like her clothes,” Amy says quietly.

“Really?”

“And her hair.”

“Really?”

“Um. Can I get back to you on that?”

“Please do,” Melissa says.

“Fine,” Shahida says. “I’ll put on Mean Girls. But if you get horny, Amy, I’m switching seats.”

Abby doesn’t make it very far through the movie. It’s warm in her room, and she’s with friends again, and though it’s a different feeling to being around her family, it’s just as vital and just as comforting, and she drifts off to sleep wondering exactly what she can do to keep a foot in both her worlds.

When she wakes a short while later, needing desperately to pee, she realises Shahida and Amy have switched off the movie and taken the bed on the other side of the room, leaving her and Melissa alone, but she doesn’t have time to appreciate their thoughtfulness because she has to lever Melissa’s arm and leg off of her so she can get out of bed before her bladder explodes.

 

* * *

 

The boys — and Will, she supposes — are dispersing, going back to their rooms, and Pippa has a long night ahead of her. Foolishly, she volunteered to take over in the security room so Indira can get some sleep, and though she’s not going to be relieved until six in the morning, at least she won’t be alone; they’re going back to two people in the security room at all times. Turns out there was a reason for all those rules they used to have, and scaling them back to cope with staffing issues can, in fact, lead to disaster!

Pippa could have told them all so. Yes, she didn’t, but maybe next year, when she has a whole year of sponsoring under her belt, she can throw her weight around a little more.

A little normality will return tomorrow, since the sponsors who took the week after New Year off will be back, and taking extra shifts to make up for the time they missed, which means Pippa, like everyone else who’s been working overtime this week, can get some flipping sleep. And Aunt Bea’s going to be offering incentives to former sponsors who’ve since taken wing to give evenings and weekends, which will take even more of the pressure off.

And there can’t be any more surprises waiting, can there? It feels like all the shoes dropped at once, but with Grandmother in hiding — so says the Frankie woman — and the whereabouts of Valérie Barbier and the missing soldier both resolved, what’s even left?

She pokes Tab, who is having a whispered conversation with Will, and points towards the bedrooms, indicating her intent. Tabitha nods and Pippa exits, throwing a quick smile Will’s way. The boy — the girl? — returns it, which is a minor miracle. Whatever Tab and Monica are doing with him and that punching bag is good for him. His fingerless gloves are sort of cute, too,

Pippa’s already checked the cameras. She knows that Steph and Bethany are both in Steph’s room, and that Bethany was having trouble. Steph seemed to be handling it, though, so Pippa didn’t interrupt and didn’t listen in, merely tagged the footage to Maria’s account and left it at that. But she wants to pop in now, if only to say goodnight to the two of them.

She taps out her special knock, so Steph knows it’s her, and after a moment, a subdued voice calls out for her to enter. Inside, they’re both sprawled on Steph’s bed, covers curled up around their knees, with that cheerleader show Bethany likes playing on low volume on the computer screen.

“Hi,” Pippa says quietly. “Just catching up. You both all right?”

“Yeah,” Bethany says, after looking to the side and checking with Steph. “We’re just a bit worn out, you know? Thinking of taking a shower and then getting some sleep. Some real sleep. Not fucked up nightmare sleep.”

Pippa leans against the door jamb. “Ouch,” she says. “Sounds bad.”

“It wasn’t that bad. I just, you know, shrieked right in Steph’s face and then had weird dreams about it.”

“She had kicking dreams,” Steph says, pulling up the covers and stretching out a leg. On her shin, the beginnings of a bruise.

“And I already said you can kick me back.”

“Not going to.”

“You can take a run-up.”

“Not going to, Beth.”

“How long’s it been, anyway?” Bethany asks, pushing lightly at Steph and turning towards Pippa.

“What, since you left the common room?” Pippa says. “I don’t know; an hour? Two?”

“Seems like longer.”

“I was asleep for half of it,” Steph says.

“And then I had an episode,” Bethany continues, “and then I slept. And then we watched TV. Full evening. Hey, Pip, can I ask a favour? Like, make an official request?”

“Sure.”

“Can we have real food tomorrow?”

“What?” Pippa says, “you didn’t like the picnic?”

“Real food,” Bethany repeats.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

They don’t talk for much longer; they’re all tired, and while Pippa isn’t going to have the opportunity to sleep for a good long while, she’s still looking forward to the comfy chairs in the security room, and the opportunity to catch up on TV while watching a basementful of people do nothing more exciting than turn over in bed. Bethany insists she needs a shower — “I’m soaked in terror sweat.” — even more than she needs sleep, though, so Pippa steps aside and lets the two of them out of Steph’s room, clutching robes and shampoo and the cleanser Steph’s finally persuaded Bethany to start using.

They walk slowly, like people walking off a shared injury, and as she watches, Stephanie reaches out a hand. Bethany takes it, and then the bathroom door closes behind her and Pippa, more than anything else, more than she’s exhausted, more than she’s frustrated with how things have been going at the Hall lately, feels lonely, and misses the heck out of Rani.

Maybe she’s not busy this week. Maybe she’ll be up for getting together before the semester really gets going.

She’ll message her in the morning, and hope for the best.

 

* * *

 

“Sorry about the dust.”

“Are you, actually?”

Monica shrugs. “Dunno. Don’t know how I feel about you yet.”

“Yeah, well,” Frankie says, “that makes two of us. And also about—” she counts under her breath, “—seventy of you.”

“Dorley grads?” Monica guesses, kicking at the door when it won’t open and dislodging a pile of something on the other side.

“Yeah.”

“You’re under.”

Frankie’s impressed. “Fewer washouts than I thought, then.”

“We’re getting—” Monica grunts as she shoves bodily against the door; it gives way, and she almost falls into the room, “—better at it. Today’s clusterfuck notwithstanding.”

Frankie follows her through. The room isn’t as dusty as the corridor outside, somehow. Monica wordlessly hands her a mask; one of the same ones the two anomalously above-ground below-ground girls were wearing. Frankie slips it over one ear, for now.

“There’s a vacuum in the storage closet opposite,” Monica says. “It should be unlocked. And, actually, as far as locks go, you have thumb access to the stairs via that door—” she jerks in the rough direction of the end of the corridor, “—but you can’t get through the fire door to the other half of the floor. And you can’t leave the building.”

“Wouldn’t want to,” Frankie mutters. “And, yeah, sensible, cutting me off from the girls.”

The fire door cuts the second floor in half; Frankie’s on one side of it and everyone else is on the other. There’s a windy little corridor that leads to the main stairwell and the lift, and it seems that’s going to be her world for the time being.

Fine with her.

The dust is unpleasant, though. It’s not as thick in here, but it’s still thick, like it hasn’t been touched in years, and Frankie hopes there’s more than just a vacuum cleaner in the closet; she’s going to need cleaning fluid and rags and possibly a scrubbing brush.

Fuck it. She’ll probably clean the corridor as well. It needs doing, and it’s not like she’s going to have much else to occupy her.

“You’ve got your own shower, toilet, et cetera,” Monica says, waving her hand at another door set into a nearby wall. “They’re not so bad; all this stuff got renovated when Bea took over, it just hasn’t been touched since.”

“Still nicer’n what old Smyth-Farrow had,” Frankie says, and it is: for all that, before it burned down, Stenordale had been a genuine slice of English heritage in its truest form — a Frankensteinian amalgam of the least-vital elements of at least four distinct ages of English architecture, haphazardly stitched together and given life mostly via artistic trellis placement — it wasn’t exactly maintained internally to the highest standards.

“Oh?” Monica says, sounding interested despite herself.

“The old pervert spent the last of his money on girls,” Frankie says. “Nothing left for fittings and fixtures.”

Monica leans against a radiator, shaking her head. “Disgusting old man,” she says.

“What do you know about him?”

“Only what I’ve read in the files.”

“Horny bastard?” Frankie says. “Very specific tastes? You don’t know the half of it. The man was a pure sadist.”

“I can’t believe Valérie Barbier was stuck in there with him.”

“Yeah, well, if you get a chance to talk to her about it, don’t.” Frankie sits on the empty bedframe which, to the credit of the original refurbishment, doesn’t creak. “Just don’t. And it wasn’t him, anyway. Oh, he was awful; she told me all about it. But she always was able to compartmentalise that stuff. Even in my day, when she was here, she was confounding Karen’s every effort. No, the thing that fucked her up is all the girls we sent along after her.”

“Ah,” Monica says. It’s a very careful, diplomatic syllable, one which says, I haven’t yet been instructed to murder you.

Frankie barely registers it. This place comes and goes, seems to switch almost at random from being just another old building to being Dorley Hall, and its walls seem once again too tall, too inescapable, too disinterestedly cruel.

“She had to watch them all die. She had to watch him kill them. Girl after girl after girl… I always think I’ve seen some horrors, and then I think of what she’s seen.” She looks up, her vision clearing, the walls receding, and there’s Monica, refreshingly normal, refreshingly now, but glaring at her with the disgust she richly deserves. “I don’t know anything,” she finishes. “Not compared to Val. Look, treat her carefully, okay? Pass it on, but be discreet about it. She’s buried more bodies than even old Dorothy, and she didn’t have a choice in any of it. Give her space when she needs it, give her stuff to do, give her interesting stuff to read and movies to watch and weird people to talk to. Maybe get her involved in the next crisis somehow. But don’t talk to her about her past. Not unless she chooses to.” She inhales deeply, lets it out with a wheeze. She keeps thinking of Val freezing up the first time she saw the open countryside. And then, suddenly, she was back to work again, helping Trev, griping at Frankie, the same old Val. She closes and locks the door on every fear, every tragedy and humiliation, and it does her no good if people go around opening them again.

Monica looks at her for a long time. Then she pushes up off the radiator, looks around, and irritably brushes the dust off the back of her jeans.

“Someone’ll be around in a bit with a mattress for you,” she says. “Bedding’s in the cupboard across the corridor, same as the hoover. And here—” she upends the bag she’s been carrying over the dust-sheeted sofa, “—is your phone. You’re on second-year rules: read-only access to the internet, and you can’t call out. There’s an SOS app on the home screen; if you get in trouble, hit the app, scan your thumb, and someone’ll come running. Probably.”

“You mean it’s a Life Alert.”

“Everyone has it,” Monica says placidly. “Oh,” she adds, nodding at a plastic-covered TV that looks like it’s from the very early days of flatscreens, “there’s an HDMI stick in the pile. Plug it into the telly and you can stream movies and shit from your phone. You… do know what HDMI is, yes?”

“Please,” Frankie says, getting up from the bed and walking the short distance to the sofa. She snatches up the little streaming stick and waggles it at Monica. “I set the tellies up at Stenordale for Dotty. It’s easier’n LEGO.”

“Right then.” Monica looks around the room as if there’s something she’s forgotten. Apparently nothing comes to mind, because she claps her hands together and says, “I’ll leave you to it.”

“Sure,” Frankie says absently, and then, because she’s still thinking about old Dorley, and she wants to remind herself and everyone listening — because if they’re at all sensible they’ll be taping this whole encounter — where she stands, “Hey, Monica, listen. If what I heard your lot did to Karen is true?” She gives her two thumbs up and an exaggerated grin. “Always hated her. Well done.”

Monica acknowledges her with rolled eyes, and heads for the door. Then she stops suddenly, halfway out. Doesn’t look round.

“The others — some of them — they think Declan’s with Dorothy. What do you think?”

Ah. Declan again. “Four corpses, right?” Frankie says. “Trev, Val and me, we got two of them. Jake killed one; that was Callum, God rest his stupid fucking soul. And the fourth was a man, so that’s got to be Jake. We didn’t get him bad enough to kill him, and old Dotty couldn’t’ve managed it even with that bloody shotgun she had in her room. She always was a terrible shot, and she hasn’t got any better with age. So that means Dina killed him.”

Monica still doesn’t turn around. “Dina?”

“New name. Jake chose it. And by the end, Declan was Dina more than she was anything else. Survival, right? People become who they need to become.” She makes a show of looking around. “This whole place is built on it.”

“Not like that.”

“No. But Val and Beatrice and Maria, it’s what they built this place off of, isn’t it? Dina’s more like them than she is you. Phoenix rising from the ashes, and all that. Hah; be even more appropriate if it was her who started the fire. And I don’t see the woman who killed Jake leaving with Dorothy. Do you?”

“Guess not.”

“She’s out there,” Frankie says. “She’ll get scooped up by the police or she’ll try to get into a shelter or something, same as Bea did, and you’ll find her again.”

“You really think?”

“Yeah. ’Course.”

There’s a long silence before Monica finally says, “Thanks, Frankie,” and heaves herself upright. She kicks the door shut behind her, leaving Frankie alone in the bare, dusty room.

 

* * *

 

Maria was awake long enough to give her input on where to keep Frankie — “Far enough away from me that I never have to see her.” — and then she fell asleep again, and that’s good enough for Edy. She’s closed the curtains and she’s kept only one lamp on, and she’s content to stay exactly where she is, in a chair by the bed, for as long as it takes. She has four new novels on her Kindle; she can stay here all night and all day if she has to.

So, of course, duty intervenes, in the form of Tabitha messaging her, asking Edy to meet her out in the corridor. Edy does so, and gets the update: regular shifts are back; all the temporary sponsors are back out of the basement and are in fact all in Abby’s room, asleep in piles; Monica’s depositing Frankie in one of the unused rooms on the second floor; Christine’s still escorting Valérie Barbier around the place, still randomly picking up extra work.

“Christine’s got that two weeks off, doesn’t she?” Edy asks, and Tabitha nods.

“Starting tomorrow.”

“She gets it. No more jobs. And if we have another clustersuck, and she tries to pick up some responsibilities? Sic Paige on her.”

Tabitha laughs. “I think she’s way ahead of us there.”

“Good. How’s Adam?”

“Still in his room. He doesn’t know anything of what’s happened today yet, and someone needs to tell him.” Tabitha pauses. “I could do it, but—”

“No,” Edy says. “No. I’ll do it. Will you sit with Maria?”

“Of course, Ede. As long as you need.”

A lot of the lights are off as she makes her way down; most of the Hall has gone to bed uncharacteristically early, or been called to various duty shifts. Some dear soul has cleared away the remains of the vast array of takeaway meals, and Edy can’t resist checking up on how much is left. Sure enough, the massive freezer in the utility room has been stocked with enough curry to keep foragers happy for weeks, and the fridge next to it has seven full pizza boxes stacked up inside; tomorrow’s unhealthy breakfast.

It’s quiet in the dining hall as she slips back through, her socks making the polished floor slippery, and she decides to nip into the security room on the way past, both to say hi to Pippa and Lisa and to appropriate a pair of slippers.

The night lights are on in the basement corridors, colouring everything a baleful red but lending an odd, glittering beauty to the two pairs of wet footsteps that lead from the bathroom to Steph’s bedroom. Edy avoids them, and quietens a laugh as she remembers Maria’s notorious Footsteps print.

And then, two doors down, is Adam’s.

She unlocks the door and lets it swing slightly open. Once, she would have knocked, but Adam has been variably responsive recently, and waiting for an answer could have had Tabitha watching Maria all night. So she pushes it open, carefully and quietly, and finds Adam exactly where the security feed showed him a few minutes ago: sitting on the floor, his back against the bed, his knees grasped in his looped arms. There’s light music on; some lo-fi mix. There’s a book discarded by his feet; a mystery novel Edy hasn’t read. And he’s been crying again.

Edy shuts the door, kicks off her slippers, and settles down next to him.

“Hi, Adam,” she says.

He doesn’t answer, but he does move up a little closer, closing the gap, accepting the implicit invitation. She does the same, so they’re touching, just barely

“What did you do today?” she asks.

He shrugs. She knows very well what he did today, and it’s the same thing he’s been doing for a while now: almost nothing.

Adam is lost.

Without the Lord’s approval, without His grace, without His presence, without the certain knowledge that one’s father, and one’s father’s father, and his father before him were all chosen to be the Voice of the Lord in the heathen lands, without the structure and strictures of the New Church to guide you, why place one foot in front of the other? Why give voice to thoughts you now suspect to be nothing more than the echoes of your father’s cruelty? Why take in each breath and why expel it?

Edy would have loved to spare him this. To have put him through the same programme as everyone else, to have continued to indulge his beliefs all the way through, as one might indulge a childish insistence that an imaginary friend lurks in the next room. But, as Maria discovered during Edy’s difficult transition, the beliefs of the New Church are quite simply incompatible with a normal life.

Can’t build a house on lies, and Edy and Adam’s families lied to them about a great many things.

It’s harder for Adam. Edy had been a minor cousin, her family at the periphery of the church, without power or influence. Edy had been relatively free to roam, to discover for herself that things were not always as they were made to seem, and her mother had even sometimes had the opportunity to whisper to her, to share kinder interpretations of the Church’s teachings. Adam, though, was more controlled. He was the heir. The new Voice. His whole life, that was all he’d known.

It hurt her to take it from him. To tell him where she came from. That she knew his father and mother. That she knew the cruelties upon which their community had been built and maintained. That the true foundations of the New Church were rape, incest, subjugation, and a systematised cruelty that many of the women eventually found themselves participating in, too old or too scared or too trapped to leave.

That there is no Voice.

And now he barely speaks.

She has yet to tell him what she suspects. But he’s the spitting image of Edy when she was his age, when she was his gender, when she was just starting this faltering, meandering path to redemption, to forgiveness and atonement. His cheeks have started to fill out just the way hers did; his eyes have begun to brighten, and already match Edy’s in colour and shape; his nose has always been a match for hers.

But she may never tell him. She may never need to. They’ll be Sisters, and that’s all that matters.

She strokes his hand. He whimpers, almost inaudibly.

“Adam,” she says, “something happened today. With Ollie.”

 

* * *

 

“We’re out of ready-made guestrooms, I’m afraid,” Christine says, as Valérie registers her thumbprint on the reader by her new bedroom door, which swings open to reveal walls in faded pastel pink, “so this is the best we could do at short notice. We’ll be putting Trevor in the room next to you—”

“He gets the one with the blue walls,” Paige says.

“Appropriate,” Valérie says, with a smile in her voice.

“—and Paige and I, and the others — Jodie, Julia, Yasmin, and Vicky when she’s around — are just around the corner. You can ask us for anything. We’ve also got a little kitchen, so you don’t need to go all the way downstairs if you need a snack. And, um…”

“That’s everything,” Paige says, squeezing Christine’s hand.

They don’t follow her in. It wouldn’t seem right; Valérie’s lived decades with essentially zero privacy, and something inside Christine itches horribly at the thought of just blithely walking into her new space. Everything’s already set up, anyway: the bed’s made, there’s a laptop and a phone and a TV and everything, and someone even tested the bathroom fixtures, made sure the shower has good pressure and the toilet flushes properly.

“You’re very kind,” Valérie says.

“Thank the second years,” Paige says. “I put them to work.”

“She’s a cruel taskmaster,” Christine says.

“Yes.”

“Then please pass on my thanks,” Valérie says. “And now, girls…”

“You’re tired,” Christine says. “Us, too. It was, um, lovely to meet you, Valérie.”

“I’m looking forward to spending more time with you,” Paige says in a more formal tone than Christine’s used to from her. The three of them haven’t had a lot of time to talk, but Paige has already mentioned her vast stash of clothing and her Instagram channel, and Valérie visibly started getting ideas. Christine had at the time wondered if she ought to move the conversation on before Valérie commandeered a phone and set up an account right there, but fortunately one of the second years found another highly inappropriate question about the eighties to ask — “Did you really have phones this big?” — and Christine was saved from having to live with two Instagram obsessives for at least another day.

Their own rooms are, as promised, just around the corner, and they choose Paige’s room for the night, closing the door behind them and falling in each other’s arms right into her bed, a manoeuvre Paige immediately comments would be impossible in Christine’s room because the mattress is still covered in laptops.

“Two,” Christine says sleepily. “Two laptops.”

“Come on,” Paige says, hooking a hand under Christine’s head and taking her weight, “we still need to shower.”

“We do?” Christine’s back hurts from the tension; her legs hurt from walking around so much; her head hurts from second-hand stress. It’s possible even her fingers hurt, but she hasn’t gotten round to interrogating those yet. “I want to sleep.”

Planting a kiss on Christine’s lips and quickly leaning away when Christine tries to respond, Paige whispers, “You smell, darling.”

“Hey!” Just for that, Christine gives up on trying to kiss her back.

“Mostly of pizza,” Paige allows. “But you do have sweat stains under your armpits.”

“Oh, God,” Christine says, sinking back into the mattress. “I got sweaty in front of the nice French lady.”

“I’m sure she didn’t notice.”

“Oh, God,” Christine says again. “She definitely noticed. You’re just being kind.” Paige kisses her again. “You’re not defeating the ‘being kind’ accusation.”

“Up,” Paige says, slapping the mattress. “I’ll shower with you. I’ll hold you up. I’ll even wash your hair.”

“Fine,” Christine says, “but only if it doesn’t get sexy. I’m too sleepy to reciprocate.”

Paige kisses her one more time. “No promises,” she whispers.

 

* * *

 

It would have been nice to find Valérie a suitable room on the first floor, near Beatrice, but no-one felt good about bombarding her with second years. The third-floor flats would have been perfect, but there are none spare; they still haven’t moved Edith out, and she’s dug in like a tick, anyway, what with her library and her… Well, mostly her library, but given that it’s spilled over onto a fifth bookcase now, it almost deserves mentioning twice. Religious histories, at least fifty editions and translations of the Christian bible — or of books that are very nearly the Christian bible — and novels upon novels upon novels. Even if she does mostly read on that awful little plastic thing these days.

So Beatrice had Paige and the second years get a room ready on second for her, and that feels, now that she comes to think about it, like an appropriate amount of space between them. Quickly surmountable, should Valérie decide to visit, but not so close that they will constantly be running into each other in the corridor.

Beatrice doesn’t know how much space to give her, nor how much space she might want or need. So Valérie will be the one to define it, and Bea will go along with whatever she chooses. But she ought to go see her tonight. To make sure she’s settling in okay. To see if there’s anything she needs. To see if she’s just as baffled by the onslaught of under-thirties women as Beatrice often is.

She finds herself outside Valérie’s door almost without thinking of it, and it’s open. Waiting for her.

“Béatrice!” Valérie calls from inside. “Come in!”

“Oh,” Bea says, hesitating, “I just wanted to see how you were, uh—”

“Come in and help me. I need your help with something and I don’t want your building to burn down the way Stenordale did when some rascal took a torch to it.”

Bea nods, steps inside, and Valérie turns half around, smiles, and beckons her forward. She’s shifted the television off its glass table-stand, which she’s moved underneath the open window. It’s not all that cold out, but a light breeze is circulating around the room, and Beatrice shivers.

“Shut the door, please,” Valérie says, and Beatrice does so. As soon as the door closes, Valérie looks different, and it’s not just the change in the light. “Thank you,” she says. “I didn’t want to do this alone, but I didn’t want to bother any of your young people, and much as Frankie has grown on me, I think doing this with her would be… profane.”

She kneels on a cushion in front of the TV table, and pulls over a rucksack she must have appropriated from somewhere.

It’s full of candles.

“I found them in the pantry,” Valérie says, “and a box of matches, and— Oh, can you pass me the dinner tray? I stole it from downstairs but I left it on the bed.”

“Of course,” Bea says, retrieving it and passing it to Valérie, who places it carefully on the glass table. Bea fetches another cushion and kneels down next to her.

Valérie begins placing candles on the tray. Some of them are scented candles in pretty glass dishes; some are emergency candles in undecorated holders. She counts under her breath as she sets them out, and then pauses, frowning, and adds one more.

“Hold these, would you?” she asks, tapping the box of matches. Bea obliges, and Valérie lights a match. She moves slowly from candle to candle, refreshing her match several times, and with each lit candle she whispers a name.

A name, and something she remembers about them.

“Molly, who loved to sing. Carol, who showed me the good way to cook roast beef. Paul, who held my hand. Neve, who arranged flowers.” On and on she goes, lighting them, pausing after each one, until finally she reaches the last candle she set out, a stubby little thing, already half spent. “Callum,” she whispers, “who was a god-damned fool.”

Valérie’s hand finds Beatrice’s, and together they sit, embraced by a silence disturbed by nothing but the whistling wind through the open window and the crackle of the candles as they burn.

The flames spit. They gutter. And, one by one, they go out.

 

* * *

 

He lost his escort somewhere amid all the commotion, and that’s absolutely fine by him. This is the first quiet Trev’s had in a long time, and he’s going to extend it for as long as he possibly can; preferably until just before they dispatch someone to look for him and drag him back to the medical portacabin. Though it’s probable that at least one of the girls knows where he is; he’s been given a phone — his to keep for as long as he needs it — and they’re idiots if they don’t track every device they hand out.

He’s not entirely convinced they’re not idiots, given today’s display, but he has to admit, he didn’t make much of a first impression, either. Trained, professional soldier, going to pieces in front of a bunch of ordinary civilian women. A thirty-year prisoner and an old woman spoke for him, while he mostly hid.

Is it worse that he knows they understand? Perhaps not the disgust he feels every time he sees himself in a reflective surface, every time he’s looked at by someone new, knowing that he is what he’s been made to be, but they get it. Everyone here’s been through the wringer, one way or another.

Or, in Frankie’s case, operated it.

Still. Good to be alone. Good to get a phone he can trust so he can catch up on things. The usual political nonsense; too much to hope that Boris Johnson had been somehow deposed while Trevor was otherwise engaged. There’s some nasty virus popping up in China, and he makes a mental note to suggest to Beatrice Quinn that they refresh their emergency supplies, on the off-chance it goes global. Perhaps commit to making the installation out back a bit more permanent. Dig it into the dirt, perhaps? Shit, he doesn’t know; logistics and support were never his thing, and he doesn’t know why he’s worrying about a virus that will probably never be his problem. Captivity made him paranoid, probably.

He’s pretty sure the Peckinville online library’s got a couple of documents about pandemic preparedness, but they weren’t required reading, so he left them unopened. Maybe he’ll seek them out, if he can get his clearance back.

Should he get his clearance back? Should he let the outfit know he’s alive? Or do they already know? The installation out back is a Peckinville effort, but given how ring-fenced the Dorley operation is, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether they’ve chucked his name up the chain. They keep quiet about this place; he didn’t know what Dorley did until one of the skeletons in its closet reached out and took him.

Sod it. It’s coming up on ten now, and that means he needs to show his face before they come looking for him. Before the doctor goes off shift. Because while his ad hoc duct tape bandage might have been replaced by something actually appropriate, and while his wound may never have been all that bad in the first place — a bleeder, not a killer, as old Perry used to say — he still has a fucking gash in his neck. Understandable that the doctor wants to check up on it.

He closes up his phone in its cute little leather case, pockets it, and presses his thumb against the reader on the door out of the conservatory. It takes a moment to register him, and he worries briefly that when that Christine girl told him to record his fingerprint that he somehow did it wrong, and then the lock rolls over and the door clicks noisily open, creaking on its hinges and scraping on the gravel outside. He makes a note: not a stealthy option. In case it ever comes up.

It’s not paranoia! There are soldiers on the premises! Someone here is preparing for something!

It doesn’t take long to find the Peckinville village, and the door to the medical cabin is unlocked, so he lets himself in. It’s almost homely; so much like every other field medical installation he’s ever seen or been briefed on, its temporary nature obvious in every aspect, from its shape — plainly three trailer-sized portacabins assembled into a single small building — to its decor. It had occurred to him to be worried about flashbacks to the medical wing he woke up in after he was kidnapped, but it couldn’t be more different, really.

Doctor Rahman greets him, has him sit down, changes his dressing, and then he’s free to take up one of the beds. The man, Ollie, is in another of them, and though he’s cuffed to the bed by the leg, his arms haven’t been restrained; probably because that’s where his injuries are.

He’s also awake.

“Hi,” Trevor says, feeling a little stupid. He’s no good at talking to the actualised girls here; he doesn’t know at all what to say to one who is, in a sense, still cooking.

The lad shrugs at him, and then sits up, putting aside his tablet and pulling out his earphones. “What’d you do to yourself, then?”

“Me?” he says, and then his hand goes to the new dressing on his neck. Oh yeah. How much should he tell this guy? “I, uh, got in a fight.”

“Right,” Ollie says, nodding. “What’s with your voice?”

“What?”

Ollie leans over a little, over-enunciates his words, as if Trev is stupid. “You look like a bird,” he says, “but you have a deep voice.”

Shit. “Long story.”

“Oh. Right. You’re one of those tran guys then.”

“I’m sorry; ‘tran guys’?”

“Yeah. Heard about it. You take testosterone, your voice lowers, you start looking like a bloke. Grow a beard, and that.”

Trev takes refuge in the mistake. Hell, it’s not all that far off the truth; they’re going to put him on testosterone at some point. Sooner rather than later, if he has anything to say about it. “Still waiting on the beard,” he says, stroking his chin.

“Don’t suppose you’ll call the police on this lot for me, will you?” Ollie says. “They’re trying to do that to me, only in reverse.”

“Oh. Sorry. No.”

The man shrugs. “Didn’t think so. Everyone’s in on it. Nothing I can do about it.” He laughs suddenly, sharply, and raises a wrapped wrist. “Not even this.”

“Might as well enjoy the ride, then?” Trev finds himself saying. Stupid! He woke up with tits and his testicles taken away and he didn’t stop hating it even for a second! Why would this man be any different?

But that’s the question, isn’t it? Why are the Dorley women different? Will Ollie eventually become like them? Or will they wash him out, like Declan?

He wants to laugh at himself. He feels terribly unoriginal. Apparently the Hall has had an influx of outsiders lately; he should compare notes with them. There’s probably something like the five stages of grief for encountering a rehabilitative forced feminisation facility, and they probably all step through them in the exact same order.

“Dunno about enjoy it,” Ollie says, with less rancour than Trev thinks appropriate. “Going to make them fight for it, though. That could be fun. And if I’m a bird in five years, I’ll know I tried.”

“Good man,” Trev says. Probably the least productive thing he could say, under the circumstances, but Ollie’s recovering from an injury, isn’t he? He should be kept calm. He should not have his coping mechanisms critiqued.

Probably not, anyway. Fuck, Trev doesn’t know; he’s an ex-soldier, and, being honest, not a great one. He couldn’t even subdue Jake. Fucking Val did better against him than he did!

“You all right, mate?” Ollie asks, and Trev doesn’t know how to feel about the way he says it. He seems to have slipped into viewing Trev as a man more easily than he would have expected, and Trev doesn’t know if that’s him being prejudiced against the kind of man who used to call him a queer at school, or if something else is going on.

He tries to play it for laughs. “Got a great big gash in my neck, haven’t I?”

“Good fight?”

“I lost.”

“Next time.”

“Yeah.” He shouldn’t say the man who did it is probably dead. Seems like the kind of thing you shouldn’t tell someone who’s here to become less violent.

There’s movement in the next room, and the sound of people talking. More than two people; the doctor and Jan’s shift replacements, presumably. Ollie lies back down in his bed and gathers his headphones back up, but before he can put them in, someone comes rushing into their shared room and stops short in the middle, as if she’s afraid to get any closer to Ollie’s bed.

“Harmony,” Ollie says.

“How are you feeling, Ollie?” she says. She’s quiet. Small. It looks like her hands are shaking.

“Well, I didn’t manage it, so I don’t know. How do you think I am?”

“I’m sorry, Oliver.”

“You going to let me go?”

“No.”

“Then that doesn’t matter, does it?”

Harmony nods. “I suppose not.” She balls her hands behind her back. “Look, I’m, uh, going to be watching you tonight. You too, um, Trevor. Nell and me. We’ll be in the next room. Okay?”

“Sure.”

She nods again. “Okay,” she says, mostly to herself. “Okay.” She’s turning to leave when she hesitates, crosses the room to the window by Ollie’s bed, and opens the curtains. Trev, craning his neck, can see nothing but the clearing, the edges of the camouflage tarp, and the woods.

“What are you doing?” Ollie asks.

“It’s, um— This window faces east. Mostly. Enough. Anyway, it’s supposed to be clear tomorrow morning. Clear enough. You’ll get the sunrise. I, um…” She pauses, frowns at herself. “Goodnight, Ollie.”

She nods at him one last time, and then leaves, taking small, nervous steps. Trev can easily imagine her sitting down in the doctor’s office in the room next door, other people’s hands quick to comfort her.

Ollie, though, is smiling. It’s gone quickly, but he sits up a bit in bed again, nodding to himself.

“Saw it,” he says. “Knew it. She always has that big watch on. Thick leather strap. It’s so ugly. But I saw it when she opened the curtains. Under the strap.” He leans back again, settles himself into the pillow. “She’s got a scar,” he says. “She’s like me.”

 

2020 January 11
Saturday

The last few days’ve been difficult, but today’s the worst yet. And it’s not as if she isn’t trying, because she is, she’s trying harder than she’s ever tried at anything, but when she goes for falsetto she sounds like a cartoon character and when she uses her whisper-voice, she can’t make herself heard over the traffic outside. So when another older couple make the same face to her that all of them make when she speaks up, and they realise exactly what she is, Diana has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from crying.

It should have gotten easier. Chiamaka’s granddaughters helped her get some basic clothes, and she borrowed a few things from each of them, too, so she has things that fit now, things she looks nice in. And nice in a way that she likes, not in a way that makes Jake do that horrible little grin that says she’s debased herself in exactly the right way. And she’s got better with her hair, and she’s gotten hold of a little makeup and impressed Chiamaka with how she’s actually pretty okay with it. And she looks in the mirror every morning and she feels good about herself, which is something she doesn’t think she’s done ever in her life before.

But she can’t get the voice right, and none of the videos she watched online make sense to her, and she’s been getting snappy recently.

It’s not good to be snappy to the customers. Chiamaka was disappointed in her yesterday, and Diana can’t let her down. After the clothes and the underwear and a couple of other little things, she doesn’t have enough cash left even to go to the next town over. She can’t be kicked out.

She smiles through the old couple’s dismayed realisation, and fortunately these ones aren’t so insulted that they don’t take the room. She books them in and gives them their key and swallows her anger and her humiliation, because the way they look at her is too similar to the way Dorothy would look at her, and the last thing she needs when she’s trying to help people, when she’s trying to get along and be normal, when she’s trying to be Diana, is to remember Stenordale. And, for fuck’s sake, she just doesn’t get what they’re so grossed out by! She’s just a—

Except she does, doesn’t she? That was one of the things Declan understood so well: men shouldn’t be women and women shouldn’t be men. Just because Diana’s learned to think otherwise, doesn’t mean the rest of the world suddenly agrees.

She stretches, and the pain in her back dissipates a little. The wooden chair’s too small for her, but the last few days it’s been especially bad. She aches all over and, worse, she keeps getting these intense hot feelings that start in her chest and spread throughout her body. She hates them; it’s like if a bruise is inside you, and itches.

She told Chiamaka all this yesterday, after she snapped at the elderly tourists, and Chiamaka’s irritation had dissipated immediately. She said Diana was too young for the menopause, and laughed.

And then she came back last night, just before Diana got ready for bed, and said that she looked up a few things. Asked when the last time Diana had her hormone pills.

Diana’s never taken any hormone pills.

When was the last injection, then?

And that was when Diana went cold. Because, yes, she got the injections weekly, back at Stenordale, and it was almost time for a new one when everything went down. And now it’s longer still, and she doesn’t have any pills or any injections and she doesn’t have the first idea how to go about getting them.

There’s a solution to her problem, but it scares the living daylights out of her. It came to her last night, as she fell asleep, and it dominated her dreams. Probably why she’s been so irritable. That, and irritability is on the list of menopause symptoms Chiamaka read out to her. Irritability (yes), dry skin (yes, and the little tube of moisturiser Chiamaka gave her is almost empty), headaches and migraines (yes and no, not yet), hot flushes (lots) and many more she doesn’t want to experience, especially because she doesn’t know what else will happen if she keeps going without the injections. Will she revert? Can that even happen, now she’s been castrated?

Or will she just get sicker and sicker?

Chiamaka said, with compassion, that she needs to find a way to fix it. She can drive her anywhere she needs to go, she said, and get her granddaughters to look after the B&B for a day. But she can’t get spendy; none of them can. And she’s not importing any grey market nonsense to her respectable bed and breakfast.

Diana’s been turning her cheap new phone over and over in her hands. She knows what she has to do. She looked up the number this morning on the computer. Not hard to find, really. The university has a directory of grad students and Dorley Hall has a directory of residents, so all she had to do was cross-reference. Easy.

Amazing how she doesn’t feel so stupid all the time any more. Just — she winces — achy and irritable.

“Chia!” she calls, once again feeling conspicuous from how deep her voice sounds. “I need a few minutes to make a call!”

“Wait!” Chiamaka calls back, from the kitchen. “I’m making a cuppa! You want one?”

“Um. Sure! Thank you!”

A giggle breaks through the anxiety building in her chest — along with another of those awful hot flushes — because Declan didn’t thank people. And that’s because Declan’s dad didn’t thank people; he accepted what he was given, and at most he would nod, or say, “Yeah,” or some other single-syllable word that might as well have been a grunt.

Declan didn’t do a lot of things that Diana does. Like read Wikipedia at night, with the dictionary open in another tab. Like go to sleep listening to YouTube videos on any subject that sounds interesting. Like show any curiosity about anything.

Diana is all curiosity.

Chiamaka comes through with the tea, sets hers down on the desk and then amusedly bats at Diana’s arm until she gets the hell out of the way. So Diana thanks her again and takes her tea through to the breakfast room, which at a quarter past eleven is finally empty.

She takes a sip, lets it warm her stomach, and then calls the number she has, hoping it’s the right one.

It answers on the third ring.

“Hello? Hello? Who is this? I don’t recognise this number.”

“H— Hello,” Diana manages to say. Stupid to be so nervous! She used to hate this woman! She used to fantasise about what she would do to her if she could get her fucking taser off her! She used to—

No. Declan used to think those thoughts. Diana refuses to.

“Who is this?” Monica asks, on the other end of the line.

In her best voice, Diana says, “My name’s Diana. You knew me as Declan. I need your help.”