5. A Machine Made of Meat

2019 October 14
Monday

Stefan’s not surprised to see other cells, identical to his, lined up on his left as he walks slowly down the concrete corridor towards the double doors at the end. Each has the same glass wall, the same cot, the same thin mattress, like the world’s least hospitable capsule hotel. He counts ten, and an eleventh room of a different sort; an interrogation room? No. He cranes his neck by the dirty window set into the door and sees nothing but shelving units and dust.

Ten cells, then. What kind of place is this, that it has ten copy-pasted concrete boxes in which to throw people? What horror show has he stumbled into?

“Stand aside,” the blonde woman commands. “Face the wall.”

He complies, still playing the obedient but bewildered boy. Not much acting required! He flinches a little at the loud buzz of the locks triggering, and then he’s being ordered through doors that have now swung open. On his way past — “Turn right! Be quick!” — he gets a look at the mechanism: what looks like a fingerprint reader attached to a lock the size and shape of a brick.

There’s another one just like it on every door in the corridor he finds himself in, and — he glances left — another on the double doors at the top of the stairs up. He hopes Christine can open them all, and is genuine in her insistence that she can get him out, because it’s clear that he’s not going anywhere without her help. And he’s willing to bet that with all this concrete you can scream and shout all you want without being heard from the outside.

Chilling.

Christine said she was still in the programme here; does that mean she’s walked the same walk? Did she wake up in a similar cell? Is there another basement, a mirror of this one, for ‘bad girls’? What did she do to end up there? The boys — the other boys; whatever — are all here for ‘violence or social violence’, she said.

Try not to let your imagination run too wild, Stef, he tells himself, as the blonde woman opens another set of doors, leading into what looks like a common area. Before he can go through, one of the other women taps him on the shoulder, motions for him to stay.

“Stefan Riley,” the blonde woman says, and he’s too distracted even to notice she’s full-naming him again, “you’re not going to cause me any problems, are you?”

“Hm?” Stefan says, watching heads turn inside the room as the men realise someone new has come to join them. “Oh. No. I promise.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re remarkably docile, remarkably quickly.”

“Thanks. I try.”

She gestures at him with her taser, and he regrets being flippant. “Don’t be clever,” she says.

“Sorry.”

“In you go, then. Have fun with the other boys.”

He nods, puzzling over the emphasis on the word, and walks carefully through the double doors into a common area that reminds him of prisons he’s seen on TV, with a handful of metal tables, some large metal cupboards with red lights that suggest they’re controlled remotely, and a TV up on the far wall. There’s also a handful of sofas scattered about the place, which don’t seem like they fit the prison aesthetic, and most of the men in the room are lounging on the ones nearest the TV. A half-dozen women, all armed with tasers and batons and a couple of them with what might be guns or perhaps heavier-duty tasers, are sitting on or standing around another cluster of sofas nearer the door. Most of them are also looking at Stefan, waiting to see what he does.

“Would you look at that?” one of the men says, and waves. “Someone new!” His cheerful mood seems out of place.

None of this is what Stefan expected.

The one who spoke gets up from the sofa and approaches him, hands in the pockets of his hoodie. He slows as he gets closer; probably trying to work out what kind of person Stefan is. “So,” the man says, stretching out the vowel, “when did you get here?”

“Yesterday,” Stefan says, frowning. “Or possibly the night before. I’m sorry, but what’s going on? Who are you?”

“Oh, we’re just a ragtag family of naughty kittens, here to be neutered, clipped, tagged and released back into the wild.”

“Uh. What?”

“It’s Woke Jail,” says one of the other men. “What thoughtcrimes did you commit?”

“It’s not Woke Jail, Will,” another one says. “He keeps calling it that,” he adds, addressing Stefan directly. “It’s a ridiculous concept. I keep telling him.”

“Tell him what you think it is,” Will says, smirking. “Go on.”

“Shut up, Will.”

“He thinks these girls are part of a secret underground ring, working for the shadow government, and they kidnap men and drain us of our— sorry, what did you say it was called?”

“I was wrong, I admit it. I’ve refined my theory but I’m never sharing it with you again…”

The two of them bicker between themselves in low voices.

“What’s happening?” Stefan says to the man still standing with him.

“Ignore them. They’re a double act we’re all fucking bored of—” he briefly yells and then turns back to Stefan, “—but it’s okay because neither of them has managed to say a single thing of value since they got here. Hi. I’m Aaron. I was here first. Welcome to Woke Jail.”

He holds out a hand and Stefan, still confused, limply takes it. “Hi.”

“And…?”

“What?”

Aaron retrieves his hand and uses it to articulate his next sentence, which he enunciates like a primary school teacher, one word at a time: “My name is Aaron and your name is…?”

“Oh. Sorry. Stefan.” His stomach clenches when he says it. He doesn’t like the blonde woman using it on him and he doesn’t think he’ll enjoy the sound of it in Aaron’s mouth, either. “How long have you been here?” he says, to give himself anything but his rising discomfort to think about.

Aaron blows out through puffed cheeks. “Two weeks, nearly? I think? They fake the day-night cycle in here — I’m sure you’ve noticed — but assuming they’re not playing games with that, about two weeks. I didn’t even get to the start of the semester before… fwwwp!” He mimes being dragged away by his neck. “Woke up in one of those fun little cells.”

“In your cell, did you get the whole…?” Stefan doesn’t know how to ask what he wants to ask without sounding silly, but Aaron seems to understand, anyway.

“The ‘men are evil and so are you’ lecture? We all did. And then we all came in here stumbling around like confused idiots, asking each other the same question: ‘Did they put your dick in a vice, too? Yada yada yada.’ Well, they all came in stumbling around. I was here already so I just watched.”

“They put your dick in a vice?”

“It’s a metaphor, Stefan. They just lectured us all about toxic masculinity, chastised us for not regularly imbibing the respect women juice and threw us in here to get on each other’s nerves. So? What did you do?”

“What did I do?” Stefan asks.

“Leave him alone!” Stefan searches for the speaker and finds him sitting by himself, on the floor by the cabinets. “He doesn’t have to tell you!”

“Shut up, Murderer Moody! No-one cares what you think.”

“I’m sorry,” Stefan says, looking back and forth, “who is he and what do you mean, what did I do?”

Aaron looks at him for a second. “Right! Okay! You’re confused. It’s fine. Understandable! Sit.” He sits at one of the metal benches and slaps the table. “Sit! And I’ll introduce you around. First things first: we’re not just in here because of our ‘toxic masculinity’—” finger quotes, rolled eyes and shrugged shoulders leave Stefan in no doubt as to what Aaron thinks of the concept, “—or our poisonous Y chromosomes or our big meaty dicks. We all did something that caught the attention of this bunch of—” He pauses and hisses with his tongue inside his cheek, like he just stopped himself from saying something he shouldn’t. “Don’t zap me, Maria!” he shouts. “I didn’t say it!”

Stefan glances back at the women near the doors, but if one of them is Maria, she doesn’t react.

“What do you mean, ‘did something’?” Stefan says. “So, what did you do?”

“Sorry,” Aaron says, “you need way more paragon points with me before you unlock my tragic backstory. Besides, I’ve given you the lowdown; you owe me a funny story. What horrific crime against the female gender did you commit?”

“Nothing!” Stefan insists.

“Ah. One of those, are you? Like Raph.”

“Fuck you, you piece of shit channer,” says a man reading a magazine on another bench, without looking up.

“Raph here insists on his innocence! But we all know why he’s here, don’t we, boys?”

“Fuck you,” Raph says again.

“Our man got a girl pregnant when they were both seventeen, then made her get an abortion when she wanted to keep it. Then off he fucks to university and cheats on her with every Stacy he can get his hands on, which was a dumb fucking move because of course she finds out. It takes her two years but she does, and someone here gets word of it and snatches him up and now, here he is!”

Stefan doesn’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand, yes, he sounds like an arsehole, but he had the impression from Christine that every man here would be, if not violent, then perhaps on the verge of violence. Cheating is awful, but he’s not sure he can understand the moral calculus that imprisons a man because of it.

On the other hand — or, wait, is he back to the original hand? — Stefan can read a wrecked life between the lines of Aaron’s glib summary, so maybe this guy, Raph, deserves… whatever this place is.

Stefan’s forming a new theory, and he refines it while Aaron babbles on, arguing with Raph about the exact nature of his transgressions: it’s a scared-straight programme. Take bad men — bad people, he amends, remembering Christine — and lock them away for a while. Teach them that toxic masculinity — or toxic whatever-Christine-did — has consequences. Maybe there are talks or classes; lectures on how to be a better person. Keep them here until whoever runs the place considers them ready to go back to the world. Supervised for a while after, maybe; Christine, after all, attended a party despite still being ‘in the programme’ in some sense she hasn’t yet defined.

Unfortunately, there’s no space in this for his theories about trans women. Probably he was completely wrong about that, and Christine’s answer to his blunt question about her gender was noncommittal. Hell, he might have just confused her. Certainly none of the men down here seem like trans people looking for help.

He puts his half-finished theory aside and refocuses on what’s happening around him.

“Plus,” Aaron’s saying, “we all know Raph has rage issues. I bet plenty of those girls he fucked woke up the next day with a few extra bruises. Am I right, Raphael?” He holds up a hand as if awaiting a high five.

“I don’t have rage issues, shithead!”

“What do you call that?” Aaron says, pointing.

There’s a dent in one of the metal cabinets. It’s deep and many-faceted, like it was made by multiple strikes. Stefan looks hard at Raph, pictures him kicking it. He’s a big guy.

Stefan shudders.

“I call that, ‘fuck off or you’re next’,” Raph says.

“Ooh, scary,” Aaron says, making a mocking gesture. “Come at me, please; I’d love to see you get tased again.” Raph replies with a middle finger and returns to his magazine. “Well!” Aaron adds, turning back to Stefan with a wild grin. “That’s Raph done. Who’s next? Oh, yes, the double act. Will and Adam. I still don’t know what dreadful things they did but they’re really fucking annoying, so Maria and her pals probably did the world a favour by locking them up down here. Love you Maria!” he adds, blowing a kiss in the direction of the women by the door. One of them, an East Asian woman, waves a taser at him. “She loves me, really. But, yeah, unless you want to go completely insane or you really want to know everything there is to know about the demons who really did nine eleven, stay away from Adam and Will.”

“Which one is the demon guy?” Stefan asks. “Adam?”

“Does it matter?”

“Fuck you, Aaron,” Will says, and points at Adam. “You’re right, new boy. He’s the demon guy.”

“I’m not the demon guy!”

“You said yesterday that demons make people gay.”

“No, I said that demonic influence in secular culture is responsible for the glorification of homosexuality.”

“Fucking Westboro freak.”

“Godless sinner.”

“Aww, they’re fighting again,” Aaron says. “And yet they always sit together! I think it’s wuv.”

“Who’s left?” he asks, wanting nothing more now than to get this over with. Everyone here seems deeply unpleasant, with the potential exception of the women, the ones with the tasers. He’s not yet willing to commit to that assessment, though.

“Those two,” Aaron says, pointing to two men who’ve been ignoring the whole spectacle in favour of some TV show, “are Declan and Ollie. That one hit his wife, that one hit his girlfriend. No; other way round. Sorry. Fun fact: Ollie there has been zapped sixteen times!”

“Why?”

“He thinks if he can get a weapon off one of the girls, he can escape. But it’s pointless. They’re locked to their fingerprints, or something. And there are a couple of really big guys knocking around somewhere, waiting to jump on us if we need jumping on. Declan actually grabbed one of the girls last week and got fucking dogpiled.”

“Oh my God,” Stefan says. “Was she okay?”

“What? Uh, yeah. I guess so? Declan got the crap beaten out of him, though. Watch for his limp, it’s hilarious. Okay, okay, who are we missing? Oh, yeah. Martin Moody. The fucking foreveralone over in the corner there. If you ever need him just listen for the soft weeping sounds.” Aaron switches to a whisper. “He’s the only one with a body count. Like, a directly-attributable-to-his-actions body count! No, ‘Oh, he ruined my life,’” he adds, in falsetto, “‘and now I can’t go on,’ shit. He’s the only cold-blooded killer here. Unless you are, too.” He holds up his arms in faux-submission. “No judgement if you are!”

“A body count? What did he do?”

Aaron mimes pouring a bottle down his throat. “Drink driving. Killed a guy, injured his wife. Got off with a fine, which the queen bitches— sorry! Which our benevolent captors didn’t like. So! Here he is.”

“I didn’t ‘get off’,” the man mumbles, just loud enough to hear. “My family leaned on the court. I wanted to— I needed to pay for what I did.”

“Congratulations!” Aaron says, grinning wildly. “You’re paying for it now, and we’re stuck paying for it with you. And that’s everyone, I think,” he adds, turning back to Stefan. “Unless you want to tell me what you did…?”

“Nothing,” Stefan repeats.

“Suit yourself. Ah!” He points through the double doors on the other side of the room, that look like they lead to the world’s most depressing conference room. A woman is laying out plates. “Lunch time!”

 

* * *

 

Stefan’s surprised by the burgers — they look really good — but not by the plastic cutlery.

Aaron swings onto the chair next to him, apparently keen to keep exploring a bond Stefan would rather not develop. Good men don’t end up here, Stefan remembers, and tries not to think about what Aaron might have done. The list is bad enough already: two men who hit their wives or girlfriends, a cheater who forced his girlfriend to get an abortion she didn’t want, and a drunk driver. Not to mention whatever the two guys at the end of the table, Will and Adam, did, although given both the subject and tone of the running argument they’ve been having for the last several minutes, he’d rather not speculate. He’s uncomfortably reminded of the videos the YouTube algorithm keeps trying to get him to watch.

Carefully, Stefan looks at each one of the men in turn, fixing in his mind what he knows about them; he doesn’t want to forget who they are, even for a moment. Of all of them, the drunk driver, the one who’s actually killed someone, seems the least objectionable. Not a conclusion Stefan enjoys coming to. Maybe it’s just that he’s quiet.

“Don’t get too excited about the burger, mate,” Aaron says. “It’s veggie. Everything here is.”

“Meat’s too masculine,” says Raph, the cheater. “Too raw.”

Stefan very carefully does not make the obvious observation. Instead he attempts to spear a chip with his plastic fork; it bends.

“You can thank Declan for the plastic cutlery,” Aaron says. “You’ve seen that bump on your stomach? Well, so did he, and he got hilariously buttmad about it.”

“Why? What is it?” Stefan says.

“It’s an implant. Releases a drug called Goslafin.”

“Goserelin, you fucking imbecile,” Will says. “It’s a drug for men with prostate cancer. It lowers testosterone. They probably use it on us to make us less aggressive.”

“Does it work?” Stefan asks.

“Fuck no,” Aaron says.

“Shut up,” Will says. “Of course it does! Your body’s a machine made of meat. You can’t act like medication just doesn’t work on you.”

“Sure I can.”

Will says to Stefan, “Ignore him. My dad, the toughest man I know, he had it and it made him tired and depressed. Eleven months on it until the surgery. You’ve been on it longest—” and he grins, and points at Aaron with his plastic fork, “—so you should be the most emasculated one in here.”

“Whatever,” Aaron says, turning away from Will, who theatrically rolls his eyes and returns to his discussion with Adam. “Anyway, Declan over there found out his boy juice was being interfered with and tried to dig it out with a spoon.”

“Did it work?” Stefan asks, trying not to think about the idea that the thing in his belly might be suppressing his testosterone. The thought is almost too good to be true. And somewhat ironic.

“Hah!” Will says. “No. I told him it wouldn’t.”

“Fuck you, Will-i-am,” Declan says. He’s alone at the far end of the table, picking his burger apart with his fingers and eating only the bun and the cheese.

“And now we have plastic forks,” Aaron finishes. “Thanks, Declan.”

Stefan tries his burger. It’s pretty good. “So,” he says, swallowing, “now I know why you’re— why we’re all here; what is this place, anyway? What’s it for?”

“Are you slow?” Aaron says. “Think about it for a second! It’s a masturbatory fantasy by feminist fuckwits who want to believe they can take ordinary guys and make a bunch of pussies out of us. But it’s just all a big show. Fucking— fucking theatre. They get us all down here, put anti-cancer drugs inside us so we’re — thank you, Will — tired and depressed and floppy-dicked. They spend a few weeks lecturing us about what big bad boys we are, and then we’re supposed to go free as changed men. It’s not going to work, of course—”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean, ‘Why not’? It’s bullshit, man. It’s a fucking psychology experiment or something. Someone’s grad paper on masculine aggression. Someone found this bomb shelter or whatever under that girls’ dorm and had a big idea that really impressed a grant committee and now we’re stuck with it. We probably can’t even sue; I bet they had all of us sign something when we were high or drunk or, I don’t know, just really fucking sad like Murderer Moody. Where were you when they got you?”

“Uh, I was at a party,” Stefan admits.

“There you go. They’ll have got a girl to chat you up and make you sign something and then the next thing you know, concrete walls and veggie burgers and— and fucking weepy here.” He throws a chip at Martin Moody.

“He’s just guessing,” Martin Moody says, ignoring the chip. “He doesn’t know.”

“And he just wants this place to be, I don’t know, fucking purgatory.”

“This is my chance, Aaron,” Moody says. “So leave me the hell alone.”

“Cry more, murderer.”

Stefan takes another bite of his burger and tries to avoid listening to the conversation. One thing seems certain: if there’s anyone who understands less about what’s going on under Dorley Hall than Stefan, it’s the men sat around the table with him. Will says it’s Woke Jail, but hasn’t elaborated on what that means; Adam seems to think it’s a conspiracy, or possibly demons; Aaron thinks it’s an experiment and it’ll all be over in a month. But the cells, the setup with the common room and the dining room and what looked like at least one more corridor leading off, it’s all too elaborate for a grad student’s experiment; besides, if it’s connected to the missing boys Stefan’s been investigating, this place has been going for years.

He feels eyes on him and looks up, sees the blonde woman, out in the corridor, staring at him through the reinforced glass doors. He smiles and shrugs at her and she glares back, frowning slightly, like he’s a puzzle she can’t solve.

A lot of that going around.

 

* * *

 

After lunch and a few more abortive attempts at conversation, Aaron seems finally to get the idea that Stefan isn’t particularly interested in talking, and joins Will and Adam on the sofas near the television, back in the common room. Most of the other men drift over to join them over the next few minutes, leaving Stefan and Martin Moody alone together at the dining table.

“My name’s not Moody,” Martin says.

“What?” Stefan snaps, irritated to be distracted from his thoughts.

“My name’s not Moody. It’s Holloway. That little shit, Aaron, coined it on my first day out of the cell. ‘Moody Martin the Murderer’. And that’s who I am now.”

“Was he right?” Stefan asks, trying to keep the contempt out of his voice. “Did you kill someone?”

He nods. “I didn’t mean to. But you don’t mean to do a lot of things when you drink, and I was always drinking.” He talks without emotion, but there’s something in his voice, a hard edge that comes up occasionally, that reminds Stefan of how Mark and Russ sounded, reading from the letters their mother left them, after her death. “I thought I could drive home. Just two miles. But I lost control. Left the road right as they were leaving the restaurant. Their… anniversary dinner. He didn’t make it to the hospital, but she survived. A broken leg. He pushed her out of the way. Saved her. From me.”

“Jesus…”

“My family has money. Hired the best lawyer they could. Said I was a young man who’d lost his way. Said it wouldn’t be fair to snuff out my potential over a mistake. Even found a criminal record for the man I killed, to make him look like less of an innocent victim. And I got off light. I was supposed to go to rehab, but I couldn’t hack it.”

“And now you’re here.”

“Yes. And those guys, they’re all wrong. This is no experiment, and it’s not Woke Jail or whatever stupid thing Will Schroeder’s going on about. Something happens here. They keep us locked up, they suppress our testosterone, they take blood samples… Something happens here.”

“What do you think it is?”

Martin meets Stefan’s eyes. An unpleasant experience. “I don’t care,” he says. “Whatever it is, I deserve it.”

Stefan doesn’t find himself able to contradict the miserable man. He just stares back at him, feeling almost more uncomfortable in his presence than he had when the blonde woman was needling at every aspect of his supposed masculinity. Eventually Martin takes the hint, swings around on his chair and returns to the common room, leaving Stefan to push his empty plate aside and lean his forehead carefully on the table.

Jesus, these people. He’s tempted to ask Christine, when and if she gets him out tonight, to lock all the doors behind them and bury the key.

He gets almost a minute alone before the door through to the common area buzzes, locking him in the dining room. The blonde woman enters from the corridor, pocketing a remote.

Stefan can’t stop himself saying, “Oh, thank God.”

“What?” the blonde woman says, stopping before she sits down and giving him a quizzical look.

Fuck it. Tell the truth. “I was expecting another one of them. Another horror story with a face. But it’s just you, the woman who yells at me.”

At the door, another woman takes up a relaxed but ready position, taser in hand. The blonde woman nods at her, and sits. Steeples her fingers.

“Do you not like your new friends?” she says.

“They’re all awful.”

“You should fit right in, then.”

Stefan swallows his reply with a cough, remembering the role he’s supposed to be playing; although he’s not sure, any more, why he’s playing it. Surely all he has to do is tell this woman he’s not anything like those men?

He realises: she won’t believe him. Like Aaron. He saw someone like him, and so does she.

Deep inside, a small voice asks, Are you sure you’re not like those men? But it’s a voice Stefan’s got used to ignoring; his base assumption that nothing he believes about himself, good or bad, can possibly be legitimate. Old lies from an old liar.

“Can I ask your name?” he says.

“Why?”

He shrugs. Affects indifference. “You know mine. I know theirs.” He nods towards the common area. A few of them, Aaron included, are watching his conversation, but presumably can’t hear anything. “I’d like to know yours.”

She glares at him. Eventually: “Pippa.”

“Hi, Pippa,” he says, smiling.

His smile sets something off inside her. “Don’t think for a second that this is working on me,” she snaps.

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. The whole act. This.” She gestures in Stefan’s direction, her mouth curled into a sneer that suggests she doesn’t like what she finds there. Well, ditto, lady.

“I don’t understand.”

“The nice guy act! The smiles, the friendly chatter, the polite questions, the— the flipping yoga! You’re nothing but an act, Stefan Riley, and when girls fall for it, that’s when you get them.”

“I ‘get’ them?”

She hits the table. “Stop acting clueless! It won’t work on me but it will piss me off! You’re as bad as the rest of them. Maybe worse.”

“Worse than the drunk driver? Or the ones that hit their wives? Or that little scrotum, Aaron?”

Pippa rubs her hand. “Potentially. That’s the thing with guys like you: you’re all cute and cuddly right up to the moment you’re not any more, and then… you’re capable of anything. I’ve seen it before.”

You can’t win with her, Stefan thinks to himself. Stop playing.

“What’s my future here, then?” he says.

“That’s up to you. I heard one of the others telling you about your implant. He’s right: it’s there to make you calm. If you choose to remain in the programme, if you agree to commit to your rehabilitation, it will be re-administered whenever it runs out, and you can expect other treatments in due course.”

“Do I get to know what those are?”

“No.”

“Right.”

“This programme has one goal and one goal only: to improve you, and to protect people from you. You’re a threat, Stefan Riley. To women, mainly, but not only. You leave when we decide that the threat you represent is neutralised. What you get to decide is how you leave: either by completing the programme and becoming a new person; or by refusing to participate, or otherwise washing out. And—”

“—those who wash out are never heard from again,” Stefan says. “I remember. What do you do, send them on to a private prison or something? Put them in the veggie burgers?”

Pippa stands, suddenly all business. “Above my pay grade,” she says. “Now. Come with me. You will be shown the rest of the facilities and then returned to your cell, where you will remain until the morning. You have a lot to think about, Stefan Riley.”

 

* * *

 

At some point on the way down the stairs, Abby’s hand found Christine’s. Looking for reassurance. Because Melissa is precious to Abby — Christine didn’t know just how precious until about half an hour ago — and Stefan is precious to Melissa. And so Abby’s belief that Stefan’s transgressions should remain private faded away in the face of her absolute terror over what Melissa will think when she tells her.

Because she has to tell her.

The best Christine could do was talk her into a delay, at least until they’ve touched base with Stefan’s sponsor.

One of the hardest things to get used to, for many of the girls in the programme, is the requirement that they never see their family again. It’s not something that’s ever bothered Christine — residual guilt about leaving her mother with her father notwithstanding; besides, she chose him over her son/daughter/whoever, and the memory of that night plays out in Christine’s nightmares with some regularity — but it’s been particularly difficult for Abby, who’d been very close with her family. Like a lot of the girls, she’s derived hope from Indira’s reconnection with her parents, and from Indira’s mother welcoming her new daughter back into the family as if she’d never been taken from it.

Family photos fill Abby’s room. Letters she’s never sent spill out of her dresser drawer. And she’s petitioning Aunt Bea to let her follow in Dira’s footsteps, a request Christine privately believes will never be granted. Aunt Bea eventually will tell her, the way she tells all of them, to move on, and Abby will be sanctioned if she ever goes against this instruction. And so the hole in Abby’s kind soul that is her past, her family, continues to grow, continues to hurt her.

And now, down in the second basement, there’s a connection to the past. Not to Abby’s, but Melissa’s; almost as important. But it’s a broken connection, fucked up and soured by the unavoidable conclusion that Stefan, if he’s here, grew up to be a bad man. Not true, of course, but it would be the cherry on the shit sundae, to drag Melissa back into it all on the eve Christine gets Stefan out. If she even still can.

One mistake begets a thousand. She’s considered owning up, telling Aunt Bea everything, but she’s not sure what will happen to her or Stefan if she does. She never did find out where the washouts go, but she’s had nightmares about that, too.

Abby releases Christine’s hand as they buzz into the ground floor kitchen. Time to look casual.

“Hi everyone!” Abby gushes, waving at the women gathered around the kitchen table. They look, variously, exhausted, annoyed, and amused. They’ll have just got done supervising lunch time downstairs, and making sure their charges don’t cause trouble. Unlikely, given that the precipitating incident prompting them to switch out the metal cutlery happened early this year — one of the boys apparently attacked himself; points for originality — but not impossible. Christine immediately finds Pippa: she’s sat at the end of the table with a laptop open and a hot chocolate in front of her.

Marshmallows and chocolate sprinkles. Shit. The full calorie bomb; must be a difficult day.

Christine accepts a hug from Maria and a shoulder-tap from Harmony, two of the older women who both have responsibility for one of the reprobates in the basement. Maria in particular she hasn’t seen for a while, except on the cameras; she looks tired. Her guy must be a pain in the neck.

Abby bustles her way to the table, pulling up a chair, entirely coincidentally, next to Pippa. Immediately she cranes her neck to look at the laptop screen. “Oh!” she says. “Is that the new boy?”

It’s probably a good thing working for the local paper doesn’t require acting skills. Christine adopts an expression of indifferent curiosity and walks around behind Pippa so she can see the screen, too. Stefan’s back in his cell, doing stretches.

“Fitness buff?” she asks, as innocently as she knows how.

“He was doing yoga when I came to see him one time,” Pippa says. Half to herself, she mutters, “I can’t work him out…”

Abby turns the laptop so the screen is face-on to her, and watches Stefan carefully. It’ll be an interesting moment for her: for all that she’s apparently listened to Melissa talk about him for cumulative days, and seen multiple pictures of his younger self, she’s never before had a chance to see him as an adult. Christine glances at the screen; he’s touching his toes.

“What’s he like?” Abby asks.

“He’s different than I expected.” Pippa takes a long sip of her hot chocolate. Slurps up a marshmallow. “If he wasn’t, you know, here, I’d say he was just a normal guy. A bit weird. Pretty cute. Kinda sad? God, it’s so effed up; I want to like him!”

“That’s a bad thing?” Christine asks, playing dumb.

Christine shouldn’t be interacting with sponsors like this, according to the large, leather-bound book of precepts that sits on a shelf in the office, accumulating dust. Because, despite being on a long leash these days, with most of her freedoms returned, she’s still in the programme. Getting to see how the sausage is made — or unmade — is perhaps counterproductive, when you are, in a sense, the sausage.

She frowns. Bad metaphor.

It hasn’t worked that way for a while, anyway. Dorley isn’t all that big, and the job of acclimating Sisters to their new lives has become, by necessity, much more communal than it was under the reign of Aunt Bea’s mysterious predecessor, ‘Grandmother’, who moved on from the programme before Abby’s time. Rumour has it she’s working for the government in some capacity these days.

Rather more reliable rumour has it that Aunt Bea herself was Grandmother’s first subject, and Christine’s more inclined to believe that one. It’d explain the way Aunt Bea occasionally allows herself to be compromised by compassion for her charges, a defect that Grandmother reportedly did not suffer from. Turtles all the way down.

So Christine and the other third-year girls come and go as they please, hang out with the sponsors, and have access to basically all the inner workings of the programme. ‘Improves buy-in’, according to Aunt Bea. Better to be roaming the university and making friends than spending another year shut mostly inside the dorm, amassing resentments.

Still amazing that the place works at all. Christine half-expects one day to open a random cupboard and find a big box labelled Assorted Mind Control Devices (Point Away From Face).

“Yes, it’s a bad thing!” Pippa shouts. “I need to hate him!” She bangs on the table, and winces, like she just hurt an old bruise. Maria frowns at her. “Sorry, sorry. Damn; Christine, can you get me some paper towels?” Christine hops up as Pippa quickly holds the laptop up, away from the slowly spreading puddle of spilled hot chocolate.

They mop up the mess together. Abby starts massaging Pippa’s shoulders.

“It’s so weird,” Pippa says, when things are back to normal. “I gave him the first-contact spiel and it was as if it genuinely upset him. And I don’t mean the way it does with most of the guys; he didn’t get angry, or try to attack me through the glass, or call me a feminazi or a bitch or a you-know-what. It was like… you ever make a joke that’s in questionable taste, like a dead baby joke or something, and then it turns out someone in the room had a miscarriage, and they’re trying to hide it but you can tell they’re really genuinely upset, and you feel like the worst person in the world? It was like that. I didn’t even get through the whole thing because I started worrying I might be about to cause a suicide attempt before I even got him out of his cell! And then, just now, when I took him to lunch and to meet the other guys, it was like he’d just— just forgotten it all!”

“What do you mean?” Maria says. She and the other women are watching Pippa intently now, and Christine remembers that Stefan is Pippa’s first subject; is she being evaluated, too?

“It was like he hit the reset button overnight. Back to the personable, pleasant guy. Actually, no; he was until he met the other guys. Then he almost shut down. They really got to him.”

“So at least you have a lever,” Maria says. “Actually, it sounds like you have a bunch.” Levers are one of the things the sponsors look for: sore spots, sensitive issues; anything that can be used to promote a change in behaviour.

“I’m not sure I want one. God help me, I almost want to unlock all the doors and let him go.”

“Well, look,” Maria says, “it sounds like you need to adjust how you see him before your next session. Harmony said she watched how you were with him during the tour and she thought you did okay; what were you thinking about then?”

“I was kind of thrown off my rhythm, so I just tried to act like Ellie did with me those first few months.”

“Good. Keep it up. And remember, we’ve had these oh-so-charming types in before. They’re always looking to get your guard down. Try thinking about what he did. It can help.”

“What did he do?” Abby asks, clearly unable to contain the question any more.

Christine doesn’t close her eyes and bang her head against the wall, but she wants to. She knows where this is going. Letting Stefan out tonight is going to look like a fucking nuclear-level disaster. It was never going to actually look good — What was your plan, exactly? — but this is just awful. The entire current sponsor team knows him, and not just to look at; they’re actively discussing his fucking psychology!

Try thinking before acting next time, Christine.

“He was with this girl, right near the dorm,” Pippa’s saying, “and she starts screaming. Like, full-on, ‘Get off me!’ stuff. I look out the window in time to see her take off and he looks like he’s about to pass out in the flower bed. So I went down, grabbed Raj from the break room so he could watch out for me, and the guy, Stefan, is fully asleep by that point. I find his wallet, and by this point I don’t know what to do with him yet. Like, he’s asleep and I’ve got Raj with me so he’s not a threat, but the girl he was with was not happy with him so I kind of don’t want to send him on his way without checking him out. So Raj watches him and I look him up. His file’s— well, look.” She spins the laptop around so Maria can see it. “It’s sealed. And they only do that when there’s been litigation to cover up something nasty.”

Or when someone hops on the system five minutes earlier, does a bit of creative writing, and changes a single field in a spreadsheet from no to yes. Saints has reasonable network security, but the weak link is always the office staff. Every year there’ll be some poor fucker in IT pulling their hair out when they realise the class lists are in Excel again.

Maria reaches over, pulls the laptop towards her, scrolls around. “There are all these comments,” she says. “Kind of suggestive, no?”

“Exactly,” Pippa says, sounding relieved.

“Did we ever ID the screaming girl?”

“No. Camera deadzone. We have a couple of shots of her running away, but she has her back to us in all of them.”

“So,” Maria says, summing up, “we have a screaming girl running away from a drunk guy. We have locked records, indicating some major incident that’s been made to go away. And a tonne of comments on his file that stop short of actionable but which paint a picture that says, if you read between the lines, ‘Don’t leave him alone with women.’ It sounds pretty conclusive, Pip; you’ve got a real dangerous asshole there. And you know Aunt Bea’s looked at this same information and approved his stay. I mean, sure, it wouldn’t stand up in court, but—”

“But we’re not a court,” Pippa finishes. “I know. God. I feel stupid. I fell for his act, didn’t I? Flipping, flipping— fuck.”

“It’s okay. It happens. The important thing is, you talked to us about it. And you always can, you know?” Maria smiles warmly.

“I know,” Pippa says, nodding. “Thanks, Maria.”

“You’re going to be okay?” Abby asks her.

“Yeah. I’ve got this.”

“Then we—” Abby points at herself and Christine, “—have some late lunch to steal. Anything good?”

“There’s cauliflower casserole somewhere in there,” Harmony says, waving at the fridge.

“Yum,” Abby says, smiling at Christine and making prompting motions with her eyebrows.

“Thanks, Harmony,” Christine says, clenching her stomach. All those ‘suggestive’ comments she’d left in the open sections of Stefan’s file had seemed like such a good idea at the time; now she just feels like she’s run up to his executioner and handed over an even bigger axe.

Three minutes of microwaving later and they’re bounding up the stairs to Abby’s room on the third floor. Christine always feels a little strange coming up here, given that most of the girls from third on up were never in the programme — she can be awkward around cis girls; always waiting for them to see right through her — but today she’s got more on her mind. She smiles absently at a pair of women watching TV in the common area and lets herself be bundled into Abby’s room, noting once again how strange it is that none of the dorms on this floor have centrally controlled biometric locks.

“Fuck, Chrissy!” Abby says, dumping her plate on her desk and ignoring it. “Fuck! I don’t know what’s going to break Liss’s heart more: that Stefan is here, or that Stefan deserves to be here!”

“Maybe he doesn’t!” Christine says, too quickly.

“You heard Maria!”

Christine takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, giving herself the appearance of composing herself so she can think through what she wants to say. How can she divert Abby from making a decision that will make things even worse? “You know what Maria’s like,” she says, “always ready to see the worst in people. But her evidence is flaky as hell, Abs. His file is closed, and suggestive comments in the notes are just… suggestive. Even the girl yelling and running away, yeah, sounds bad, but it’s all circumstantial. Even Maria said it wouldn’t stand up in court.”

“I just… I can’t stand the thought of the innocent boy I heard so much about going through… well, what happened to us.” Abby wrings her hands together. She doesn’t talk about her time in the programme much; Christine’s got the impression her sponsor went particularly hard on her. And she’s never said what she did, beyond obliquely referencing ‘short guy syndrome’. Trying to imagine Abby as a boy, let alone a bad one, is so absurd it makes Christine’s head hurt. “But I also can’t stand the thought that that kid is gone. Replaced by a dangerous creep. And— and what if it’s because of us? Chrissy, we took Liss away from him! She was like a big sister to him — big brother, whatever — and we just lifted her out of his life. Made him think she was dead! God, Chrissy, we did this to him. I have to tell her…”

“Tell you what,” Christine says quickly, before Abby can dive for her phone again, “why don’t I look into it? I said I could try and find out what he did, and I meant it. I bet I could get his file open. I mean, even back then I never went that far into the university system—” Lies upon lies to tarnish my soul, she thinks, “—but Saints is hardly GCHQ. And then you can know for certain. And if it’s nothing, if he was brought in for no reason, if this is all just a big misunderstanding, well, then we go to Aunt Bea.”

Abby’s eyes, which are reddening, light up. “You can do that?”

There. That’s the exit strategy. A trusted programme graduate asks her to put the old black hat on one last time, out of concern for another programme graduate, and Christine reluctantly agrees. She finds a totally innocuous incident on Stefan’s file and an innocent explanation for all the sinister notes, and together they go to Aunt Bea to exonerate him. Maybe he can sign an NDA, or something; surely nothing too dreadful can happen to him now he’s had so many eyes on him?

“Yeah,” Christine says. “I can do it. Give me a day, and I can do it.”

 

 

2019 October 15
Tuesday

It’s two in the morning on Tuesday and her phone alarm is playing. It’d been wishful thinking to set it — she’s been running on adrenaline and caffeine since yesterday afternoon — but at the very least it startles her out of her reverie. And gets I Knew You Were Trouble stuck in her head.

All this stuff with Stefan has had Christine spending time in her memories. Skipping the bad stuff, mostly. Dwelling on the first time Indira ever seemed pleased with her. God, but that woman can make you feel like a new person with nothing but her smile. Makes you want to change your whole self, inside and out, to feel that kind of approval again.

She taps her phone and it goes silent. Checks the laptop, which has been tracking the movements of all the Sisters, both the sponsors and the volunteers who occasionally help out in the security room; all are in bed. The night-shift guys are dozing lightly in the break room on basement 1, and Christine breathes silent thanks to Aunt Bea’s streak of protective paranoia: the men she grudgingly hires from some PMC don’t have access to the security room or the cameras, and while they’re on Dorley’s network their phones can only receive calls, not make them.

She throws on a shirt. It can get cold down there.

Let’s go see Stefan.

Early in her second year here, Christine discovered that the electronic locks on all the doors can be cycled slowly, making them virtually silent. She even tested a script that would hook into the system and quietly lock every door except the ones closest to her phone, allowing her and only her to walk around Dorley Hall and its basements unimpeded. It worked perfectly, but she’s never used it: one person trying a lock and finding it broken can be explained away as a glitch, but if a dozen people do so then it’s fairly obvious someone’s just ratfucked their network. The script is the sort of thing it’s only truly safe to use if you don’t plan on ever coming back. And where would Christine go?

She settles for locking Pippa’s door only, looping as few cameras as she thinks she can get away with, and activating the alert script on her laptop. It’ll ping her phone if any of the biometrics activate. She should have a few hours; more than enough time.

She goes down the back way, anyway. Safer to use the triple-door, triple-locked fire escape on the other side of the basement than go down through the kitchen. She doesn’t enjoy going this way — she has to pass good ol’ Basement Bedroom 3, her home away from home for one difficult year, now housing some guy called William — but she’s more than earned a little discomfort.

Stefan’s waiting for her in his cell. Remarkably composed, which is a trifle irritating. At least he’s not doing handstands.

“Hi,” he whispers.

“You can talk normally,” she says. He’s standing, but she sits, all too aware that her lack of sleep is going to catch up with her at some point, and she’d like to be close to the floor in case it happens sooner rather than later.

“Okay. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“God. I’m not even sure where to start.”

Stefan mirrors her; sits cross-legged on the floor of his cell. If it weren’t for the glass door, they’d be close enough to touch each other. “Yesterday I asked if you’re a trans woman,” he says. “You said ‘sort of’ and then immediately had to leave. Maybe start with that?”

This is it. The point of no return. Shit. She’s been dreading this part.

“What I am,” she says, “and who I am, it’s all bound up with this place, and what happens here. When I came here I was… very different. Angry, afraid, and—” she recalls a phrase of Indira’s from her very first evaluation, “—capable of acts of great cruelty when I felt trapped and lonely. I was never physically violent, but I hurt people all the same.” This is not who you are any more. This is not who you are any more. This is not who you are any more, Christine! “And it’s because of that, because of the things I did, that I was brought here. For rehabilitation. That’s what the programme does. It takes dangerous men, men like, well, the ones you met today, and it turns them into… into…”

She can’t say it. It’s just too fucking much and she can’t say it. So she just holds her hands out in front of her, in the classic magician’s ta-da pose. Stares into his eyes as she does so. Can’t look away.

Don’t judge me. Please don’t judge me. Even though, God knows, I deserve to be judged.

“You mean, you—”

“Yeah,” she says.

“You really—?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“But you’re so—”

“Yeah,” she says.

“You’re a man?”

Now she breaks eye contact. “No.”

“But you said you’re not trans. Or ‘sort of’ or something.”

“My gender isn’t the issue here,” she says, holding herself still, willing herself not to react, even as her belly fills with bile, even as old wounds open all over her, even as memories she despises overwhelm her. She can’t stop it coming out: “But if you call me a man again I’ll walk away from this cell and leave you to rot!” She clamps a hand over her mouth. Stupid. So, so stupid. You’re supposed to be helping him! “Sorry,” she says, through her fingers. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, shit! Sorry!”

His eyes are on her, reducing her to the boy she once was, cruel and lonely and sad and scared, lashing out in public and then retreating to his room and making himself bleed. She’s changed, she wants to say, and she wants to believe it, but he’ll always be where she came from. The monster she’s forever trying to escape.

“It’s okay!” Stefan says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to— Oh, God, you’re crying! I’m sorry, Christine, that was— I shouldn’t have said that.”

She screws shut her eyes, wipes them with her sleeve. “Don’t be sorry!” she hisses. “I put you here! And I was just like those fuckers out there!” She presses her hands, balled up in her shirt, to her temples. “Hate me!”

“No!”

“Stefan, I—”

She hiccups, the way she does when she’s about to collapse into floods of tears, and the discomfort breaks through her misery, enough that she can hold her breath, count to ten, and regain control.

The shame. God, the shame. Still overwhelming, years later.

Christine didn’t expect coming out to Stefan to be so painful. With Indira’s family it had been different, so she hadn’t thought about it much — truthfully, had deliberately avoided thinking about it — until it was time actually to say the words. Foolish. Indira’s family believe her to be a trans woman, just like their beloved recovered daughter; a convenient lie, and one she can live with, take pride in. But as much as she wishes Indira’s family were right about her, they aren’t. She has nothing to be proud of. She didn’t choose this, didn’t fight for her own self-determination. She was captured and transformed against her will; a woman made out of a man so repugnant that someone took a long, hard look at him and decided the world would be better off if he simply ceased to exist.

And now Stefan knows.

“Christine,” he says, quietly, full of concern, and God, she doesn’t deserve that name. Doesn’t deserve to hear it spoken softly. There are many things she does deserve, but kindness? Absolutely not.

“Please,” he says, and she looks back at him, there on the other side of the door, stuck in a prison she put him in, and he’s holding a hand up to the glass, pressing it there like he wants her to reach forward and—

“Christine,” he whispers.

She holds up her hand. Places it against the glass. Closes her eyes.

It’s almost like they can feel each other.

“Shit,” she whispers, relaxing her shoulders. Moisture on her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I, uh, I wasn’t prepared for how hard that would hit me. Jesus, I thought I was over all that.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No,” Christine says, and sighs. “But it’s part and parcel of Dorley, so I guess I kind of have to.” She drops her hand, curls it up in her lap, cradles it. Watches the tendons twitch with the exhausted curiosity that finds her sometimes when she’s emotionally spent. Be kind to yourself, Christine. “The Sisters of Dorley. That’s us. Remade, all of us. Reshaped. Made better.”

“Made into women,” Stefan says. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“All the guys out there. It’s going to happen to them, too? Like it did for you?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Does it work?”

“Worked on me.”

“For everyone?”

“No.”

“The washouts.”

“Yes.”

“How many are going to wash out?”

“It varies. This looks like a particularly shitty batch, for what it’s worth.”

“What happens to them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do they die? Or just get moved?”

“I don’t know.”

“And still you brought me into this.”

“Yes. I panicked. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t blame you. Not really. I spent years investigating this place. I wanted to find out everything about it. Even if I was, in the end, completely wrong about it.”

“I’m going to get you out. Tonight.”

Stefan doesn’t say anything for long enough that Christine, finally, looks up from her lap again. He’s looking her over. Examining her. For what? He doesn’t look critical; just curious.

“I have a few questions,” he says, when he realises he’s got her attention.

“Okay.”

“Melissa Haverford? She’s… Mark? Mark Vogel?”

“I never knew her by that name, but, yes.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s okay.”

“Does she… ever mention me?”

“All the time, I’m told.”

“You don’t know her personally?”

“Not really. We’ve talked a little.”

“Can I see her?”

“She doesn’t live here any more.”

“No, I mean, do you have a picture of her? Like, a file photo or something. I only have what’s in here—” he taps the side of his head, “—and it’s been a long time.”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Christine says. “Give me a second. Abby sent me some pictures the last time she went to see her. Better than a file photo, probably. Here.”

She holds her phone up to the glass. On the screen, Abby and Melissa are posing, four times over, in a strip of photobooth shots: laughing; sticking their tongues out; Abby planting a big kiss on Melissa’s cheek; bunny ears. Stefan touches his finger to the glass.

“It’s really her,” he says. He loses his voice on the last syllable, and everything else comes out in a whisper: “She’s really alive.”

Christine loses control again. Sobbing quietly, holding up the phone, she watches Stefan as he stares at his old friend. His almost-brother. His lost sister. She never had that kind of connection with anyone, not until she came to Dorley, and the thought of having it and then it being ripped away is beyond heartbreaking. She looked up their respective ages, back in her room; Stefan thought Melissa was dead — or gone, at the very least — for seven years.

The silence holds for a while, but it can’t last forever. “We need to get you out of here,” Christine says, sniffing, and puts her phone away. “And, about Melissa: I can send you some more pictures, once you’re safe, but it’ll need to be a while before we can think about putting the two of you in contact.” She stands, brushes out the folds in her shirt, wipes her cheeks again. “Aunt Bea’s going to be antsy about you knowing as much as you do about this place, so you probably won’t be able to meet in person for—”

“I want to stay.”

He’s still sitting on the floor, looking up at her with a desperate need she’s never seen on anyone’s face before. She has to replay what he said a few times in her head before she gets it.

And still it doesn’t make sense.

“You want to what?”