19. You’re Just Someone I Was Forced to Know

2019 November 29
Friday

It’s the chorded message chime from two phones that wakes him, but it’s the arm around his belly that causes him to jerk upright and hit his head on the wall, which doesn’t do wonders for the headache he discovers when he opens his eyes. Even the dim red light from the strip in the ceiling feels bright. He pulls at the sheets, intending to cover his head, finds them trapped by something, remembers the arm around his waist and almost falls out of bed.

The arm around him, which belongs to someone considerably stronger than him, saves him. Its owner responds to his thrashing with quiet, insistent moans and a firming of its grip.

He resorts to clearing his throat.

“Hm?” Pippa says, sounding like she prefers her arm exactly where it is. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry, Stef. Do you need to pee?” She releases him and the mattress clinks as, suddenly unsupported, he almost falls out again.

“No,” Stefan says carefully, and rolls over to face her. It’s tricky; the bed isn’t exactly wide, and it’s a squeeze to fit two people lengthways. He settles for a strange hopping manoeuvre on his hip, which Pippa watches him perform, bemused. The mattress coils don’t poke him quite as hard as he expected.

Pippa grins at him. “Hi.”

“Um, what did we do last night?”

“What did—? Oh!” She snorts, and then grimaces and massages her forehead. “Ow. You don’t remember? Look on the table.”

She helps him turn over again — “I’ll keep my hands decent,” she whispers with far too much delight as she steadies his shoulder and back — and when he’s in position he sees two wine glasses and two empty bottles on the bedside table, next to his little elephant and frog, and both their phones.

Memory returns. “Oh,” he says. There’s a third bottle, discarded on its side under the computer desk, where it must have rolled. The effort’s made his head throb again, and he closes his eyes to say, “Pip, that was probably an outstandingly bad idea.”

“It was fine,” she says, and Stefan can hear the smirk in her voice as he sits up and, still with his eyes closed, swings his legs off the bed.

“I hope you can support that thesis,” he mutters.

“You’re a fun drunk.”

Hmm. No trousers. “I’m amazed I was a conscious drunk.” He opens his eyes again, halfway, to give them time to adjust. The only light in the room is still from the lighting strip, which Pippa’s changed to a candlelight yellow with an app on her phone. “I wasn’t exactly a drinker before, and I’ve had a bit of an enforced dry spell. I don’t know if I told you about my dry spell?” He checks, and in addition to a t-shirt he is, in fact, wearing underwear. Thank God.

“Oh yeah,” Pippa says, “I heard. Some chick found you in a flowerbed and thought you could use a few months’ time-out in an exclusive underground spa.”

They listened to Edy’s playlist last night, which was mostly 90s and early 2000s stuff. When they both got the message that disclosure was set for the coming Saturday, so Maria and Edy could be back in the building for it, Pippa called upstairs for a bottle and some glasses to be sent down in the dumbwaiter. “No lectures tomorrow,” she said, clinking her glass to his, “and Maria’s going to be fine. I’m letting my hair down.”

“What hair?” Stefan had said, and made to ruffle her pixie cut, only backing off when she threatened to pour white wine on his head.

After the first bottle they switched to one of Pippa’s playlists. Stefan let her keep just the one Taylor Swift track: 22; “It’s my song,” she insisted, “because I’m twenty-two.” He didn’t argue with the logic.

“At least you got some drinking practice in,” Pippa says, stretching and climbing over him, out of the bed. She’s dressed almost identically to him, having borrowed one of his t-shirts last night, and she pulls it off and over her head without turning around, and giggles when, freed, she sees he’s turned away. “Don’t be silly,” she scolds, and kicks up last night’s dress from the floor, catching it and dropping it over her head.

“What if I don’t want to practise drinking?”

“You’ll need it. Now you’re officially one of us, they’re going to start roping you into our social functions. They tend to get boozy.”

“Yes, Christine warned me about those. I was planning on making excuses. You know, dentist appointment, family emergency, essay due; kidnapped.”

“Ah,” Pippa says, stepping into her shoes, “the classics.”

She’d dumped her dress and shoes halfway through the second bottle and climbed into bed next to him to watch a show a friend had recommended, a recent one; definitely not on the approved list, full of attractive people making terrible decisions. She nudged him with her elbow when a trans girl character — “Played by an actual trans woman!” she hissed — came cycling onto the screen. It’d made him pay a little more attention, despite the alcohol complicating matters.

Right now he can’t even remember what she looked like.

His head throbs again.

“Hangover?” Pippa says. “Same. Just chill here a few minutes and I’ll get someone to send some painkillers down. We need to get you a lockbox or something to go under the bed to keep stuff like that in,” she adds, half to herself.

He’s perfectly happy to go along with her instruction to stay put; even getting up from the bed would be an insurmountable challenge. “How are you so chipper,” he says, “if you’re hungover, too?”

“I might still be a little drunk. I finished the last bottle while you were snoring away.”

Stefan nods, slowly and carefully, so as not to dislodge any more headache. “Is it not going to be weird if one of the boys sees you leaving my room?”

She steps over, taps him lightly on the forehead. “Nope. How many times have I come down here in the morning? Just because none of them saw me walk in, doesn’t mean I didn’t.”

He flops back onto the bed, twisting so he lands lengthways and doesn’t brain himself on the wall again. “You’ve thought of everything.”

Pippa smiles. “That’s why I’m the… incredibly experienced, not at all winging-it Dorley graduate. I got a good grade in girl.”

Her impish grin and the little bounce she does to accentuate her joke make him laugh. “Clearly.”

“Anything else you need before I go?”

“Um, yeah, actually.” He raises himself up on his elbows, tries to borrow a percentage of her energy as he voices a thought that’s been worrying at him for the last few minutes. “It’s not weird for us to spend the night together, is it?”

She frowns at him, sits back down on the bed and hauls on his hand until he sits up next to her. She doesn’t let go of his fingers, and starts rubbing her thumb along their length. “Sponsors stay overnight all the time. Sure, it normally takes a lot longer for that kind of closeness to build, and, yeah, I’m not actually your sponsor any more — if I ever was — but, absolutely, it’s normal. Doesn’t happen for everyone, but Indira and Christine, for example, used to have sleepovers all the time, towards the end of the first year. Ask Christine to braid your hair when it gets longer; she’s good.”

“You said ‘closeness’,” he continues urgently. “Does it ever get… sexual? This isn’t me asking for anything with you, it’s just—”

“I know, Stef,” she says with a languid smile. “And, no. It’s rare, and highly discouraged. There’s a little bit of a power imbalance.” She pinches off a tiny volume with thumb and forefinger. “Rather unethical. And ethics, as you know—” she interrupts herself with a giggle, “—are so important here.”

“It’s just, I had the impression that Abby and Melissa are, uh, you know…”

“Yes, I do know. And they’re… complicated. And very close. Until Melissa left, anyway. Now she’s elsewhere, and Abby’s restless. Even more so these last few months.”

He nods again, and lets Pippa drag him all the way out of bed and into a hug.

“You going to be okay?” she whispers.

“Yeah. I’m not super excited about another day pretending ignorance, but I’ll manage.”

She squeezes him. “Spend the day in your room, then. Say you’ve got a headache; not much of a lie, there. Or ask to come upstairs. Like I said, you’re one of us now. You’re a Sister. You have, within this house, as much freedom as you ask for. My advice is to start asking.”

“I don’t feel much like a sister.”

Pippa kisses him lightly on the cheek. “You will.”

 

* * *

 

When Stefan finally consents to open his door after what feels like five full minutes of irregular but increasingly frantic knocking, he’s not surprised to find Aaron, in a hoodie zipped all the way up and the hood over his head — he’s been complaining about the cold, lately; most of them have — rocking back and forth on his heels and glaring up at him.

“Yes?” Stefan says, leaning into his sleepiness. He’d gone back to sleep less than half an hour after taking Pippa’s painkillers, sent down with caffeine-free tea in one of the kitchen’s less hilarious mugs.

“Where have you been?”

“Asleep.” On cue, the need to yawn and stretch takes him. Indira, leaning against the opposite wall and currently out of Aaron’s eyeline, winks at him.

“I’ve been up since seven,” Aaron says, yanking a thumb in Indira’s direction; she smirks. “How come you get to sleep in?”

Indira pushes off from the wall and walks quietly up behind Aaron. “Extreme favouritism,” she says, making him jump. “We do it on a random rota. Keeps you all on your toes.”

“Really?”

“No.” With a hand on each shoulder she manoeuvres Aaron to the side and nudges him back towards his room. “You smell like a sock. Go get your washing stuff. It’s shower time.”

“Jesus. Fine.”

“How’s your head?” Indira whispers to Stefan when Aaron retreats into his room and slams his door as best he can.

“Better now,” Stefan says. “How’s Pippa?”

“Tabby said she was riding pretty high until about an hour ago, and then she fell asleep in the security room. Almost faceplanted into her bagel. She put a blanket on her. She’s fine.”

“Good.”

“Sorry we’re not doing, you know, the thing today.”

“It makes sense to wait,” Stefan says. “And it’s only one more day. I’ll live.” He winces as his headache lances him again; the painkillers are wearing off. “If the hangover doesn’t kill me, that is.”

Indira smirks at him. “You’ll fit right in here if you keep drinking like that.” She mimes knocking back too many glasses of wine.

“So Pippa tells me.”

“Hey, you should come to the next—”

Whatever event she was about to invite him to goes unnamed; Aaron is back, as is circumspection. He raises his eyebrows and his wash kit at Stefan, who takes the hint and ducks back into his room to collect his shower things. He rubs quickly at his face as soon as he thinks he’s out of sight, and decides he can probably get away without shaving. He hasn’t gone a day without since Pippa moved him out of the cell, but he has to admit that there are days when it’s mostly ceremonial.

“Have fun!” Indira shouts at them as they close the bathroom door behind them; Aaron flinches again.

“So?” Stefan says, while they undress. “How do you like your new sponsor?”

“God,” Aaron says, dropping his underwear on the pile of clothes. True to recent form, he mostly faces away, now that he’s naked. “Don’t.”

“That good?”

“Stef, she’s driving me up the fucking wall.”

“Oh?”

“She’s so… so…”

“So…?”

“I don’t know!”

Aaron ducks under his shower and Stefan, after taking a moment to check he’s set the temperature properly, turns away to hide his smile. Christine’s talked about Indira’s methods, about how in the early days especially she had ways of ‘weaponising niceness’, which disarmed all the terrible things Christine wanted to say to her. It didn’t stop her saying them, obviously; it just compounded the guilt she felt afterwards.

They wash in silence.

It’s becoming difficult to predict Aaron’s moods. For all his insistence that the drudgery of life down here has flattened his responses to the changes his body’s been forced through, it’s hard to believe he’s not bothered by them. Sometimes the boy is his familiar self, the chatterbox, the wind-up toy whose stream of consciousness and endless innuendo can be interrupted only by food, sleep, or a good movie; sometimes, like now, he’s quiet, keeping even his eyes to himself. Stefan imagines him in his time alone, examining himself, repeating to himself the mantra that it’s just gynecomastia or something like it, that the swelling on his chest can only go so far, that it’ll go away on its own, or be easily removed. Comforting lies; Stefan’s poisoned gift.

Stefan lets him have his quiet. It’s the last day of this. Tomorrow the sponsors kick over the board, reveal the game the boys have really been playing this whole time, and everything changes.

“What’s with the name, anyway?” Aaron asks, breaking the silence and handing his conditioner bottle to Stefan.

He squeezes some out into his hands and starts massaging it through Aaron’s hair. “What do you mean?”

“Stef. Everyone calls you that now.”

Where’s he going with this? “‘Stefan’ is kind of a mouthful, don’t you think? I’ve never liked it. Makes me feel like I’m back at school, like when the teacher calls you up in front of the class.”

“Yeah,” Aaron says, squirming under Stefan’s fingers, “but isn’t ‘Stef’ kind of… girly?”

Stefan tells the honest truth. “No-one’s ever mistaken me for a girl.”

Aaron snorts and mutters something under his breath.

“What?” Stefan says, nudging him.

“Oh, uh, nothing. I’m just wondering how it started. You being Stef, I mean.”

“My friend, the one who went away.” Stefan briefly stops rubbing conditioner into the tips of Aaron’s lengthening hair. Even with everything he knows, and even though it won’t be forever, her absence eats at him. “She called me that.” Because, the very first time they met, she saw Stefan wince at his full name and somehow intuited that he might prefer something else. “It spread from her.”

“Melissa, right?”

“Right.”

“Your first cru-ush!” Aaron sings.

Stefan pokes him in the back of the neck, to reprimand him and to suggest that Aaron can go back to his own shower now. “Gross! She was like my sister. My much older sister.”

Aaron starts washing his undercarriage, leaning his head away from the water stream. It’s taken weeks of patient nagging to get him to understand that conditioner doesn’t really do anything if you immediately rinse it out. And from what Stefan’s observed of the Dorley girls, most of them keep their hair long — those still in the programme are probably under instructions to do so, come to think of it — so this way Aaron will at least not have to deal with tangles alongside his forcibly applied new gender.

“What was she like?”

The smile comes automatically. “Kind,” Stefan says. “And smart. Really smart. I’d have done terribly in all my science subjects without her help.” Because the memory of the supermarket invades him yet again, he continues without meaning to. “And pretty. So fucking pretty, Aaron.”

“Sounds like you did have a crush.”

“No.” I wanted to be like her from the moment I saw her again. “She was just…”

“So fucking pretty?”

“Hard not to notice.”

“You miss her?”

He turns away. Washes himself below the waist. Directs his flattening mood at the task. “Like a part of me rotted away, yeah.”

“How long did you know her?”

“Since I was ten.” Rinse away the soap. Wash the feet. Be methodical. Be a machine. Be not present. “She left when I was fourteen.”

“You never said why she left.”

“I never knew.”

Aaron leaves him alone after that, and Stefan finishes up. But when they’re towelled and robed and about to leave, he shyly grabs Stefan’s forearm, stopping him by the sinks. His hand, damp against Stefan’s wrist, trembles a little; this must be hard for him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “About Melissa. I’ve told you about Elizabeth, yeah? I knew her for, like, no time compared to you and Melissa, but I still miss her every day.”

“People say it gets easier,” Stefan says. “I’m still waiting.”

“Look,” Aaron says, “I’m fucking terrible at this, but I’m trying to express sympathy and empathy and all that shit, so I, um…”

Fuck it. Stefan interrupts him by pulling on his hand and dragging him into a hug. Aaron squeaks in surprise and stiffens, like a lost creature, freezing to protect itself from unknown predators, but when Stefan whispers, “Thank you,” he relaxes, and loops his arms around Stefan’s back.

“I never found her again,” Aaron says. “I lost her number, never knew her last name. I’ve been worrying, lately, that maybe she looked for me, maybe she found me, maybe she heard about what I did. Decided she wants nothing to do with me.”

Stefan wants to say that she won’t find him in here, that he can look for her when he leaves, that they could see each other again, but that’s a lie too far. He hugs the boy more tightly instead.

Later, at their delayed breakfast, they discover their usual Weetabix has been augmented by a cellophane-wrapped variety pack of cereal, sitting in the middle of the dining table on a wooden tray, along with porcelain bowls, metal spoons, and blue-top milk. Over his Coco Pops, Aaron talks about much, but does not mention Melissa, Elizabeth, or the hug.

 

2019 November 30
Saturday

Getting up before the sun sucks, but today’s the big day: disclosure. All hands on deck. And with Maria delivered back to her room yesterday evening, even Edy — nominally still on leave — is making herself available. As the new Head of Network Security, and as Stef’s friend, Christine can’t sit this one out.

And she’s got a slide presentation to prepare for Monica.

She slips out of bed, lifting Paige’s hand off her hip and kissing her silently on the tip of her nose, showers quickly and dresses quietly. She picks clothes she can move easily in: a loose blue dress with a few handy pockets, leggings, trainers and a wide belt; she wants to be unrestricted in case things kick off. It’s not likely, not unless Adam, Aaron or Martin have an undiscovered propensity for (non-vehicular) violence, but it’s not impossible, and they’re doing things by the book now. She slips the taser she was issued into the largest pocket, grateful that Paige is still asleep; she hates that Christine has to have it. Hates having it in the room. A reminder of their past; other people’s present.

Simple makeup. Her skin looks okay today so she skips foundation and just deepens her naturally pale lips and adds a little eyeliner. She pulls out the scrunchie she wore in the shower, takes one look at her hair and puts it back in, pulling out a few strands around her face and leaving the rest up. It doesn’t look spectacular, but it’s fine enough. They’re supposed to look at least somewhat aspirational — sorry boys, you’re going to be girls, but maybe you can be pretty girls, like us — but, fuck it, perhaps Christine can be the role model for girls who probably should have washed their hair this morning.

“Why did I take this job?” she asks herself, and Paige answers in her sleep with such sweet and gentle grumbling that Christine has to force herself to grab her laptop and leave the room immediately before she succumbs to the urge to just climb back in with her, forget about disclosure, forget about Stef, and tell Aunt Bea to take her salary and shove it.

Twenty thousand, though! Net! And no rent or bills! A safety net for the two of them, over and above the stipends they can expect.

She closes the door and creeps down the corridor to the kitchen, aiming to fill herself with coffee before she has to face another human. She dumps her computer on the table and starts checking over the intake files, assembling photos and records and dates into slides, irritated at herself for not doing this yesterday (but Paige had brought some new dresses around to show her, and one thing inevitably led to another). At least the task is brainless.

She’s on her second cup and finishing off a bowl of cereal when her phone chimes: Vicky.

Victoria Robinson: Hey Tina. Won’t be around much for a bit. Lorna and I are taking some time to be together. Straight home from lectures. Staying in at the weekends.
Victoria Robinson: There have been some BIG talks.

Christine Hale: Oh shit babe
Christine Hale: Anything you need, shout
Christine Hale: I’m here for you
Christine Hale: We all are

Victoria Robinson: Thanks.
Victoria Robinson: I’m so fucking scared. This is WAY beyond the vrenaflaxine thing. She says she’s been noticing things for a while, and I’m having to pretend to be baffled and gaslight the shit out of her while inwardly crapping myself, looking back on everything I’ve ever said and done around her, trying to work out if any of it betrays the Big Fucking Secret.
Victoria Robinson: She even brought up the donation. The very large and completely anonymous donation that put her FFS fund over the finish line.
Victoria Robinson: She must have been thinking about that for ages.
Victoria Robinson: Tell me there’s nothing to find there, please.

Christine Hale: It’s watertight, Vick
Christine Hale: Processed through our most anonymised payment lines
Christine Hale: You’d have to be a state-level actor to trace it back to us and even then I wouldn’t give high odds
Christine Hale: If you have friends in high places you can get really fucky with finance
Christine Hale: Does she have any ideas about who sent it?

Victoria Robinson: I don’t think so, not any more. She asked if I knew, and I said no, and that was a WHOLE conversation.
Victoria Robinson: We got onto my family, my school, everything. All the stuff about me that’s fake as shit. It’s like she’s going through my whole life, looking for the cracks.
Victoria Robinson: Tina.
Victoria Robinson: I’m ALL cracks.

Christine Hale: Did you stick to your NPH?

Victoria Robinson: She asked about my SCARS, Tina! My GRS scars on my fucking labia! I didn’t think they were even visible enough! I can barely see them myself in the mirror with the torch on my phone and I know what to look for!

Christine Hale: Shit

Victoria Robinson: Damn right, shit.
Victoria Robinson: And yeah I fell back on my NPH. I could practically see those laminated fucking NPH sheets I spent all that time memorising.

Christine Hale: Good
Christine Hale: Those are unimpeachable

Victoria Robinson: I know, Tina.

Christine Hale: Right
Christine Hale: Sorry

Victoria Robinson: It’s fine, I’m just so scared.
Victoria Robinson: She tells me she still loves me. And that word ‘still’ in there, it’s like it won’t stop echoing in my head. It means she knows there’s things she has to forgive. It means
Victoria Robinson: Shit.
Victoria Robinson: It means she doesn’t see me as the same person she used to.
Victoria Robinson: I’ll always be someone who lied to her now.
Victoria Robinson: She keeps telling me she still loves me. And it’s not like she’s trying to convince herself. She really does love me.
Victoria Robinson: But it’s clear she doesn’t trust me any more.
Victoria Robinson: Maybe it’s just too many lies, all at once. Maybe I sound different when I’m talking about the last year or so, to when I’m listing off all the fake bullshit I’m supposed to pretend is my life.
Victoria Robinson: Maybe I sound like a liar every time I open my fucking mouth because I am one.
Victoria Robinson: She’s everything to me. The most special girl in the world. And I’m scared I’m just going to lose her. I’m scared she’s going to decide I’m too broken, too untrustworthy, and just leave. All I want is to tell her everything and I JUST CAN’T
Victoria Robinson: I hate this I hate this I hate this

Christine Hale: Do you want me to tell one of the senior sponsors about this? Maria’s back, she might have an idea

Victoria Robinson: NO
Victoria Robinson: Keep those people out of it. Especially Maria.
Victoria Robinson: If I have to I’ll ask them for help but not yet
Victoria Robinson: Please say you won’t Tina please say you’ll keep this between us

Christine Hale: I won’t say a word
Christine Hale: I promise

Victoria Robinson: Thank you.
Victoria Robinson: Okay she’s out of the shower, no more texts, I have to delete everything

Christine drops the phone on the table and turns her attention back to her coffee, trying to put her worries about her friend out of her mind; she won’t do anything without permission, especially not since it was her slip that kicked all this off. Even if it was, apparently, something that’s been festering in Lorna for quite a while.

Does Lorna suspect her? They’ve been nothing but friendly with each other, but Christine’s hardly an expert on her. For all that Vicky is one of her best friends, her girlfriend — her future wife, if they can weather this and if Vicky gets her wish — is still mostly a stranger.

“Hey,” someone says from the doorway. “Mind if we come in?”

It’s Julia, which means Yasmin’s probably either around the corner or still getting dressed in one of their rooms. Christine hasn’t seen either of them for weeks; they keep away from their Sisters as a matter of course. She’s pretty sure one of them must have gotten hold of the lecture schedules and worked out times to duck in through the front door and up the stairs to the second floor without being spotted.

“It’s not my kitchen,” Christine says, and immediately realises how she sounds. “Sorry. Bad morning.” She picks up and waggles her phone by way of explanation.

Julia sets about preparing some kind of egg dish on the corner hob, with onions and red peppers. It doesn’t take long for the aroma to make Christine regret her choice of Weetabix.

“That’s an early breakfast,” Christine says after a while. Julia nods. “You, uh, going out today?”

“No, I’m here all day,” Julia replies, in the hesitant manner she uses when she’s concentrating on something and which ignites in Christine a brief spark of nostalgia; the last time she heard it, they all lived underground together and Julia was training her voice in the echoey acoustics of the dining room. “But Yas is on call, so…” She wiggles her fingers; a you work it out gesture.

“Hey,” Yasmin says, appearing on cue around the corner, kissing Julia on the back of the neck and slumping into a chair opposite Christine. “Long time.”

“Yeah,” Christine says. Awkward. Sure, the few times Christine’s seen Yasmin and Julia recently they’ve exchanged smiles and hellos — a vast improvement! — but that’s been more or less it for the last year; not really a foundation on which to rebuild a rapport, or even just to have a conversation that doesn’t make Christine cringe with inadequacy. The two of them have been in a stable relationship since the first year, and in work since their major restrictions were lifted; Christine feels adolescent around them.

Julia, her back turned to both of them, continues to cook. Yasmin props herself up on her hands and stares at Christine, chewing on her lip. Thinking. Christine doesn’t squirm under the examination, but she wants to. She pays attention to her coffee instead.

“So,” Yasmin says eventually, “I have to ask your advice.”

Christine blinks away her surprise. “Oh! Sure.”

“Me and Jools,” she says, “we should have graduated by now, right? I mean, you think so, don’t you?”

Both Yasmin and Julia are, as far as she’s ever been able to tell, model examples of the women Dorley aims to let loose on the world, and she’s been at a loss as to understand why they’ve been kept here. Sure, in most previous intakes the third-year girls have stayed on until the end of the third year, but the loosening of guidelines across the board has taken effect here, too: Vicky, graduating in two years; Paige and now Christine, effectively sponsor-less; Jodie, socialising extensively with people from outside the programme. It’s sobering to realise, as Christine suddenly does, that she’s on course, out of everyone in her intake, to become the least likely ever to leave this place.

No. She’s going to leave. Her and Paige. Growing old together. Somewhere away from here.

“Yeah,” she says. “Definitely.”

“Well,” Yasmin says, still watching Christine’s face carefully, “we finally found out why we’re still stuck here. Identities and accounts held hostage.”

“Be careful, Yas,” Julia says.

“We were supposed to work it out for ourselves,” Yasmin continues, “but, of course, we didn’t, because it’s stupid, just like all their… extra-curricular crap. We’re supposed to ‘socialise’.”

“Oh,” Christine says. “But you do socialise, right? You have whole lives away from Dorley. You just… don’t hang out with anyone here. Which is valid.”

“Thank you for your approval,” Julia says.

“We have lives,” Yasmin says, “but we don’t have friends. We have coworkers. And we have… whatever you lot are to us.”

Christine, through her shrug, attempts to communicate that her lot can be taken or left, as one pleases.

“They told us we have to spend time with you,” Julia says. “Sally and Lisa, ganging up on us as usual. We’re ‘insufficiently socialised’.”

“And we said, like you, that it’s bullshit. And it’s not like— Okay, so, no offence, Christine, but I don’t especially want to hang out with you, or Paige, or Vicky, or anyone in your circle.”

“Um. None taken.”

“You didn’t exactly make it easy for us down there,” Julia says. “It’s a bit difficult not to remember that, just, like, looking at you.”

Christine frowns. “We mostly left you alone, I thought.”

“Exactly,” Yasmin says. “It was always you three and Jodie, and even when she broke off to spend more time with Donna, it was still always you three. And us, at the periphery. And Craig, I suppose, before they killed him.”

“He washed out,” Christine corrects. “We don’t know—”

“They might as well have killed him. Not that I miss the guy, but that’s not the point. We shouldn’t have to spend time with a bunch of— of sponsors, or the girls who ignored us while we were getting tortured and reshaped, just to go free! We’re ready now!”

“Yasmin,” Julia warns again.

“How much socialising did they say?” Christine asks.

Julia waves a dismissive hand. “Not much.”

“They’re not requiring you come out clubbing with us, or anything?”

“No.”

“So just switch to using the downstairs kitchen for a bit, then. Eat lunch in the dining hall at the weekends. Paige and I are usually around, and Jodie, too, so there’ll be people you know. Even if you don’t like us very much.”

“It’s not that we don’t like you,” Yasmin says. “We just, you know…”

“You were there at the worst part of our lives,” Julia says, dropping a plate in front of Yasmin and sitting down next to her, “and you didn’t help.”

“Sorry,” Christine says. “I was a mess back then. We all were. But I should have—”

“The past is the past,” Yasmin says. She chews on her breakfast for a bit — it smells amazing — and adds, “Perhaps we can come down for lunch today. See how it goes.”

“I thought you were on call?”

“It rarely amounts to anything, and if it does, I can usually handle it remotely.”

“Oh, shit, actually,” Christine says, “today might be a bad time to start coming down for lunch. They’re doing disclosure today, and—”

Yasmin drops her fork and sits back in her chair. “Fucksake!” she says, “This is exactly why I didn’t want to do this! You can’t spend five minutes around a ‘Sister’ without getting sucked into all this bullshit again! That’s what this requirement’s actually about: it’s to gaslight us.”

That word again. “What do you mean?” Christine asks.

“We’re loners. We have each other, and that’s all we’ve ever needed. But you know what that means? We have no ties here. No reason to think fondly of this place. And that’s unacceptable, so they want us to spend time with you — okay, fine, not actually you, but you know what I mean — and start seeing this place through the eyes of the programme. See the first and second years as they come up. Understand the sponsor point of view. Stop viewing our lives, our experiences, our memories of what was done to us through our own framing, and start adopting Beatrice’s.” She picks up the fork again and stabs at the air with it. “Stop thinking of the rest of you as just people we were tortured next to and start thinking of you as our Sisters.” She spits it with a sneer. “The family that spays together, stays together!”

Christine winces. She’s seen that mug.

“Yas—” Julia says.

“They’re such manipulative bitches! They want us thinking of our torture and mutilation in purely administrative terms, with nice innocent words like ‘disclosure’ bandied around to mask what’s actually being done: revealing to a group of vulnerable boys, ripped out of their lives and taken captive, that they’re going to be held against their will for at least the next two years, that their bodies are going to be taken from them and ripped apart, and that their minds are next on the chopping block. It’s fucking—”

“Yas, please!”

“Jools!” Yasmin says sharply. “She’s not going to tell on me! Are you, Christine?”

Christine emphatically shakes her head.

“No, Yas,” Julia says, “the cameras…”

Yasmin throws down her fork again. “Shit,” she says. “Sally’s going to be annoyed with me again.”

“Just a moment,” Christine says, picking up her phone and loading up her app. She almost loads her old custom app — legitimacy is a difficult habit to instil — but she chooses the correct one and waits impatiently for the feeds to load in.

“What are you doing?” Julia asks.

Being manipulative, Christine thinks. Out loud, she says, “Wanna see?” She pulls out her chair and swings it around to the end of the table, sitting down again at right angles to Yasmin and Julia, close enough that if she angles her phone they can both see well enough. As they watch, she calls up the last five minutes of footage, scrubs around in it to show Julia and then Yasmin entering the kitchen, then defines start and end points and tags it corrupted footage. A tap sends it straight to the archive; another puts all the second-floor cameras into a full reboot cycle.

“Christine—” Yasmin says.

Christine wags a finger. “Not done,” she says. Now she loads her custom app, finds the archived footage and scrambles it. “There.” She looks up, grinning, to a pair of confused faces. See? Someone on the inside is your friend…

“How come you can do that?” Yasmin asks, half-accusing, half-astonished.

“I took a job here. Head of Network Security. Bea and Maria have been really unsubtle about how badly they want me to be a sponsor; this way, I get them off my back, I make some money, and I don’t end up in the basement next year telling some poor lad I’m going to cut his balls off.” Her smile widens. “But I’ve also had control of pretty much the entire network for a while now, since way before I took the job. I have a whole suite of tools for fucking with the surveillance here. The door locks, too.”

“Wait,” Yasmin says, gesticulating with her fork again, “you’re doing tech support for Dorley? You’re in charge of it?”

“Yep.”

“Do you know how much you could make in the private sector, with those kinds of skills?”

“Is it better than twenty thousand, after tax, with no rent and bills, for a brand new hire with no relevant qualifications?”

“I mean, no, okay, wow. After tax?”

“Hey! I saw this job first!”

“Sure, no worries. Wouldn’t want it anyway.” Yasmin smiles at Julia. “We’re out of here as soon as they let us.”

“I have to ask,” Christine says, cupping her mug in both hands to still her fingers; what she’s about to say feels uncomfortably true believer, “and I mean, my job requires me to ask: you’re not security risks, are you?”

“Hey!” Julia says. “You said you wouldn’t report us!”

“I did and I won’t. And you’re obviously ready to leave. Have been for ages. You deserve your lives. So, if you’ll let me, I’ll argue for that, officially; I’m on payroll now, after all. You should talk to Indira as well. She’ll listen, and we can both bring your case to Bea. All I ask is that, when you leave, you move on. Forget about this place, if you need to. But all the people I love are tied to it, one way or another, and as much as I want to take all of them with me when I go, I’m fairly sure that’s not going to happen. Losing any of them to someone else’s grudge—”

“Don’t worry,” Yasmin says. “All we want is to move out.”

“Anyone who tells on this place would become the most newsworthy person in the world, anyway,” Julia says. “And that’s unpleasant enough for regular people, let alone people like us, people with… our histories.”

“You’re really planning to leave?” Yasmin asks. “I assumed you’d stay forever, actually.”

“Nope,” Christine says vehemently. “I’ll probably stay here while I finish my degree, since Aunt Bea seems to want to throw money at me and Paige and I can get a double room up on the fifth floor and still pay no rent, but when I graduate Saints, I’m leaving. For where, for what, I don’t know.” She smiles. “My future’s with Paige, and the family I made here; it’s not with Dorley itself.”

“Good for you.”

“We have another reason to keep the secret, anyway,” Julia says. “We heard about the trans girl. No matter how mad we might be at the rest of you, we wouldn’t want to hurt her.”

Christine laughs. “Yeah. Dorley’s first innocent.”

“How’s she doing?” Yasmin asks. “I’ve been sort of worried about her. Is she okay?”

 

* * *

 

The basement’s still bifurcated — ‘split population’ is the official Dorley term — with Will, Raph and Ollie living out of the cells for now. The plan is to keep them confined for the time being, with minimal entertainment but no other punishment, until they’ve gotten over themselves, and while the cells aren’t quite as austere as they were when Stefan first woke up in one, having been reconfigured for a longer stay — Pippa described a nicer mattress, voice control over the lights, and a tablet — they’re still not exactly pleasant places to spend weeks or months at a time. When it’s time to rejoin the rest of them, Stefan imagines Will, Raph and Ollie will be less likely to try anything, lest they find themselves sent right back to the cells.

Difficult to care about them right now, though; it’s disclosure day! At last!

The four of them — him, Aaron, Adam and Martin — are spaced out in the common room, one at each of the metal tables, feet tucked under the seat, separated and more or less immobilised. Their sponsors stand at their sides, tasers cupped in ready hands, with Edy back for Adam but Indira still standing in for Maria. At the edges of the room, also with weapons ready, stand almost as many sponsors and other Dorley girls as had appeared after Will attacked Maria; no Paige, but Christine sits on the sofa by the door, laptop balanced on her crossed legs, frowning at the screen. She shoots Stefan a grin when none of the other boys are looking, and wiggles her fingers in greeting.

They’ve been positioned so they’re facing the doors into the dining room, and that’s where Monica comes in from, all smiles, carrying with her a stool that Stefan recognises from his brief glance into the rooms on the first floor basement. She drops it, sits down with heels resting on the bottom rung, and places her hands carefully in her lap.

A sitting position from which she can easily and quickly stand and step away. Wise, after Maria.

“Good morning!” Monica says, looking around at Stefan and the boys like a substitute teacher greeting the class the other teachers warned her about. “It’s time for the big speech. But first, a reminder: violence will not be tolerated. If you attack your sponsor or any other employee, there will be consequences. If you attack each other, there will be consequences. I believe, Edy, you summed our institutional attitude up as, ‘we’ll bury you in the woods’?” Edy nods, embarrassed, and pats the back of Adam’s head. “Absent that, you must understand that we are not offering you a choice. And—” she laughs cynically, “—we are not accepting comments or criticism at this time. There are two ways to leave this place: complete the programme or wash out, whether through resistance or violence. Any questions, before I begin?”

“Define ‘resistance’,” Aaron says. “Do we get to, like, ever actually complain about shit, or are you going to delimb me and bury me in five bin bags the moment I raise my voice?”

“You can yell and scream and complain as much as you like, later. Just keep your hands to yourself. Anyone else? No? Okay!” Monica leans forward on her stool, hands clasped in front of her. “By now, you’ll have noticed certain changes in your bodies. Perhaps you feel the cold a little more than you did; maybe you’ve found you’re more sensitive in some areas and less in others. These changes are deliberate, and there will be more to come. You remember your Goserelin implants? Those have been suppressing your testosterone since you arrived. It’s a procedure we’ve used in other years, with other male intakes, to reduce aggression, but our success with them has been… mixed. In fact, in all the years Dorley has been operating as a rehabilitation facility—” Aaron snorts, and Indira reaches out without looking and slaps him lightly on the shoulder, “—we have had considerably poorer treatment outcomes with our male intakes than with our female intakes. Put bluntly, the endemic violence of toxic masculinity is extremely difficult to cure, and we have been forced to wash out the majority of our subjects. So, this year, in the interests of being humane, we’re trying something new.”

Monica pauses, to let the boys’ minds race. So far, this is everything Stefan expected: Pippa explained that they prefer every intake believe they’re the first ones in Dorley’s history to be feminised, lest the boys in question draw (correct) conclusions about their sponsors. It’s crucial, Stefan read in the guidelines, for the boys to feel like their only allies, the only ones who can understand their plight, are each other; to bond under the attractive boot heel of the sponsors. Only later, when the subject is at their lowest, will the sponsor reveal that it was all just another ruse, that she, too, was once the same. She will present herself as proof that future, family and friends all await, if only they can push through.

But at least Stefan won’t have to pretend about most of it any more.

“In addition to your testosterone suppression,” Monica continues, “for the past month, we have been administering estrogen in appropriate doses. We intend to continue this regimen indefinitely.”

Another pause, punctuated almost immediately by Aaron attempting to stand and hitting his knee on the underside of the metal table. “You fucking what?” he yells, and starts trying to untangle his legs; for what purpose, Stefan can’t imagine.

Indira puts a hand on his shoulder. “Sit.”

“No!” He tries to shake her off. “You’re not going to fucking—”

“Sit!” Indira repeats. “I will not tell you a third time, Aaron Holt, and if you don’t return to your seat right this instant I will make you sit down.”

He doesn’t immediately comply, but he does stop struggling against her grip. “All right!” he says to Indira, and puts flat palms on the table to steady himself and lean forward to address Monica. “You’re not serious; estrogen?”

“I am completely serious,” Monica says. Stefan wonders if any of the boys have noticed the edges of a smirk playing about her mouth. “As I said, you’ll have noticed some of the physical changes already; they are not caused by testosterone suppression alone, as I know some of you have speculated. These changes will continue. We have informational pamphlets should you wish to educate yourself fully.” She gestures to a small pile on the cabinet nearest the TV. Stefan, twisting to look, turns his laugh into a cough: the pamphlets have NHS branding.

Indira uses Aaron’s moment of paralysed outrage to push him back down into his seat. He lands with a surprised squeak and glares at her. Held down by her, he can do nothing but complain. “Stef! Why aren’t you helping?”

“What would I even do?” Stefan says, remembering at the last moment to push a scowl onto his face, as if he’s equally angry. He points around the room. “Taser, taser, taser, taser… and a roomful of big guys with actual guns, somewhere.”

“I don’t mean fight,” Aaron says. “I mean— fuck, I don’t know. Why not get Pippa to help? You have this whole psychosexual thing going on with her—”

“It’s called having a friend, Aaron.”

He hits the table. “Then why isn’t she, as your ‘friend’, stopping this? They’re making us into fucking girls, Stefan! That’s what estrogen does.”

“How do you know that?”

Aaron looks like he’s going to hit the table again, and Stefan has to admit that he’s probably pushing the pretence of ignorance a little far.

“Have you ever been online? Estrogen’s what trans women take. It’s what makes them women.”

“Actually—” Indira starts.

“Yes,” Aaron interrupts, “Jesus fucking Christ, I know, they were women already, is that really the point?”

“You should always endeavour to be accurate.”

“Oh my fucking— You see, Stef! You see what she’s like? I’m being menaced by a pedantic primary school teacher!”

Monica claps her hands to force all eyes to return to her. “Are you done?” she says.

“Not even remotely,” Aaron says.

“We can escort you out. Put you in the cuffs in your room, and leave it to Indira to give you the rest of the information, if you’d like.”

“Fuck. No. Fine. I’ll be quiet. Tell us your plans for us, Mo-ni-ca.”

She frowns at him, irritated but not unsettled by Aaron’s reference to her former charge. “Before I continue, you should know that we did not come to this decision lightly; nor were you chosen at random. Some of you are here because you’ve hurt people — very badly — and others because your lives were on harmful trajectories. Aaron, since you have chosen to be so vocal, I believe we will use your case as the example. Christine?”

“One second,” Christine says. Stefan glances over: she’s tapping at the screen of her laptop, biting her lip in concentration. “There.”

When Christine hits a key on her computer the TV clicks on, showing a picture of Aaron, taken some time before Dorley snatched him. He’s at a bar — not one of the ones on campus; perhaps this was taken in his home town? — and he’s drinking from a half-empty bottle of light beer. His hair’s shorter and he’s wearing a suit jacket over a loose shirt. Stefan wants absurdly to protect the boy in the photo, to warn him what’s coming, to make him change his ways. Pippa steps closer and squeezes his upper arm. With the boys all staring at the TV screen, he feels safe to reach up and take her hand, just for a second.

“Aaron Holt,” Monica says. “Twenty-one years old as of July. Geology student. Prolific harasser of women.”

“Do we really have to do this?” Aaron asks. He’s not looking at the screen.

“You have, I believe, extensively covered the topic of your dick pics with your peers, so I won’t go into much detail except to note that your expulsion from Saints was countermanded by your parents, as was any hint of actual disciplinary action. A large donation, forming the last leg of funding required for what is probably now going to be called the Aaron Holt Memorial Tennis Court. Be proud, Aaron; your name will live on. Christine: next, please?”

Another tap on her computer and Aaron’s photo shrinks into the top-left corner, replaced in the centre by an unfolding list of dates, events, and pictures of women.

Monica points at the screen. “These women were spared the indignity of your penis, but did not escape your other avenues of harassment. Most of it surprisingly chaste, but all of it rather misogynist. We don’t even know what some of these women did to piss you off, Aaron, but there are rather a lot of them, aren’t there?”

“Stop it,” Aaron mumbles, resting his head in his arms.

Stefan knows he has something to say here, a knife to twist. “Aaron,” he says, “there are so many…”

“Shut up,” he says. “I know.”

Indira pats him on the shoulder and leans down. “It’ll be over soon,” she whispers.

“Next,” Monica says. More dates, events and pictures scroll onto the screen. “Next.” The list updates again.

“Stop it,” Aaron says again.

“Next. Here’s the list of websites we pulled off your laptop, your phone, and your mobile provider. Notice a theme?” Monica waves her hand at the screen, and Stefan does indeed notice the theme. When Abby and Christine called Aaron an incel he hadn’t realised they were actually describing him so accurately. “Next.”

“Stop it!” Aaron yells, pushing Indira off his shoulder and glaring red-eyed at Monica. “I get it! Next! Next! Next!” He bangs his fist on the table in time with his chant. “You have every bad thing I’ve ever fucking done up there!”

“Not just that,” Monica says. “We also have this.” Her voice is a little softer, and when the screen flickers again it shows a list of incidents from his boarding school. Aaron’s name is in the victim column this time, opposite the kinds of names that are destined to accumulate inherited honorifics as their owners age. Bullying, intimidation, theft, and seven assaults. Three of them—

Stefan looks away from the screen.

“We have more,” Monica says. “Incidents dating back to primary school, where you switch back and forth between aggressor and victim.”

“Fuck you, Monica,” Aaron says. “If you’re trying to say I’m the way I am because I got bullied in school, fuck you.”

“No, Aaron. You are the way that you are because your worst traits have been encouraged at every step of your life. Neglectful parents. Poor role models. People who hurt you, and people who encouraged you to hurt others. And the one true friend you had, well, she left you.”

Aaron, looking at the table again, sticks a middle finger up in Monica’s rough direction.

“You don’t have to be this way,” she continues. “You never did. You are bright, quick-witted, and even capable of empathy. But you were failed, repeatedly. Taught to be impulsive rather than wise. Resentful rather than thoughtful. Never offered better options, or a better way to behave; shown only loneliness, violence, and an extremely unhealthy view of women.” She nods at Christine, who returns the screen to its starting configuration. “And we know what happens to boys like you, left alone: you implode or you explode. You go quietly or you go very, very noisily. I know you hate looking at that screen, Aaron, and seeing everything you’ve done in one place. Well, you’re only twenty-one. Imagine how much longer those lists will be in a year; two; five. Imagine yourself at thirty; do you even recognise him? How many people has he hurt? How badly has he hurt himself?” She lowers her voice. “Is he even still around?”

“Fuck you,” he says again, dropping his head back into folded arms.

“We’ve been taking groups of troubled and troublesome people into our care for a long time now,” Monica says. “Our aim is always to reform, to provide resources, to map out alternate ways to live life. To find people who are on the edge of atrocity, and bring them back. But we have been, as I said, considerably more successful with women than with men. From the very start, in fact. And we’ve tried many different methods with the men, trying to replicate our results with the women; nothing works. As a society, we are simply too ready to forgive men — white cisgender men, it has to be said — for any harm they might commit, especially if they are of means. And you, Aaron — and I do genuinely apologise for singling you out again — are a textbook case for failure. A white cisgender man with money, looks, charm, and absolutely appalling habits. You’ll keep getting away with it until, eventually, either you can’t live with yourself or someone else doesn’t survive you.”

“I can change,” he whispers.

“Can you, now? What would you be doing, right now, if we hadn’t taken you in? Be honest.”

“I can change. I want to change!”

“But you won’t. This country won’t let you. Have you, by any chance, heard of Charlotte Church?”

And Monica launches into a spiel almost word-for-word identical to the one Beatrice subjected Stefan to, which leaves him free to tune her out and concentrate on Aaron, quivering in the nest of his forearms, stripped and laid bare by Monica’s evidence against him, by her confidence in the inevitability of his recidivism, by her mournful enumeration of his failings.

At around the halfway point, Indira waves to get Christine’s attention and beckons her over. Christine puts down her laptop, pulls a taser out of her pocket with visible distaste, and stands where Indira stood. Indira sits on the chair next to Aaron, joins him in his space, encircles his shoulders with one arm and his hands with the other. Christine looks at Stefan and mouths, Are you okay? He nods. He’s not sure if he actually is; it’s hard to watch Aaron go through this, but harder still to see Aaron’s victims.

There really were a lot of them.

“This year,” Monica says, finishing up, “we have decided, finally, to act in accordance with the data we’ve been collecting for almost two decades. To attempt to rehabilitate you as males would be to abandon you. So we’re trying something new.”

At his table, Martin, heretofore silent, snorts and shares a look with his sponsor, Pamela. She rolls her eyes at him, displaying only an echo of the disdain Stefan remembers from the last time he saw them interacting. But that was weeks ago. Things change, including, apparently, Ella’s disgust for her charge.

Things change, including all the boys.

“Excuse me,” Adam says. He’s raising an arm, and supporting it with his other hand as if he thinks he might have trouble holding it aloft without help. Behind him, Edy rubs his shoulders. “By something new, you mean, with the estrogen, and the— the—”

“Goserelin,” Aaron supplies, muffled by his arms.

“Yes,” Monica says, before Adam can continue. “Rather than resign ourselves to another pointless year of failed male redemption, we are going to rehabilitate you as women.”

“How far will that go, please?” Adam says.

“All the way.”

“A— all the way?”

“All the way.”

Adam stiffens for a moment, and then turns to Edy and says, so quietly Stefan almost can’t hear, “I’d like to return to my room, please.” Edy nods, steps back to let him stand, and follows him out of the common room, her taser still clipped to her hip.

“‘All the way’,” Aaron says. He raises his head again. “This is fucking ludicrous, right? You see that, yeah? Your solution to toxic masculinity or chronic dick waggling syndrome or— or whatever the fuck is wrong with me, is to make me into a girl?”

Monica shrugs. “Yes.”

“Stefan?” Aaron turns to face him. “Do you have anything to say about this? At all?”

“I’m, uh, still processing it,” Stefan says, caught out.

“Of course you are,” Aaron says. “Indira, I take it from Adam’s exit that going to my room and staying there, sans handcuffs, is an option?” She nods. “Let’s go, then.”

Stefan does his best to avoid Aaron’s glare as the boy leaves, walked out of the room at taser-point. That last part could have gone better.

With just him and Martin remaining, the sponsors visibly relax. Edy returns from delivering Adam to his room; Monica hops down off her stool and walks over to talk to her. Christine’s eyes flicker down to meet Stefan’s again, and he does his best to answer the question he sees there silently, with a quick quirk of his eyebrows, because Martin’s looking at him, and he still has a role to play.

Why is Martin looking at him?

He excuses himself from Pippa, who half-heartedly waggles her taser at him, and joins Martin at his table. Ella nods to the both of them and joins Christine and Pippa, leaving them alone.

“I saw you laughing,” Stefan says, after Martin doesn’t say anything. “Kind of laughing, anyway. What was so funny?”

Martin smiles. It’s a bitter smile, and quite shallow, but it’s not as disturbing as it might have been had Stefan not observed the dour man’s mood unaccountably improving over the last few days. “I was right,” he says.

“About what?”

Martin rests his chin on his hand. “About this, Stefan. About their plan for us.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone?”

“Neither did you,” Martin says.

Stefan, perpetually wrong-footed this morning, can only answer, “What?”

“I know you saw this coming, too.”

“You’re just going to let it happen, then?” Stefan says, ignoring the accusation. “I saw more pushback from bloody Adam than from you.”

Martin gestures towards the assembled sponsors. “It’s like you always say: they have the tasers and the keys. Besides, I don’t think they’re wrong, necessarily.”

That is emphatically not in Stefan’s script. “About rehab through womanhood?” he says.

“I wasn’t just a drinker who had a bad accident one day,” Martin says, meeting Stefan’s eyes with as steady a gaze as he’s ever seen on the man. “She could have put me up on the screen and, sure, my list wouldn’t have been as long as Aaron’s, but the fact remains that I’ve always gotten away with things. Because of who I am. Who my parents know. I’m… borderline aristocratic. And I hate it. I’m just not strong enough to push back against it. Except in the most terminal way, if you get my meaning. As weird as it is to say, coming here might have saved my life, for all that there’s anything there to save.”

“But,” Stefan says, unable to let the thought go, “you don’t want to be a woman, right?”

Martin’s eyes harden and his hands, placed harmlessly on the table, tighten into fists. But he relaxes again before Stefan can respond, returns to his former equanimity. “Stefan,” he says, “I don’t want to be anything.”

 

* * *

 

Two days ago, Abby gave Christine the address of a restaurant in Almsworth. Today, it turns out to be a pub: The Fallen General, hooked into a back street deep in the winding alleys that spread out from the river like cobbled veins. According to the menu, the pub is named after a poorly anchored statue, erected in the centre of what is now a small roundabout, which blew over and washed away in a flash storm sometime in the late nineteenth century, taking the memory of whichever luminary it commemorated with it. The head, neck and one shoulder of the statue, recovered decades later, are on display under a reinforced glass dome, positioned amidst the spirits behind the bar, looking out on the patrons with faded, weatherworn eyes.

The Fallen General, with its exposed wooden beams, generous outside seating, cutesy signage and desecrated conversation piece, is as much a tourist pub as it is a drinking pit for locals, and as such contains on a bright Saturday afternoon about as many people with backpacks as without. It’s probably why Abby picked it: good camouflage. Or, perhaps, good for witnesses.

But for what?

“How did disclosure go?” Abby asks, as Christine swings down onto the bench next to her. She’s staked out a table by the front window, the better nervously to stare out of it, and spotted Christine before Christine spotted her, waved at her with fake enthusiasm. Abby’s nervous and trying to hide it.

“Could’ve been worse. Monica victimised Aaron. Not unfairly, considering his rap sheet; he was probably the best case study to make the point she wanted to make.” It’d still been hard to watch the boy crumple up in his seat. “There was a bit of shouting, and then one by one the boys all got escorted back to their rooms while everyone else stayed behind to chat with Stef. I made my excuses.”

“No riots, then?”

“No. I doubt it’ll go as well this afternoon when they tell the guys in the cells.”

Abby smirks. “If they riot, the worst they can do is brain themselves on those nasty little metal toilets. You want something to eat?”

Christine shakes her head. “I want to know what I’m doing here, Abs. And, no, I’m still riding breakfast. I could murder a Coke, though.”

“Me too, actually. No, I’ll get it; you sit. And, yes, I promise I’ll tell you what this is all about when I get back.”

She squashes back as far as she can to let Abby out, and people-watches while Abby arranges drinks for the both of them. She quite likes the atmosphere here; the place is reminiscent of the kinds of pubs her mum liked and would drag her to when she was a child: safe, rural-themed, and able to supply large baskets of chunky chips slathered in salt and vinegar. She smiles, picturing her mother digging in, the fat, greasy chips contrasting with the delicate white wines she preferred, and kicks the table to dispel the memory. That was before everything: before it all went to shit; before her father started hitting her mother; before Christine disappeared and consented eventually to be remade. Back when she’d had a family.

Best forget it all, really. Fuck sentimentality, fuck memories and fuck her mother, too; she’s here for her Sister and nothing and no-one else.

When Abby returns, depositing Cokes on the table and sliding back down onto the bench, it’s impossible not to notice her hands shaking.

“You okay, Abs?”

“I’m fine!” Abby says, too loud. “So. Okay. We’re meeting a couple of people for lunch. Just lunch. Nothing else. You’re here for moral support.”

“Mine or theirs?”

“Mine!”

“Define ‘a couple of people’.”

Abby stalls, takes a swig from her Coke. Christine elbows her. “Remember how I said my parents hired a private investigator?” Abby says, and preemptively winces. “Well, I, uh, kinda sorta contacted him.”

“Abby.”

“Yes, Christine?”

“These people, they’re your parents, right?”

Abby nods. “Yeah,” she says, “yeah, they are.”

“They don’t know about you, right?”

“Nope.”

“Do they even know anything about who they’re meeting?”

“Nope.”

“What are you going to tell them, and is it better than the truth?”

Abby blinks, confused for a second, and then the words all come out in a rush. “I’d never tell them the truth, Chrissy! You think I’m stupid? I have a story, and it’s a good one, and you’re in it, so please stay and don’t run off! I need someone here and you’re the only one I can trust, so—”

“Relax!” Christine interrupts. “I’m not running off. And you couldn’t trust Dira?”

“Not the way I trust you. I know you won’t tell Bea. I’m merely very certain she wouldn’t.”

“She wouldn’t.”

“She’s a sponsor,” Abby says. “She has obligations.”

“I’m an employee, too.”

“Yeah, but, like, you’re not exactly… scrupulously loyal, are you?”

Christine weighs her answer. “Let’s just say, I’m loyal to the spirit, not the letter.”

“Exactly,” Abby says triumphantly, and then wilts under Christine’s glare. “Fine! If this goes well, I’ll think about bringing Indira in.”

“Good,” Christine says. “So, if you’re telling a story, what’s my role in it?”

“You’re— shit! They’re here!”

Of course they are. Everything in Christine’s life operates on impeccably awkward timing. “I’ll wing it,” she says. “Is that them?” She points at an older man and woman, both Black and conservatively dressed, climbing out of a hatchback parked just down the road. “Abs?” she prompts, when Abby doesn’t say anything. “Is that them?”

“What?” Abby says, quietly and as if unsure, suddenly, of everything. Christine pokes her again. “Yes. Sorry. Yes. It’s them. And… someone else?”

Someone’s climbing out of the back seat, into the shadow cast by the buildings on the other side of the road: a man (almost definitely), in his early twenties (probably), and of about the same height and skin tone as Abby and her parents (as far as Christine can tell). With a practised shake of his wrist he extends a cane and puts his weight on it with every other step as he rounds the car and joins Abby’s parents. They cross the road together.

“You have a brother?” Christine says.

“No.”

Christine’s out of time for guesses, because they cross the street quickly and head straight for Abby’s table as soon as they enter the pub. She must have told them which table to look for; how long has she been sitting here? She smiles at them as they sit down, Abby’s father opposite Christine, Abby’s mother opposite Abby. The mystery man pulls up a chair and sits opposite the window, effectively blocking either of them from leaving.

No-one says anything. Abby’s parents are waiting for her to open, and Abby herself has frozen.

Fine. “Hi!” Christine says, leaning into her voice training for a nice, clear, bright voice, forward in the mouth and high-pitched; feminine and friendly. “My name’s Christine Hale. I’m—” Shit! Did Abby even give them a name? “—I’m with her.”

“Understood,” Abby’s father says. He points at himself. “I’m Robert and this is Diane.” He’s decided that Christine is the one in charge; understandable, given Abby’s complete silence. She’s staring at the younger man, frowning slightly. Robert continues, “Carl, our investigator, said you have information about our son. Please, we just want to know if he’s okay. Carl says he’s alive, but—”

“Oh my God,” Abby says, quietly but with such force that it shuts her father up. “Are you… Derek?”

“Yes,” the man at the end of the table says. He matches her frown.

“You would have been, what, fourteen when I left? Goodness, look at you!”

“Please,” Robert says, “if one of you knows something, you have to tell us. Or if you’ve been leading Carl on a wild goose chase… we have to know.”

Abby shakes herself, head to hands, which she then places on the table in front of her, clasped. Her knuckles tighten. Under the table, Christine places what she hopes is a calming hand on Abby’s thigh.

“Yes,” Abby says, looking from her father to her mother, “okay. Sorry. This is… oh, fuck, this is so hard.” Christine squeezes, and Abby glances quickly her way, smiling in thanks. She takes a deep breath. “Mum,” she says. “Dad.” And then, absurdly, she suppresses a giggle. “Cousin Derek. I asked you here today because I wanted to see you again. Because I wanted to see my family again.” She closes her eyes. “It’s me.”

Abby’s mother, Diane, leans forward, staring intently at her daughter. “What do you mean?”

“I’m—”

“Gareth?”

She says it quietly, incredibly so, but for Abby it’s a shout; she jumps like she just bit a live wire and her breathing audibly quickens, but before anyone can react she waves her hand to say she’s okay. Diane’s got a hand on the table and Abby reaches out to take it, draws her mother’s hand into the middle and holds it with both of hers.

“Yes,” Abby whispers. “It’s me.”

“We thought you were dead.”

“I’m not. I’m just… different.”

“Let me look at you,” Diane says, and Abby holds still. She’s wearing her hair out of her face for this, in her habitual bun, gathered in tight curls just above the nape of her neck, and it leaves her whole face visible. She smiles nervously, tightly, with her lips almost pursed, expending a great deal of effort to keep herself under control. Christine doesn’t know whether, if Abby had room to move, she’d leap forward and embrace her family or run out of the pub and never look back.

“That’s you, Garry?” her father says. At the end of the table, Derek leans on his elbow and just stares.

“Yes,” Abby says.

“I see him,” Diane says. “In her. I see him in her.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I’m being rude; you must have a new name?”

Abby nods, but doesn’t say anything. Christine’s still wondering if she should interject, perhaps even take over the conversation, when Abby suddenly comes alive again, retreats from her mother’s hand, sits back and exhales deeply. “My name’s Abigail,” she says, smiling brightly, smiling the way Christine’s used to, smiling like her sister always should. “Abby,” she adds. “I took the surname Meyer.”

“Grant not good enough for you?” her mother says, but there’s a tease to her tone, one Christine recognises from Abby herself. She looks from Abby to her mother; they look so much alike.

Abby laughs. “No,” she says, “no, it’s good. But I had to disappear. I—”

“Garry?” Derek says, grabbing Abby’s hand. “Seriously? Garry?”

“Hi, Rick,” Abby says. “But, uh, call me Abby, if you’re going to shout, please?”

“Oh.” Derek lets go of her hand and smiles sheepishly. “Right. Yeah. I know the drill.”

“What do you mean, you know the drill?” Abby’s father asks.

“One of the guys at work is trans,” Derek says. “Mick. He’s a good guy. You met him, at the—”

“Tell us about him later, dear,” Diane says.

There’s a moment of embarrassed silence, broken when Robert Grant slaps the table. “Right,” he says. “Now that we’re all over the big surprise, why don’t we get some lunch in, and some drinks, and we can talk about the last decade without—” he points at Abby, “—leaving out why you pretended to be dead. So, what do you fancy, Gar— Abby? Roast beef sandwich, like always, or do you eat dainty little salads now, like your mother?”

“Roast beef sandwich sounds great, Dad,” she says, and covers the side of her mouth to whisper to her mother, “I skipped breakfast.”

Robert collects lunch orders for all of them — Christine agrees to try Abby’s order of a roast beef and cranberry sauce sandwich, and has her offer to pay waved away — and bustles off to the bar to find someone to serve him. Christine recognises in his attitude the sudden and necessary busyness of an older man who has something difficult to deal with and needs to occupy his hands so his mind can work away in silence.

“So,” Diane says, “Christine, was it?” Christine nods. “How do you know our— our daughter? Are you two, um…?”

“Oh, no!” Christine says quickly. “We’re just friends. Really good friends. Sisters, almost. I mean, not even almost. I think of her as my big sister, really.”

“Then you must be a remarkable young woman.”

“I try.”

“How did you and Abigail meet?”

Christine’s impressed. Barely a hint of a pause before her daughter’s name that time. Then she parses the question. “Uh, Abs? You want to take that one?”

Abby nods. “It’s sort of part of the whole story,” she says. “Why don’t we wait for Dad to get back first?”

He returns a few moments later but doesn’t want to talk about any of the ‘big stuff’ until their food arrives, so they fill the time with small talk about Derek’s job — he’s in Quality Assurance at a software company — and Christine’s degree, until four sandwiches and a salad arrive, plus a large basket of enormous chips, which makes Christine smile despite herself.

Abby’s story is simple, and like all the best lies is constructed partly of truths: she was an unhappy child, a restive teen and a disruptive university student, and she came to a true understanding of herself after hitting rock bottom, early in her degree. The fictions are that she left Saints for a long time so she could transition up in Manchester, which is where she met a young, pre-transition Christine.

“Oh,” Abby’s mother says, “you’re like her, then?”

Christine shrugs. “On my best days, I’d like to think I get close. She’s the kindest person I’ve ever met, Mrs Grant.”

“Oh, do call me Diane.”

Christine didn’t miss the half-second’s surprise on Diane’s face: that her former son could be seen as aspirationally kind is perhaps almost as big a leap for her as the gender thing. Which is ludicrous to Christine — she’s seen Abby’s file, and read in there mostly deep depression and the occasional self-destructive impulse — but the worst years of Abby’s past are Abby’s alone to share, and she’s always preferred to forget her former self.

Abby explains her extended silence by leaning into Aunt Bea’s justification for keeping Dorley’s resources to herself: she was helped to transition by a small collective of other trans people, who have to guard their privacy very carefully, especially in this age of increased stigmatisation — “We’ve seen some very unpleasant things said in the papers,” Diane says, nodding seriously; “Nothing but nonsense in there,” Robert confirms, with a disgusted shake of his head — so she kept the secret to keep them safe, at least until she could complete her transition and leave.

“Does that mean you’ve had your, um…?” her father asks.

Everyone at the table knows what he means. “Yes,” Abby says. “I have.”

“Understood,” Robert says, swallowing.

“But when I was nearly done,” Abby says, continuing her story, “I met Christine. She’d left her abusive family and was looking for help, so we helped her. I stayed behind to look after her for a while, and then I came back down here to finish my degree at Saints, under my new name. She joined me a few years later.”

Christine nods. “She made this place sound so great. And, well, she really does feel like a sister to me. I go where she goes.”

“I should have told you about myself back then,” Abby says, frowning, regretful, “but secrecy was a habit, and also… I was ashamed, mum. I treated you badly and then I disappeared without a word. It took me a long time to get over that. To realise how stupid I was being. I’m sorry.”

“We’re going to talk about that,” Robert says, “but not today. Today, I’m just happy to have my son back. Even if he’s… different.”

“I always wanted a little girl,” Diane says. She’s been holding Abby’s hand across the table for the last ten minutes, ever since the plates were cleared away, and it’s only the alarm on Abby’s phone that forces her to let go, so Abby can extract it from her bag and silence it.

They have a few more minutes, Abby tells them, but she’s meeting a source for work and she can’t be late. Which dovetails neatly, as Abby no doubt planned, into a discussion about what she does for a living. She shows them her newspaper bylines on her phone and extracts much parental pride from the remaining time.

They all swap numbers — Derek asking shyly enough for Christine’s that she has to make a point of noticing a text she has from her girlfriend, which the man takes in good spirits — and part with smiles and a promise between Abby and her parents to meet up again in a few days, somewhere they can really talk, where they can spend more than just a few hours together. Abby deflects the question of where she lives as a topic for another time, and hugs are shared all round.

While Abby’s checking the bus timetable, her mother takes Christine aside and asks her quietly, “Is she happy?”

“Yes,” Christine says. “She’s happy. Not just that, but she’s kind, thoughtful and funny. She’s helped me so much, and she’s helped a lot of other people, too. She’s a treasure. She’s my sister, Mrs Grant, and I love her.”

“Diane,” she corrects with a grin. “And, I have to say, I wouldn’t know. With her, I can see my son — although I have to look pretty hard! — but with you… I wouldn’t know.”

Christine’s starting to expect this from cis people now. A compelling argument for copying Paige and Vicky and becoming a cis girl permanently. “Thank you!” she says warmly.

“Do you think she’ll find someone? Someone who loves her for who she is?”

“That’s not in doubt. She’s wonderful, Diane.”

With promises that, yes, she’ll take good care of herself and Abby, Christine extracts herself from Diane Grant and joins Abby at the bus stop, waving back at Abby’s family, who are standing around their car and fidgeting, seemingly about to come and wait with them. But then the bus arrives and the Grants and cousin Derek watch them alight with unmistakable tears in three pairs of eyes, and Abby’s family is gone from view.

“So, I’m trans to Indira’s family,” Christine says quietly, settling into a seat and making a show of counting on her fingers, “and now to your family, too, and I’m cis to Lorna… Am I forgetting anyone?”

“You could go see your mother,” Abby says, “and be trans to her, too.”

“I’m thinking about it! I said I’d think about it, and I’m thinking about it.” Not entirely accurate.

“Good.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Honestly?” Abby says. “Like I just ran five marathons. It’s going to take all evening for my heart to slow back down.”

“You did well.”

“Thank you.”

“So did they, I thought.”

Abby smiles. “I knew they’d be okay with me. I hate the lies, but I’ve been thinking about what to say for a long time, and I know what they’re like: now that they have me back, they won’t push. If there’s holes in my story, they’ll give me privacy about it. They always did.”

“This is going to be a regular thing, then? Seeing them?”

“Yes. I’ve got my family back, Chrissy, and I’m never letting go. Oh, and did I see Derek getting a little cute with you?”

“You did. I mentioned my girlfriend. He didn’t whine.”

“He’s a good boy. Good man, now, I should say. Oh, and about that name they called me…”

“I did not hear it,” Christine says. “I’ve already forgotten it.”

“Bless you, Christine.”

 

* * *

 

Stefan eats a late lunch in the common area, with Pippa, Martin and Martin’s sponsor, Pamela. Pippa evidently shares Stefan’s fascination with Martin’s apparent ambivalence towards his upcoming and inevitable feminisation, and asks a couple of questions, none of which fill in the picture to Stefan’s satisfaction; the man genuinely does not seem to care. He leaves for a shower and a nap after lunch, and Stefan follows a little while later, agreeing, for the sake of appearances, to spend at least some time in his room, in case one of the boys — Aaron — decides to call on him. But no-one does and, bored, he heads back out to the common room to find Monica, Tabby and Jane lounging on the couches, playing poker. They offer to teach him, and deal him in.

He’s terrible.

He asks, during yet another hand in which he folds early, if Martin’s attitude is unusual. Not particularly, Jane tells him; it’s not every year they bring in someone so traumatised or guilt-ridden that they submit willingly, but it’s hardly unknown. They don’t tend to stick around after, preferring to live away from the Hall and make new lives for themselves elsewhere in the country, but all of them are, last anyone looked, as happy as people in their position can reasonably be expected to be.

“Still doesn’t make sense to me,” he says, dropping another hand of cards on the table, scarcely any better at poker than he was when they dealt him in. “I just can’t wrap my head around it.”

“You know what I think it is?” Tabby says. She’s sitting cross-legged on the other couch, guarding both her cards and her pile of improvised betting chips — buttons — on the cushion in front of her. “I think it’s because you’re trans.”

“Oh?” Stefan says.

“Explain, Tabitha,” Monica says. She’s lying on her back on the floor, with her head on a bean bag chair and her knees elevated. Stress, she explained. Tabby suggested they put whale noises on over the common room speakers, to really help relax her, and Monica threw a button at her. Tabby accused her of trying to bribe the clearly superior poker player.

“Thank you, Monica,” Tabby says, imitating Monica’s lecture voice with a smirk, “I will explain! Stef, as a trans woman, your gender is pretty strongly defined, wouldn’t you say? Something you’ve always been aware of, even if you didn’t always know what exactly it was. I mean, dysphoria, depression, depersonalisation, dissociation; it all comes from a pretty extreme body/gender mismatch.”

Stefan shrugs. “Yeah, I suppose.”

“I think — and, you have to understand, I’m speaking from personal experience, here — the opposite of that state isn’t being cis, necessarily,” Tabby says. “It’s being indifferent.”

“What?”

“Some people just don’t care.”

“Very technical, Tab,” Jane says.

“It’s true, though,” Tabby says.

“Well, yeah, probably.”

Tabby leans forward more, throws her cards down on the table, the game temporarily abandoned for the discussion. “There are people who are guys solely because they are guys. And girls who are girls because they are girls. They’ve never thought about it. They don’t have a particular attachment to the shape they currently are, the social role they currently occupy, it’s just… theirs. It’s like their car, or their house. They may like it fine enough, but if someone like us comes along and says, hey, sorry, it’s time to move house, they’d just ask about the new address and for a week to box up their stuff.”

“It’s a tautological gender,” Monica says, from the floor.

“That doesn’t help.”

Stefan’s trying to imagine it. The idea of being simply indifferent. “That’s so alien to me.”

Tabby smiles at him. “That’s just it. Gender, and the fuckery of it, has defined your whole life. And there’s a lot of cis people who feel the same, except without the dysphoria and the need to transition; they really, really feel like a girl or whatever, and they get really into being a girl. I’m sure you can think of people like that.”

Stefan shrugs. He hasn’t known all that many people.

“We don’t get a lot of people like that,” Monica says. “It’s practically an instant washout. It’d be pointlessly cruel to try and get them to change.”

“We go for the middle ground,” Jane says. “Boys who can change, even if they don’t want to. Whose identity, under all the cultural conditioning, is flexible enough. But, yeah, sometimes we get Martins, who just don’t care, whether because they’re like that naturally or they’ve been made that way by guilt, trauma, blah blah blah.”

“You think even Declan was like that?” Stefan says.

“He was a pretty big fucking question mark, to be honest,” Monica says. “But he was a piece of shit. Getting him off the streets seemed like a pretty potent priority, and we didn’t even know about the rapes. Just the violence.”

“Jesus.”

“No-one else is going to wash out, though,” Jane says.

“That’s hardly a foregone conclusion, Janey,” Tabby says.

“It is!”

“Ignore her,” Monica says. “She’s just saying that because she got Declan and only Declan in the pool.”

Jane nods. “I’m going to win two hundred quid.”

“So,” Stefan says, “the ones who aren’t like Martin, they’ll adapt?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

“You just… do,” Tabby says. “You accept it. You move on. It’s better this way, anyway.” She makes a show of extending her arms and flaring out the loose material of her sleeves, which are a bright cream-white and contrast beautifully with her dark skin, even under the unflattering basement lights. “Nicer clothes, softer skin. And the company’s better.”

“You learn to live with it,” Jane says, “when you have no other choice. And it’s not like any of us were living nice lives before we came here. Remember, we don’t just snatch guys randomly off the street. We put in the hours, do the research. We go for guys who’ll benefit, and who’ll survive.”

“What would Will have to go back to?” Tabby says. “I hate the fucker right now, but it couldn’t be more clear he’s drowning in guilt and doesn’t know how to deal with it except to hurt more people, which then makes him feel even more guilty. When we’re done with her, she won’t be that guy any more.”

“Yeah. You don’t hurt people like he does if you’re happy.”

“Masculinity is a prison,” Monica says. “We have the key.”

Stefan frowns. “Do you ever wash out guys who, maybe, could change who they are, but not the way you do it?”

“Not often,” Tabby says quietly. “But it’s happened.”

“We’re better at avoiding that than we used to be,” Monica says.

It still seems like a high price to pay. Stefan doesn’t say it, but Tabby sees it in him, anyway. “It hasn’t happened for years,” she says, reaching across the couches and taking his hand. “We’re very careful.”

He nods. There doesn’t seem to be any other appropriate reaction.

“Well, girls,” Monica says, sitting up and stretching, “game’s over, I think.”

“Aw,” Tabby says.

“Really?” Jane says.

Monica slips a band off her wrist and ties her hair into a ponytail. “Really. We can’t put this off any longer.”

Jane groans like a teenager whose curfew has been brought forward, but hops up off the couch, anyway, offering a hand to Tabby and pulling her up. “You ready to give another speech, Mon?” Jane says, aiming a swipe at Monica and missing.

“Stop,” Monica says. “No. I miss Maria.”

“Well,” Tabby says, “you can take it out on the guy that hurt her. Come on.” She smiles at Stefan, gives him a tired little wave. “It was nice to finally get a chance to talk to you properly, Stef.”

“Hey!” Edy shouts, poking her head through the door that leads to the bathroom, as the three sponsors head out to the corridor. “Are you—?”

“Yes,” Jane yells, “we’re doing the thing.”

“Make sure you tell—”

“We know!” Tabby and Monica say in unison.

“They’re supposed to tell the security guys where they’re going to be,” Edy says to Stefan, “and I know they forgot.”

“How’s Adam?” Stefan asks, turning around properly on the sofa so he can rest his hands on the back cushions.

Edy shakes her head. “Not good. I’m giving him some privacy to pee, but…” She sighs, and rolls her shoulders, pushing tension out of her body. “I really thought he’d do better with this.”

“With what? Being made into a girl?” When Edy nods he adds, “I’m sure he’ll get used to it in time.” Silently he scolds himself for being too damn nice about all this. It’s too easy to get sucked in, to be on the sponsors’ side, when they’re offering him everything he wants, when he’s just seen a list of sins longer than a supermarket receipt scroll by on the TV.

Edy beams at him. “You’re sweet, Stef. Oops, gotta go!” She ducks back into the bathroom, leaving Stefan alone in the common room.

Adam’s having trouble and Martin doesn’t care; what about Aaron? He was distressed during disclosure, understandably, and hasn’t left his room since, not even to urinate.

Worrying. He should look in on him.

He should check with Indira first, though, before he goes banging on Aaron’s door. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and sends her a message, and while he waits for a reply, he tidies the common room. Bean bag chairs in the corner, couches straightened up, deck of cards back in the cabinet. Dirty plastic mugs go in the dining room, for one of the girls to pick up later. He’s wondering if there’s a vacuum cleaner somewhere around — they must clean the place during the night, or early in the morning, because he’s never seen them do so — when he laughs at how ridiculous he’s being: he’s cleaning the torture basement. Voluntarily.

Feeling rebellious, he drops back onto the couch and reads a book on his phone, studiously ignoring the dust bunnies in the corner.

It takes a while for Indira to get back to him, and she does it in person. She gives him the bad news: Aaron’s not eating or drinking, he’s not watching a movie or listening to music or reading; he’s not doing anything. Just sitting on his bed, staring at nothing. And ignoring all of Indira’s attempts to get his attention.

“I tapped him on the head. I stood in front of him and said his name. I waved in front of his eyes! I even put water bottles and cookies on the bed next to him, in case he gets hungry or thirsty. I stopped short of actual physical violence, but I’m willing to try anything.”

“You can’t just leave him alone? This is a pretty big bomb that got dropped on him today. Maybe he just needs time.”

“Time is fine,” Indira says, leaning against the wall, “as long as he takes even the slightest bit of care of himself. But all he’s had today is a bowl of cereal and nothing even to drink since then, and if this becomes a whole twenty-four hours without food and water, then we have to start looking at drastic options, and those are…”

“Drastic?”

“Strapping someone down and making them eat and drink doesn’t help. It keeps them alive, but it’s just more trauma. They don’t recover. You get into a vicious circle. The threat of it is useful,” she adds, frowning, “but if you actually have to follow through, you’ve lost.”

The answer’s obvious. “Why don’t I talk to him?” he says.

 

* * *

 

Aaron’s sitting cross-legged on his bed, surrounded by the detritus of Indira’s attempts to get him to engage: water bottles, paper plates with cookies on, a couple of wrapped cereal bars, and some scattered cushions.

Indira insisted repeatedly to Stefan that he doesn’t have to do this, that this goes beyond Beatrice’s instructions for him, that this is sponsor stuff and not something he should be taking on. But what other options are there? Despite everything, Aaron is his friend, and he’s currently facing something no-one should have to face alone.

“Hi.”

Aaron says nothing.

“Indira let me in. I said I was worried about you after Monica really went in on you in the common room. That was pretty fucking intense, right?”

Aaron says nothing.

“They’re telling Will and the others now. Same speech, probably. I bet Monica uses Ollie as her example. Probably got a big chart of all the times he made his wife’s life a living hell. Or is it a girlfriend he had? I bet both. I bet he had a wife and a girlfriend, and was fucking horrible to both of them. He seems like the type.”

Aaron says nothing.

“I kind of want to be a fly on the wall for that? And I kind of don’t. After Declan and Will I think I’ve had my fill of sudden, unpredictable acts of violence.”

Aaron says nothing.

“I bugged Pip for details, but she just gave me one of those pamphlets and, like, I get the mechanics of it, I think? I just want to know why they think this’ll possibly help.”

Aaron says nothing.

“Did you know those pamphlets are from the NHS? Isn’t that ridiculous? As if this is a legit operation or something. Government-funded. Like what they’re doing to us is on the approved treatment list put out by the World Health Organisation.”

Aaron says nothing.

“Did you eat? I ate. I wasn’t really in the mood, but I was hungry and I decided I could still be scared shitless on a full stomach. There was meat in the lasagne actually. I think they decided to give us a treat to make up for all that stuff they said, but it might not have been a good idea because after weeks and weeks of vegetarian food I think my gut bacteria’s forgotten how to deal with beef. I feel a bit uncomfortable.”

Aaron says nothing.

“Aaron,” Stefan says, taking another step closer, “talk to me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m worried about you!”

“Oh, yeah? You want your little mate back, is that it?”

“I’m just worried.”

“Yeah, well, you fucking saw it, didn’t you?” Aaron leans back on the bed. He’s still cross-legged and his hands are buried in his lap. “Up on the screen. All the shit at school. What they liked to do to me. Want to know a funny secret? That’s just what I reported. I stopped telling on them after a while. No point. No evidence, unless you counted me having bruises or needing to shower in my uniform to get the blood out. They were all little lord fuckfaces and archduke dickheads, anyway. No-one was ever going to punish them. And, no, if you’re thinking, ‘Ah, that’s his origin story, that’s why he’s a bastard!’ No. I threw that in Monica’s face because I could. I don’t actually believe it. It was all just shit on top of shit. I wasn’t a good guy even before I went to that school, and getting victimised there… I kind of thought it was karma for a while, you know?”

“Aaron—”

“You know what I’m thinking about? I’m thinking about how they used to just casually hit me in the corridors. How they chased me down sometimes when they were bored. How they— how they did other stuff. And I’m thinking, what if I’d been a girl back then? What if I’d been a girl, like Monica and Indira and Maria all want to make me, surrounded by those boys? What would they have done? How much further would they have gone? I know what estrogen does, Stef. And I know what happens when you drain a body of testosterone. It’s why trans women don’t win Olympic medals. They’re making us weak, Stef. Weak, and then they want to send us out there, changed so we have no chance of fighting off people like that.”

“Women don’t have to be weak, Aaron—”

“For fuck’s sake, Stefan! You’re giving me that, too? You’re asking me to be fair and even-handed and glug the fucking respect women juice in the middle of all this? Are you actually Indira in a shitload of makeup and a ginger wig?”

“Sorry.”

“Look at me: I was smaller than most of the women here when they kidnapped me, and I’m only going to get weaker. It’s all part of the punishment, that’s what it is. One big power play. It’s the long game, and it ends with us dead, or worse, whatever we do.”

“You don’t think they’re sincere?”

“You do? Stef, that’s the stupidest question you’ve ever asked. And, yes, fine, it doesn’t fucking matter if they’re lying or not because tasers, guns, locks, et fucking cetera, I know. But there’s other ways to fight. Other ways to hurt them. They want me to take those hormone shots? They’ll have to put me to sleep first. They want me to get another Goserelin implant? They’ll have to tase me. They want me to eat? They’ll have to put a tube in me.”

“That’s your strategy? To make yourself miserable?”

“It’s not a ‘strategy’. It’s a ‘fuck you’. If they’re going to be like those boys at school, if they’re going to hurt me for their own reasons, then they’re going to have to do what those boys did and hold me down while they do it. I’m not going to consent. I’m not going to salve their consciences. They’re going to see me screaming when they close their eyes at night; I’m going to make all of them into monsters. Just fucking watch me, dude. They can do whatever they want to me. They can grow tits on me, they can cut off my dick; whatever. They’ll just have to live with it.”

“They didn’t say they were going to cut off—”

“Jesus, Stefan! Read the fucking room! Monica said, ‘All the way.’ Twice! What do you think that means? They’re going to teach us how to paint our faces and wear frilly knickers? No. They’re going to pump us full of hormones until we look like the sisters we never had and then they’re going to cut off our fucking dicks. It’s not just about a chest I can wank with and a bit of swelling any more. It’s real. It’s irreversible. And don’t think I haven’t noticed how well you’re taking this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know why Martin doesn’t care: he’s practically anaesthetised by his own self-loathing. Adam’s probably putting all his energy into praying he wakes up somewhere less fucking psychotic. But you; I don’t get you.” He half-smiles. “Okay, sometimes I do. Sometimes you seem just like me. But other times, like now, it’s like you’re from another planet. Like you’re a Stepford wife. Like you’re standing in front of me as a distraction because you’re in league with the insect queen, and she’s behind me, ready to implant her eggs. Why don’t you care, Stef?”

“I care. But what would I do?”

“Don’t give me the whole routine again. I don’t mean that you don’t try to escape. You’re friends with these girls, dude! You and Pippa are practically brother and sister, and I’ve seen you smiling and talking with the others. It’s like you like it down here, or something.”

He’s right. Stefan’s act has been absolutely terrible. Beatrice echoes in his mind; can’t be the Judas goat if he’s not believable. And if he can’t do that for them, if he can’t survive Dorley alongside them, then how will they get through it? Aaron’s already making plans to resist; they really could wash him out.

“You’re so calm about everything,” Aaron insists.

But how can he explain himself? How can he position himself as Aaron’s peer once again? How can he sell this?

“They’re going to do everything to you they’re going to do to me, so why don’t you care?” Aaron says.

An idea occurs. It starts itching in his mind as soon as he thinks about it; a diseased thought that needs to be expelled. It’s probably the worst thing he could do to Aaron right now. It’s manipulative and it’s cruel.

But it’ll sell it.

“Can I sit down?” he says.

“Sure. Whatever.”

He clears aside the cookies and the water bottles and sits on the bed next to Aaron. Closer than Aaron expected. Close enough for their thighs to touch. Aaron shifts uncomfortably, but doesn’t move.

“I’m not okay with this, Aaron,” Stefan says, breathing out heavily and slumping his shoulders. “I don’t exactly understand everything about what they’re going to do, but I know enough to know I don’t want it. And, yeah, actually, you say I’ve been talking to the sponsors? This is a big fucking betrayal. They’ve been talking to me, acting like my friends, all while knowing this was what was coming… It’s sick.” It’s not hard to spit the word. “Maybe they think we can all be gal pals after, or something. I don’t know. But what I do know is, I can keep going. I always keep going. I’m good at keeping going, Aaron. I’ve been doing it all my life. All I need is a reason.” He leans back on the bed, shoulders against the wall, hands cupped in his lap. He wants to seem open and honest. Nothing to hide. “When I was a kid and I was getting bullied, spending time at home was my reason. When Melissa disappeared, being strong for Russ was my reason. And when my friendship with him fell apart, studying was my reason, to get to Saints. And when I was lonely at Saints, graduating and getting a good job was my reason. I’ve always had a reason to keep going, and I always make sure I do. Because if I don’t have a reason, if I don’t find a reason, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“So,” Aaron says, leaning back, matching Stefan’s pose, “what’s your reason now? What’s a good enough incentive to keep going when those girlboss psychos are getting ready to castrate you?”

Aaron’s looking at him, so Stefan looks back. Holds it. Two, three, four seconds. Five. Aaron opens his mouth, and Stefan pre-emptively interrupts, looking away as he does so.

“You,” Stefan says. “You’re my reason.”

 

* * *

 

It would have been nice if it’d gone another way. If Aaron had accepted Stefan’s affection. If they’d hugged it out. If they’d even, Stefan has to admit to himself in the most guarded corner of his mind, kissed. If Aaron hadn’t recoiled from him, hadn’t pushed him off the bed. Hadn’t thrown cookies and water bottles and pillows at him until he left.

Hadn’t screamed ugly words down the corridor until Stefan burst into the common area and slammed the doors shut, quieting him.

But he bought it.

Stefan’s okay with being forcibly transitioned because he’s fallen for one of the boys suffering alongside him? An incredibly believable lie, it turns out.

Indira and Edy come through from the dining room and pull him back up off the sofa. One hand in each of theirs, they lead him out of the common room, up the stairs, past the security room. Through that cavernous dining hall. Into the kitchen, where he spoke with Beatrice, long ago. Pippa, Christine and Abby are there, Pippa kicking her chair back and almost running for him as soon as he comes into view. Indira and Edy hand him off to her, and he falls into her arms.

She holds him until the tears stop.

Gentle hands help him into a chair and he sits, leans both arms on the kitchen table, and wipes ineffectually at his eyes until someone — Abby, he thinks — passes him a box of tissues.

“I’m so sorry, Stef,” Pippa whispers, sitting down next to him and rubbing the back of his neck.

Indira puts a phone on the table, the view from one of Aaron’s room cameras on the screen. “He’s eating,” she says. “Cereal bars. You broke his resolve. He’s eating. You helped him.”

“You did amazingly, Stef,” Christine says, taking a hand and massaging his knuckles.

“Here,” Paige says, passing a mug around, through Abby’s hands and Christine’s and onto the table in front of Stefan. Hot chocolate. Marshmallow. He threads his free fingers through the handle and drinks.

“He’ll be okay,” Indira says, sitting down opposite and smiling.

“And so will you,” Abby says.

He blows on his hot chocolate. The reflected heat is nice, and eases the soreness around his eyes and the salt-dry skin on his cheeks. He imagines he’s red all over, his fair and lightly freckled complexion burning.

“I hope so,” he says.

“You will,” Pippa says.

“We’re all here for you,” Christine says.

“Forget what Aunt Bea asked of you,” Paige says. She’s still standing by the microwave, where she heated the milk, and looking down at him with crossed arms. “Don’t burn yourself out trying to help people who don’t want to be helped.”

“That’s our job,” Indira says.

“I want to help him, though,” Stefan says,

“And you did. He’s eating. He’ll get through this. And,” Indira adds, glancing at Edy, “just because we don’t want to strap him down, doesn’t mean we won’t, if we have to. He’s only hurting himself.”

“And he won’t do that forever,” Christine says. “He reminds me of me, a little. After the orchi. He’ll work it out. Even if it gets worse for him before it gets better, it’ll get better.”

It’s still a little alarming to remember that they’re all in on it.

One of the other sponsors — someone attached to the second or third year, someone he’s seen around in ancillary roles downstairs but doesn’t know by name — passes through the kitchen on her way out, and smiles at him as she goes. Another product of Dorley. Another woman who might once have been strapped down, been made to drink water, been made to eat, been made to accept injections. Been mutilated. Another one who is, like the rest, in on it.

Another one who’s happy now.

Aaron, throwing things, sending him away, rejecting him. Rejecting his help and, yes, his affection. Screw him. There’s too much evidence casually walking the halls of Dorley that says he’ll be okay, eventually. That he’ll live, in some form or other. And that’s all that matters. Stefan can’t spend every waking minute worrying about him.

He wipes his eyes again, and drinks his hot chocolate.

 

* * *

 

The girls slowly scatter, Christine and Paige up to Christine’s room — “You should drop by some time,” Christine said on her way out, “and I’ll show you the view from the second floor.” — Abby out on some errand, and Indira back down to the security room, to keep an eye on Aaron and Adam and to link up with Monica and the others.

Edy sits down next to him, when it’s just the two of them left in the kitchen. “We were going to take you down, too,” she says, “to meet with Monica and watch the footage of the second disclosure, get your thoughts on it, but I think that can wait, don’t you?”

He nods. it’s about all he has the energy for; he’s emptied out, exhausted from stress, from crying, from Aaron. Edy gets him some coffee and toasts him a bagel, and eats with him. Various other women pass through the kitchen as he eats. Two of them, a pair of girls named Faye and Rebecca, tell him how exciting it is to have him around, and ask him if Christine’s a good dancer; he has to admit that at the party where they met they mainly drank, smoked, and wandered around a half-complete building site together.

“That’s cool, too,” Faye says.

“Say hi to Christine from us when you see her next,” Rebecca says, as their sponsor collects them and escorts them out of the kitchen and into the main hall. Edy explains that, as second years, they don’t yet have the run of the place.

“But they seem so… normal,” he says.

“You should have seen them a month ago,” Edy says. “This place is nominally a dorm for adult students, but sometimes it’s like a hostel for horny adolescents.”

He finishes his bagel and coffee, and cleans his face with the moist wipe Edy offers.

“Aaron,” she says. “You love him, don’t you?”

He screws up the wipe and drops it onto the empty plate. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe. Maybe not. I feel… protective of him. Despite what I saw on the screen today. Despite everything.”

“Don’t over-analyse it. Lots of us formed attachments down there. And, with only a few exceptions, none of us were exactly great people, either. It’s okay to love a bastard, Stef. Here, bastards reform.”

“Why do I like him, though?” Of all people, of everyone he’s ever met, why Aaron? He’s been chewing on that along with his bagel, and come up with nothing.

“Why Maria, for me?” Edy leans on her wrist, smiling wistfully. “I’ve been here a long time, Stef. On and off. Known Maria longer than I’ve been a woman. And, my goodness, we weren’t friends to begin with. Emphatically not. I was one of Aunt Bea’s first, you know. Things were still a bit rough, back then. I spent eighteen months in the basement, under Maria and Bea’s authority. Had rather a hard time. So, even after I graduated, I avoided her. Through my first sponsorship I mostly interacted with her by text message. And when I got restless and left, back in 2013, I didn’t even say goodbye. I just left. Did my resignation by phone. But in the end, I came back. I missed this place. And why wouldn’t I?” She makes a show of looking around the kitchen, taking in microwave, food processor, AGA. “We have all the fancy equipment.” She sighs. “When I got back, things were different. More relaxed. Nicer. And it had been so long since she was the face of my rehabilitation that I couldn’t see her that way any more. That’s when I finally started talking to her properly.” Edy’s staring into the distance, now; into memory. “She apologised. I told her it wasn’t necessary. I told her I did things out there, out in the world, as Edith, that I never could have done before. Had experiences I never could have had. I thanked her, and that was the first time we so much as hugged. But it still took us until this year to get together. It was just, finally, the right time for it. We were both ready. And sometimes that’s all it is: it’s the right time, it’s the right place, and it’s the right person — no matter how unlikely any of those seem — and you fall in love.”

“Maybe,” he says again.

“Do you think your affection for him will survive the changes he’s going to go through?”

“I’m more worried he won’t survive.”

“He will,” Edy says. “He’ll live, and he’ll be a woman. Are you okay with that?”

“For his sake? No. Never in a million years will I be okay with that.”

“And if he comes to accept it? To embrace it? Like I did?”

Stef sighs. Imagines, once again, Aaron in a year’s time. It’s difficult; he can’t get around the idea that he won’t make it, that he’ll wash out, that he’ll be one of Dorley’s check marks in the failure column.

“I still don’t understand how you lot work,” he says, “even though you all keep taking a run at explaining it to me. But, yeah, I get what you’re asking. And I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Come on,” Edy says, standing, pushing her chair back, and holding out her hand for Stefan. “Maria wants to see you.”

“Because of today?” he says.

“She just wants to touch base.” Edy rolls her eyes. “And she’s a compulsive meddler who is probably watching us right now.” She looks up and blows a kiss at the almost-perfectly disguised camera set into the cornice. “But it’s not because of today, no. You just haven’t had a chance to really talk yet. C’mon.”

Stefan consents to be dragged out of his chair, and as Edy lets go of his hand she spins around and scrutinises him, screwing up one eye and grinning. “Your changes are well underway, Stef,” she says. “And not just on your chest. Have a look at your face, later.” She takes a step back. “Have a look at your whole body.”

“That’s something I prefer not to do.”

“Not for long!” Edy replies, and grabs his hand again, suddenly energetic. She pulls him along, not through the double doors into the hallway like he expected, but back through the dining hall and into a corridor on the other side. There’s a staircase at the back of the building, and as they ascend he catches glimpses of the woods through circular windows. He laughs: on one side of Dorley Hall there’s the university, more built up every year, full of activity even at night, and on the other side, only silent trees. He thinks of home, of the suburbs that end at the street he used to live on with his family and Melissa and Russ. The little places they would escape to, to study, to talk. A little piece of safety, before Melissa came here and Russ stopped talking to him and his parents moved away.

Careful, Stef. You don’t want this place to start feeling like home.

Edy leads him off the stairs and into an L-shaped corridor with frosted glass doors at either end; an isolated space, a small section cut away from the rest of the third floor. Christine said that ordinary students, who have nothing to do with the programme and no idea what happens in their dorm’s basement, live up here; on the other side of those locked doors, no doubt.

“My room,” Edy says, pointing. “Monica’s, Tabby’s. Aunt Bea’s down on first and the rest of the sponsors are scattered all over the place, but we’re the oldest so we get the nicest rooms. And here—” with ceremony she opens the door in front of them, “—is Maria’s flat. And my home away from home,” she adds in a whisper.

“I can hear you gossiping, Edith,” Maria says.

“I’m not gossiping! I’m being informative.”

Maria’s flat is larger than Stefan expected. The main room is laid out as a bedsit, with a large bed on the left — which contains Maria — and a living and study area on the right. An open arch on the nearest wall leads to a kitchen and against the far wall, on the other side of the bed, doors open into what looks like a utility room — she has her own washing machine! decadence! — and a bathroom.

“Hi, Stef,” Maria says. As Stefan approaches the bed and sits in the office chair Edy directs him to, he notices her eyes are sharp and her smile steady. Good. Maybe this view will replace the one of her head hitting the floor in his dreams.

“Hi,” he says, returning her smile. “Um. Nice place.” There’s a framed picture up in the utility room, above the toilet, and he can almost make it out, but the light from Maria’s bedside lamp reflects off the glass and obliterates the image. Edy, when she sits down on the other side of the bed, reaches behind her and quietly closes the door.

Right. It’s probably not polite to stare at a woman’s toilet. Especially if she has, second only to Beatrice herself, the power of life and death over you. Double especially if she’s convalescing.

“I wanted to touch base,” Maria says, “and— hey!” She makes a grab for the laptop which Edy, taking advantage of her distraction, has snatched off her lap.

“No work!” Edy says, holding the computer out of reach.

“I was just checking, Ede.”

“You were meddling. Everything’s fine.”

“What’s this about Aaron hiding in his room? What’s Indira doing about it? Monica?”

“Ignore her, Stef. She’s just being smug that it took three of us to take over her duties. Which I have, since I got back—” Edy wags a finger at Maria, “—been trying to imply means she’s been overworked this whole time!”

“I was thinking of getting him up on the intercom—”

“No.”

“I just want to check in with him.”

“No!”

“Fine.” Maria dismisses Edy, turning away from her with only the barest hint of a smirk. Edy rolls her eyes, places the laptop sufficiently far out of reach, and heads over to the kitchen area. “How are you, Stef?” Maria says.

“Um,” he says. How is he? “A bit shaken. I didn’t think Aaron would take it so hard. After all, he adapted to the, uh, the chest thing pretty quickly.”

“It’s always different after disclosure,” Edy says, from the kitchen. She pours water from a filter jug into a kettle.

“The fact that it’s permanent is a shock to the system,” Maria says. “An intentional one, I should say. And the first of many.”

“Seems a little cruel,” Stefan says, “to drop it on them and just let them deal.”

Maria shrugs. “Don’t forget, we’re not just changing them physically. We’re changing them mentally, too. Helping them become better people.”

“At the point of a taser.” Stefan can’t help saying it.

“The process isn’t pleasant,” Maria says. “But it works.”

“So everyone keeps saying. And I know I don’t have to like it. I just have to be the Judas goat.”

“About that…” Maria leans forward and fluffs up some of the pillows behind her, to better support her head as she sits up. “Auntie didn’t make the greatest of impressions on you, I know. We’ve asked her to back off. Leave you alone. For a while.”

“‘We’?”

“Pippa and me. With reinforcements from Christine, Abby, Indira… You’ve got quite the fan club up here. Bea… She tries, she really does. But she’s had a rough life, and her instincts aren’t always the most helpful. She believes in protection above all else. It can make her lose sight of her ideals, make her forget who we should be protecting, because it’s not just ourselves.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying, ‘don’t be the Judas goat.’ If you’re going to be down there, you’re going to be transitioning alongside the others, and you’re going to be around them all the time; it’s not practical to pretend to be horrified by everything all the time, and I hope you won’t be offended if I say your acting skills are in need of development.”

“No argument there.”

“What I’m saying—” she glances at Edy, who is pouring tea from a pot into three mugs, “—is that you should have the chance to get out of there. Permanently.”

“Do you have permission for that, babe?” Edy says.

“Nope!” Maria says, smacking her lips with satisfaction on the plosive. “My plan is to move fast and break things.”

“Please don’t move fast, Maria, not in your condition. Stef? Milk and sugar?”

“Um, just milk, please,” Stefan says, and turns back to Maria. “What do you mean, ‘get out of there’?”

“I mean,” Maria says, accepting a mug from Edy and wrapping her fingers around it, “that we can pretend to wash you out. It wouldn’t be hard to make it nice and believable for the boys. We get you a room somewhere in the building — on the first or second floors, which are secure — and you can have a normal, boring transition, away from all the chaos downstairs.”

“You think Aunt Bea would go for that?” Edy says. She passes Stefan a mug — it’s just about cool enough to hold; she added a lot of milk — and takes her own around to her chair on the other side of the bed.

Maria juts out her lower lip like a pouting child, and says, “Yes, of course! Because I have a head injury! I bet I could ask her for my own helicopter and she’d be texting Elle for the funds before the evening’s out. I could probably get two if I started dripping blood again.”

Edy reaches out and gently rubs Maria’s head, over the bandana-style bandage. “What did I tell you about dark jokes?”

Maria grabs Edy’s wrist and strokes her hand with her thumb. “That I should try to cut down?”

“Um,” Stefan says, unwilling to interrupt them but needing rather urgently to make his point. “It’s nice to be invited up here, but… what about Aaron? What are we going to do about him?”

Edy frowns. “Didn’t he reject you pretty roundly, earlier?”

“Doesn’t mean I’m not still fond of him. Doesn’t mean I want him to struggle with all this. And he will: he doesn’t get on with any of the other boys. He thinks Will’s a wanker and he thinks Adam’s a weirdo and he hates Martin. And Raph and Ollie, unless they’ve become very different people over the last couple of days, are actively antagonistic towards him. Not only that, but he’s got a history with being stuck in an environment he can’t leave with a bunch of boys. Boarding school was basically hell for him, and I know that because I’m literally the only one he’s opened up to.” Stefan shrugs. “And, honestly? If he’s wary of me for a while, after what happened—” Don’t think about it, Stef, “—then it makes it easier for me to be objective. To help him without dying of guilt.”

“You think you can do that? Stay down there, be around him; around all of them? You were having a pretty hard time, before.”

He takes a sip of tea. The mug says, amid stylised clipart of dresses, If you lived here you’d be a girl by now. Of course it does. “I can back off. Let Indira mostly interact with him. She can do the sponsor stuff, the day-to-day stuff. Force-feed him if she needs to, even. But I’m not leaving him all on his own. Even if he never speaks to me again, it’ll be better for him just to see me dealing with it. There needs to be someone down there, someone he doesn’t h—” Stefan swallows against the lump in his throat and tries again, “—someone he doesn’t hate, so he can see it’s possible to cope with what’s coming. I couldn’t live with myself if I abandoned him.” He shrugs, pretending a greater indifference than he feels; it would be so nice to turn his back on everything and transition like a normal girl, up here somewhere. “So I’m staying. Sorry.”

Maria nods. “Then let us know if there’s anything we can do to help,” she says. “When we say you’re one of us, now, we mean it, and we support our own.”

“I mean,” Stefan says, looking around, “time away from the basement is nice.”

“Yes,” Maria says, “it really is.” She drinks her tea and scrutinises him. Her mug says, in large, red letters, Gone Feminisin’, but the caricature of a fisherwoman is mostly hidden by Maria’s fingers. Which is a good thing; Stefan doesn’t especially want to see what’s hooked on the end of the cartoon fishing rod. “Have you given any thought to your name?”

“Um. What do you mean?”

“Do you intend to keep going by Stef — which would, I suppose, mean picking some variant of Stephanie — or will you switch it out for something different?”

Stefan laughs. “I haven’t given it much thought. I kind of like being Stef, I think.”

“Well, nothing’s set in stone. Don’t think that just because we’ve got used to calling you one thing, we can’t switch. We’ve all done it.”

“Monica’s on her third name,” Edy says.

“To be honest,” Stefan says, “it’s a little difficult to think about. I can’t really imagine who I’ll be after all this. Feeling like a girl… It’s hard. Difficult to get a hold on, you know?”

“You’re still having problems with dysphoria?” Maria asks, bluntly. He nods stiffly, tensing up just at the mention of it, and as she goes quiet, biting her lip, clearly thinking about something, he forces himself to look around the room again, to give himself something else to concentrate on. He finds nothing new but he describes it all to himself in detail anyway, reviving an old game he used to play in class just so he can’t think too hard about his answer to Maria’s question. Yes, he still has problems with dysphoria, thank you, Maria; yes, when he tries to think of himself as the woman he’s supposed to be he finds himself almost unable to move, becoming so paralysed by even the tiniest sensations that any motion might prompt drastic action. He’s become used to waiting these feelings out, or chasing them away by forcing himself to think about something else, anything else, no matter how trivial.

The kettle in the kitchen: it’s bright red and has an oddly geometric design. It’s not what he thinks of when he pictures the platonic kettle; his would be shorter, rounded off, and in an earthy, homely colour. Dark green, perhaps…

“Stef?”

Someone’s trying to get his attention. Edy. She’s waving at him. He blinks. Smiles for her. Concentrates on the now.

“Can you keep a secret?” Maria asks.

“I’m decent at it.”

“Then can I tell you a story? One I think you might find… interesting?” He nods, wondering what she wants to tell him. “I’m a woman,” she says, “unequivocally and irrevocably. And I was assigned male at birth, like you. Like Edith. But, except in the strictest, most mechanical sense, I’m not really a trans woman. I know some of our girls embrace the label; it’s never fit me.” She wiggles a hand back and forth to indicate something like, it’s complicated. “There’s an implied gender trajectory there that just doesn’t work. But—” she leans into Edy, who is offering her shoulder for support, “—I understand dysphoria. All too well.”

Edy frowns. “Are you going to tell her what I think you’re going to tell her?”

“Yes,” Maria says, rubbing Edy’s hand but not taking her eyes off Stefan. “I don’t know how much you know of the history of this place, Stef, but Beatrice didn’t always run it. She took over fifteen years ago. How she did so is a long story for another time; all you need to know is that, before her, Dorley was run by the self-styled Grandmother. A vicious old bitch for whom this was her sadistic little playground. It was she who transformed me, and her methods were… more brutal than ours.” She passes her mug to Edy and rolls up her sleeve. Rocks her arm left and right in the lamplight. Faint lines criss-cross her forearm all around; without the direct light, they’d probably be invisible. “My captor, the one who brought me in, she liked to play around the vein. To threaten to make her cuts deadly but to never actually follow through. And she liked to surprise me with it; I’d wake up and she’d be there, with the blade, already cutting. Unlike most of them she didn’t seem to get a sexual thrill out of it; she just enjoyed hurting people. Hurting me, at the time. Many dozens of women and men before me. All of us toys for her pleasure.”

“Women and men?” Stefan says, trying and failing to wipe from his mind the image of Maria waking to some faceless torturer carving into her. Despite what she does for a living, Maria’s always seemed gentle, in a pragmatic sort of way; the idea that Will’s assault was merely the latest injustice in a life filled with violence is abhorrent.

“Yes. And that’s what’s important here. In the current iteration of the programme, we encourage men — grown boys, really, given their general level of emotional development — to grow into women. To break away from the toxic masculinity that empowered them to abuse others, and which abused them in turn. Yes?”

“I have… quibbles, but sure.”

“Grandmother emphatically did not want that. She preferred men in women’s bodies. She believed that for a man to become a woman is the ultimate humiliation — and for many men it absolutely is, which was exciting for someone as titillated by the concept as Grandmother. She treasured the man behind the eyes, inhabiting a body he no longer recognised. She saw his panic, his all-consuming self-disgust, and she got off on it. But she discovered — thanks to Bea, actually, and a girl she was close with — that, despite her efforts, womanhood blossomed inside some of us. And so there were the rules, always being refined and adjusted, designed to keep us from becoming the women they made us look like and, when that proved ineffective, designed simply to force us to hide it.” The bitterness in her voice, at bay until now, overflows, and she spits her next words through a sneer. “To make us play along with their fantasy. We were punished when we named ourselves or when we treated each other as women, even in private. They even started to hurt us for walking, sitting or standing in ways they viewed as ‘too feminine’, things which once they would have celebrated as humiliations; they got me on that a lot. Rules upon rules upon rules to dictate our behaviour, to keep us male, because if we adapted, it just wasn’t fun any more. But we adapted anyway. It was almost fractal, and most definitely farcical: a woman, inside a man, inside a woman.”

The picture of Maria under the thumb of a single torturer, already difficult enough to deal with, is replaced by one of Maria and several other women — Stefan’s mind populates Grandmother’s Dorley Hall with Edy, Monica, Tabby and Jane — trapped in an ever-changing bestiary of cruelty, subject to indignities and violence he’s glad he has difficulty imagining. He stares at Maria, trying to override his mind’s eye with the image of her, today, safe and alive, but his eyes keep flicking to her bandaged head, to the ancient scars on her forearm, and he wonders what else might have been done to her and the women she once lived with.

“Stef?” Maria says. While he’s been imagining horrors, she’s been calming herself, and there’s no pain left in her voice now. “If that was too much for you—”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry, Maria.”

“It’s okay, Stef.” She sounds so much like his mum would when he skinned a knee as a kid. Reassuring; loving. Like nothing bad could happen ever again. “Memories fade, even the awful ones. Not completely, and—” she glances at Edy, who rubs her shoulder with an intimate smile, “—sometimes they come back with reinforcements, but, mostly, they’re just memories.”

“Is there anything I can do?” he asks. It sounds idiotic as soon as he says it.

With a quirk of her lip, Maria says, “You’re doing it. You’re here and you’re listening to me. It’s good to tell the story again. It’s… validating to see someone react with—” and she smiles again, “—the appropriate amount of horror.”

Grandmother’s Dorley. Christ. Aunt Bea’s is the nice version.

“How many?” he says, hoarse. “How many people did Grandmother take?”

Maria frowns and Edy clasps her upper arm, comforting her. “You don’t want to know,” Maria says. “We do have the numbers,” she continues automatically, eyes unfocused. “Aunt Bea and her people did a lot of digging. We got most of their files. And there were the stubs of police reports and things. Missing persons. Parole records.” Her voice grows even more distant. “She looked. She looked for her for so long. ” She shakes her head, fixes Stefan with a glare he wants desperately to escape. “You don’t want to know. It’s not worth the nightmares.”

Stefan nods. Nightmares seem inevitable at this point, but he doesn’t push. Maria had seemed, if only for a second, even more vulnerable than she had on the floor of the common room. He can’t stop himself from asking one more question, though: “Who was she looking for?”

“Hmm?”

“You said she was looking for someone.”

“Oh,” Maria says, “yes. Valerie. Beatrice’s… friend. Valerie didn’t escape, unlike Bea. She was taken away, and Bea didn’t get out until months after; it’s likely she was already dead.”

“That’s— that’s just awful, Maria.”

“That’s what it was like, back then,” Maria says, patting Edy’s arm and leaning forward, reinvigorated. “I survived in Grandmother’s Dorley by understanding exactly what was being done to me and refusing to be broken. Refusing to be ashamed of it. The more they tried to put me back in the role they wanted for me — the scared, cowed man, emasculated and afraid of nothing more than the continued erosion of his masculinity — the more I embraced my womanhood. I chose a name. I invented a whole new history for myself. I created a new life. I asserted, at every point, no matter how much they cut me, burned me, humiliated me, tortured me, that I am Maria, and that their sad, angry little attempts to exercise their rage on me, or entertain their pathetic fetishes, meant nothing.” She leans even closer. “And this is my point, this is why I wanted to tell you all this: I know what it is to see a stranger staring back at me when I look in the mirror, Stef. I know what it is to want so completely to escape my own skin that I scream, that I tear at myself, that I throw myself against walls until no unbruised flesh remains. I know what it is to feel like every word spoken to me is meant for the shell I’ve been forced into. I know what it is to speak and to shudder at the sound of my own voice.

“That’s dysphoria, Stef. It’s what they gave to me, it’s the tool they used to try to make me into what they wanted, but it lies, Stef. Dysphoria lies. And you can choose not to listen. To fight it. Mock it. Assert yourself. Be yourself. Because to give in to it, to let it control you, is assuredly as repellent a torture as any I experienced.”

“But,” Stefan says, “I still look and sound like—”

“Fuck that, Stef,” Maria says with such vehemence that Stefan almost jumps. “How you look will change. How you sound will change. Everything about you will change. And I know how much those things matter, how much they matter to you right now, how much the hope of a happy future is difficult to hold on to when you look at yourself and feel… mutilated. But it’s transitory. Your dysphoria wants you to believe that it’s forever, and that’s a lie it will keep telling you, making you believe the changes you’re waiting for aren’t happening when they are. And you know one of its other lies? It wants you to believe the worst of other people, it wants you to think that it knows what they see when they look at you, but ask any of us who we see and we’ll all tell you the same: we see you. We see Stef. We see a girl. The girl you were before you got here, the girl you are now; the girl you could not more obviously be. And we don’t see her out of pity, or because we know the way you’re going to change; we see her because she’s there. She’s you. And if you can’t see her… Well, sorry, but you’re outnumbered. You’re a fucking girl, Stef.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that. Doesn’t know what to think about it. It feels like too much to fit in his head. A good thing he’s sitting down or he’d be on the floor by now; as it is, his knees tremble weakly and his hands grasp uselessly at each other.

“Maria,” Edy says, “are you force-feminising her?”

“I think we established that I have only one hammer and a surfeit of nails,” she mutters, and then grimaces. “Sorry, Stef; I think I need some rest. Talked a bit too long. Got a bit het up. Just— just fucking claim yourself, will you? You’re a woman among women; act like it. Tell your dysphoria the same thing I told mine: you won’t win. Name it as your enemy and kill it.” She closes her eyes. “Ede, can you make sure she gets put on the locks for the stairs, the ground floor, et cetera? And maybe set up a room for her, somewhere she can go to spend time with the other girls? I want her to have some freedom. I want her to feel like she belongs.”

“Of course, baby,” Edy says, rising and reaching out an arm for Stefan as she rounds the bed. “Get some rest.”

“Way ahead of you,” Maria whispers.

Stefan accepts Edy’s hand, rises out of the chair, and thanks Maria quietly, exchanges goodbyes. Those words, at least, are available to him, the rhythm of small pleasantries something easily recalled.

“You okay, Stef?” Edy asks as she leads him out of the room. He glances behind them and sees Maria settling back in bed, closing her eyes, and then realises she asked him a question.

“Oh,” he says, “um, yes. Probably.”

“A lot to think about, huh?”

He nods. It’s all he can think of to do.

Edy leads him downstairs, past a handful of sponsors eating a late dinner in the dining hall — Tabby jumps up out of her seat to give him a quick hug — and back into the basement. Indira, on duty in the security room, waves, and he waves back, almost overbalancing; he hadn’t realised he was quite so tired. But if he still hasn’t got his thoughts in order, the journey back downstairs has made them all seem somewhat less immediate and less overwhelming, and he can function well enough to perform minimal self-care.

“You want me to call Pippa?” Edy says, when they reach his room.

“No,” he says, “it’s okay. I’ll probably crash soon. Long day.”

“Okay. Sleep well, Stef.”

She blows him a kiss as she leaves, and he summons the last of his energy to fetch his toothbrush and toothpaste, throw a robe over his top, and stagger to the bathroom to clean his teeth. He watches himself in the mirror as he does so, a departure from habit, and thinks of Maria, trapped by Grandmother, forced back into a role that no longer fit her, play-acting for sadists. It’s a less visceral image this time; it really does help to remember that she’s upstairs, in her own flat, surrounded by laptops and silly mugs and her own washing machine, with Edy rushing back to her.

The role that doesn’t fit him is clear. And Maria’s right: he lives in a house full of women who know exactly who he is, who would never treat him the way they would treat a boy. So why is he treating himself that way?

Habit?

When he gets back to his room, his computer screen is lit up; a message from Maria. It reads:

I saw you squinting at the print I have up above my toilet. Thought you might get a kick out of it. Tell Pippa, Edy or Indira if you need anything at all, and remember to put yourself first. Leave the boys to us; just be an example for them.

Attached is an image: an idyllic sunset beach scene, overlaid with the text, in cursive:

One night, a woman had a dream. She dreamed she was walking along the beach with her auntie. Across the sky flashed scenes from the last several months of her life, and for each scene, she noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; one belonged to her, and the other to her auntie.

When the last scene flashed before her, she looked back at the footprints in the sand, and noticed that many times along the path of her life there was only one set of footprints. In the lowest and most difficult parts of her life, it seemed, she walked alone.

“Auntie,” she said, “you said that once I came to you, you’d walk with me all the way. But when I look back at my life, I see that you left me to face my greatest hardships alone.”

“My precious child,” her auntie replied, “I love you and would never leave you. When you see but one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”

“Thank you, auntie,” the woman said, looking back again and deriving great comfort from the view, until she saw something in the distance, just before the longest stretch of solo footprints. Puzzled, she asked, “Auntie? What are those little lumps in the sand back there?”

“Oh,” her auntie replied, “those are your balls. Sorry about that.”

He doesn’t know if it’s stress, exhaustion, or the relief that Maria, despite her injuries, despite her horrific history, is still able to send him something so ridiculous, but he has to cover his mouth to muffle the laughter. He laughs until his throat burns, his chest hurts, and his cheeks ache, and lets the enervation carry him, weak-limbed, to bed.

On his phone he finds a message from Edy, letting him know a room is being set aside for him on the first floor, and that his thumbprint will take him out of the basement and up the back stairs. And one from Indira, thanking him again for helping Aaron. And one from Pippa, joking about their ‘excitingly psychosexual relationship’ and suggesting they meet up tomorrow night in his new first-floor room; he’ll like it, she says, because it’s the only one on the floor apart from Aunt Bea’s flat that has an ensuite. He can shower on his own, guaranteed. Finally, a message from Christine: five hug emoji, a reminder to bug her on Consensus any time he wants, and a sticker that says, You go girl!

It really is so much easier, so much more comforting, to find community with the women of Dorley than with the men down here. So what’s stopping him? His embodiment? Changing all the time. Aaron? He can help him without being such a constant presence in his life.

Dysphoria?

If Maria can beat it, so can he.

He remembers himself under the nurse’s hand. Surprises himself with the memory. Doesn’t know why it came up. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? If the nurse was from Grandmother’s time, then she was a part of what happened to Maria. Might even have participated in it. Did Maria stiffen as the nurse examined her, too? Did she, too, try to make herself into an unemotional automaton, a nonconscious machine of meat, just surviving, not experiencing?

He swings out of bed again, energised but aware that these are perhaps the last of his reserves for the day. Borrowing from tomorrow, maybe. He hooks open the wardrobe with his toe, examines himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door. Kicks off his trousers, pulls his shirt tight around his body.

He remembers how he looked on the day the nurse was here: pink from burning himself in the shower; hunched and dysphoric after the examination. He’s different now to how he was then. He better understands his place here. Better understands the girls here. Better understands what they went through, and what will happen to Aaron and the other boys.

He pulls his t-shirt tighter, exposes his shape fully to the mirror. He was always too thin; money and misery conspired against his appetite. But almost two months of regular meals and one month of estradiol has shaped him, changed him, grown him. He’s fleshier in more places than just his chest. His hips are a little rounder — is that why his legs and lower back have been aching recently? — and his belly is a little less flat, skin once taut now relaxing around the faintest suggestion of shape. And his jawline is softer, his cheeks more full. In all cases it’s the tiniest hint of change, mere millimetres, but it’s enough that his reflection is comfortingly unfamiliar.

They all see him as a girl, do they? Maybe it’s time to try it for himself. He closes his eyes, tries to clear his memory and reset his image of himself. He thinks of Maria, the woman within the man within the woman, defiantly spitting at her captors. He thinks of Christine, Paige, Pippa, Indira and Abby, of all of them standing where he now stands, examining themselves in the same mirror. He thinks of Melissa, not as he’s seen her in the pictures on the network, the ones he looks at most nights, but as he saw her that first time, nervous and new, at the supermarket where he used to work: a girl, still developing, still learning, but as kind and generous as ever she was.

The bridge of his nose tickles; oh yeah, hair’s getting long, too. He blows at it, curling his lip to direct the air, but it keeps falling back into place. He runs a hand through it, smooths it away from his forehead, and suddenly he remembers, years ago, in the old house, his reflection in the dark screen of his phone. Remembers the sharp bones of his cheeks, the waxiness of his adolescent skin, the greasiness of the hair his mother made him cut. How foolish to remember that boy and think of himself as the same person, unchanged despite the years! How different he is now!

He is different, isn’t he?

He bites his lip. Still nervous. Afraid that when he opens his eyes, in defiance of all logic, the same boy will glare back at him, the teenager broken by secrets and self-hatred. But he can’t stand here forever.

Fuck it. If the women of Dorley can do this, so can he.

He opens his eyes, looks himself up and down, and steps unconsciously back.

It’s too much.

It’s impossible.

It’s unreal.

But there she is: the girl the others all say they can see.

A step forward again. Fingers reaching out, making contact with the glass. Making it real, making it tangible.

“Hi, Stef,” she whispers, and the girl in the mirror whispers back.