40. The Wicked Unaware

2004 August 3
Tuesday

Eighteen tomorrow, which means one thing and one thing only, and Seth McMillan could not be more excited. Eighteen tomorrow means leaving the farm, means going north to Edinburgh or south to Newcastle — Father Adam hasn’t yet said which. Eighteen tomorrow means it’s time for his first true battle, the one which will define the rest of his life.

It’s time to walk among the unbelievers. The wicked unaware. The ignorant unsaved. Or, as Mum says, the British.

Dad mumbles along with Father Adam when he speaks of the nation, but Mum doesn’t, and whispers to him instead that to call a farm — and not even a particularly large farm, at that — a nation is to reach for a form of vainglory as yet unattainable to the human soul, “but you know the Father; he reaches.” And then Dad usually snaps at her to be quiet, to pay attention, to not disrupt the service, but they are seated too far back to be truly disruptive. In the back pews, they are not actively disfavoured — that would place them elsewhere — but they flirt with it persistently.

So Mum says.

Seth doesn’t yet know what vainglory means. One of the tasks he has assigned himself, in the two or so hours he expects to have free tomorrow, is to explore, to walk among the unbelievers cloaked as one of their own, and to find whatever they have for a library, so he can look up the many words his mother uses that cannot be found in the small but spiritually complete library at home.

The farm; the nation; his world.

It seems wrong to yearn to leave it, but his mother is not native to the nation, and he wants desperately to see where she came from.

The television weather said it would be warm all week, but it’s always wrong for here. Mum says it’s because they built all their houses on the hill, and thus created an accidental wind tunnel through which the bitter salt wind from the sea whistles day-in, day-out, an accompaniment to Seth’s dreams since before he can remember. Dad says it’s because the British lie, and that the broadcasts they receive on the single television in the library here are targeted specifically to them, to deceive and confuse. It’s probably why the television is kept locked behind metal mesh these days, and why Seth is not authorised to choose the channel.

No, Mum says, it’s because, years ago, Noah sneaked in one night and reconnected the aerial and saw things he wasn’t supposed to, things which contradict the teaching of the church. Seth, confused, had asked how Noah, who even now is only seven years old, could possibly have managed such a thing; his mother had turned away at that point. Another Noah, she said. She should not have said anything, she said. Forget about him, she said. And she put him to bed early that night, and assigned him extra prayers.

Your grace is your most precious gift. Please, Lord, make me worthy of it.

But the television weather said it would be warm all week, and tomorrow is the day Seth walks among the ignorant unsaved, and he’s excited to discover the truth of it, away from the farm, away from the nation, away from Father Adam.

 

2020 January 11
Saturday

Confidence doesn’t last here. She should have remembered. And she does, sort of, when she forces herself to think about it: Declan might be dead, but he’s not gone, and she remembers what it was like when he first understood he would not be leaving this place. His cocksure certainty that everything would turn out alright for him, the way it always had — for certain values of ‘alright’, Diana muses — faded away, to be replaced by what preceded it: a childish tendency to push and push and never stop, to always be rattling someone’s nerves, to always be asserting his wants, his needs, his physical superiority.

The overcompensation of the youngest and smallest, mutated by adolescence into the masculinity of his father.

She remembers, staring up at the entrance to the hall — its name carved into stone and mounted right there in the brick, a branding inflicted — the way her father acted when Declan grew taller than him. To begin with, it was as if he expected retribution for the way he had treated his youngest child, but at seventeen, Declan had already moved on; his father’s cruelties no longer mattered, were barely even remembered, except inasmuch as he could pass them on to others, smaller, slower, more kind.

Confidence dies here, and whatever you choose to replace it, Diana is sure, says every possible thing about your character that the sponsors could ever want to know. That for her — for him, for Declan — it was cruelty, yet more of it, cruelty unfettered, directed at people just as vulnerable as he was, just as trapped, is another in a long list of memories that will never leave her, that will remain as grit and dirt in her gut for as long as she lives.

She is the lone bright spot in the life of Declan Shaw. She is the survivor of everything he was, everything he did, and everything that was done to him. And she will not go back. Not ever. It is her guiding light, her mantra, and she has with some amusement started to say to herself, WWDD: What Wouldn’t Declan Do?

So what does such a resolution require her to become, now that she’s here?

A hand closes around hers.

“Diana?” Monica says softly. “Are you coming inside?”

What is it that returns to her now, as the remnants of her confidence slip away?

Only she can decide that. If Diana is still being built, brick by brick, then only Diana can decide the shape of her. Who does she become, when she is so scared she can hardly move?

“Di?” Frankie says from her other side.

“Yeah,” Diana says, her voice rough. “I’m okay. I can… I think I can feel him. I can… see what he would do, what he would say.”

And she can: Declan, not so dead after all, roused by fear. He is once again the cage into which she once willingly stepped.

But she will not. Never again.

“Fuck him,” Monica whispers, and gives her hand a squeeze.

“Fuck him,” Diana agrees, and together they walk right up to the entryway and push their way inside.

The doors feel heavier than they should.

Someone jumps up from the kitchen table at their approach and rushes to the kitchen doors, unlocking them and pulling them aside. Diana knows her: Raph’s sponsor. Did Declan ever bother to learn her name? She doesn’t think so. Maybe it doesn’t sound good.

Maybe Declan was just a self-centred little prick.

“Half the hall wanted to see you,” Raph’s sponsor says, smiling warmly and returning to the table, “but Bea said a gaggle of, quote, ‘clucking hens waiting to devour a speck of chicken feed’, unquote, would be overwhelming for Diana here.”

“Boy, does Aunt Bea ever have our number,” Monica murmurs.

“So it’s just me here. Waiting for you. Hi, Diana. Welcome back.”

Bea. Aunt Bea. Declan’s memory presents an image of an older woman, in her forties or fifties but ageing well, waiting for him outside Declan’s cell. Laying down the law. Condemning him. Declan screamed at her for that. Diana, however, can discern a degree of nuance: Aunt Bea had been determined to see the end of Declan, yes, but she mourned him, too. Declan was a bundle of missed opportunities, of wasted potential, the living embodiment of always making the wrong choice.

Aunt Bea blends with Monica, with the other sponsors, with the beatings Declan endured, with the indignities he suffered with pride and which Diana recalls with shame. Almost funny, really: the girls here attacked Declan on the surface, where his wounds had long since scarred into armour, and it had been nothing more than the rattle of batons against a cage.

At Stenordale, they got to him on the inside, where he was weak, and they ended him.

Too.

Many.

Memories.

And all of them all at once.

She wants to laugh. She wants to fucking screech. Because she’s back, she’s here in the place where Declan made himself almost stronger than he’d ever been, where he confirmed for himself his long-held suspicion that all he had to do was keep pushing back and the world would arrange itself around him. He should have died here; instead, he died at Stenordale, with blood on his hands and smoke in his lungs.

She wants to scream, but she settles for hugging herself.

It’s ridiculous, really, that she’s having this reaction here, because Declan never saw the kitchen, because this could be any old house. She could half-close her eyes and it could almost be Stenordale.

But she knows where she is. That the decor is unfamiliar doesn’t seem to matter. Two floors down is where she was kept, and she can almost feel the humming of the air conditioning down there.

She wants to ask Monica: Do the graduate girls fear the place where they were held captive, too? And if so, why? Is it because they remember the things that were done to them? Or is it as she suspects, that it is because they remember who they once were? Who they might, with what feels like the slightest nudge, become again?

Cornered as she is, she knows what Declan would do: he would fight. He’d drive an elbow into Monica’s neck; he’d stamp hard on Frankie’s shin; and if the other one, Raph’s sponsor, if she tried to get in the way, well, there are fucking chairs, aren’t there? She might not be as strong as she was and she might not have the mass any more, but she’s still bigger than everyone here; she could do it.

“Diana?” Monica asks again, the same soft concern in her voice, and then her hand touches Diana’s cheeks, left then right, gentle and careful. Wiping away her tears.

Declan is here. His blood and defiance soaked into the floor here, just as it did at Stenordale, and now he fucking haunts the place, haunts her.

“I’m scared, Monica,” she says. Another thing she’s learning: not to pretend like her emotions don’t exist. Yes, they’re a weakness, but a weakness isn’t a bad thing; a weakness is a need, and needs are provided by other people. Needs are how you let people in. Needs are how you love.

“Outside,” Monica says quietly, “you said you could feel him.”

Nodding, Diana whispers, “Yes. It’s… It’s pretty fucking overwhelming. He wants to fight.” She laughs bitterly. “No. He doesn’t. Either he’s not real, or he’s just me. I want to fight. It would be so easy.”

“It’s okay. You won’t hurt me.”

“I won’t,” Diana says quickly. Say it like you fucking mean it, Di-an-a. “I won’t,” she repeats. An instruction. A fucking injunction.

“No, you won’t. I know it, Diana. And don’t forget—” Monica applies a little pressure to Diana’s elbow, turns her around to face the double doors, “—you’re not trapped. You can leave. You have that choice.”

Diana glances at her, then goes back to staring out of the kitchen doors. It feels like thoughts have left her, like she’s a dumb mass of impulses, and she doesn’t know which to obey. But she’s not Declan, who was made instinctively to lash out in insecurity, in fear, in desperation, in pride. She’s Diana, so she waits, and ignores the thrashing of memory.

He fades.

Not completely, but enough.

She can leave.

It shouldn’t be so easy.

It feels insulting that it is.

But she can leave.

So if she stays, if she walks through the kitchen and farther into this vast, dark building, so like Stenordale in so many ways, it is because she chooses to.

“Diana?” a small voice says, turning Diana around. Raph’s sponsor is there, beside her, shorter — in comparison, not compared to the average woman — and slimmer, vulnerable to Diana, should she choose to take advantage of it.

Fuck, she wishes she could switch that part of her mind all the way off.

“Diana,” Raph’s sponsor says again, “look at me.” Diana’s hands are still wrapped around her waist; Raph’s sponsor takes one, almost peels it away from Diana’s body, and holds it. “You remember me, right?” Diana nods. “I knew you before. When you were here. I saw everything. Look into my eyes, Diana: am I afraid of you?”

Diana looks. What she finds there, she doesn’t know, couldn’t even begin to guess, and before she can, Raph’s sponsor hugs her.

Disarming her.

And so Diana rests her head on the woman’s shoulder, and carefully wraps her arms around her, aware as she does so that her lower lip is trembling and her lungs are heating with the pain of keeping herself from crying, from really wailing the way her body wants to. She daren’t relax her self-control, not now, not yet. She doesn’t feel finished; whoever Diana is, whoever she is here, is as yet not entirely decided.

She needs new instincts. She longs for them. She’s desperate to be natural again, to be unguarded. Another question to ask Monica: is that even possible? Or will she be watching herself, her every action, her every thought, for the rest of her life?

“I’m sorry,” she says, and the act of speaking loosens her self-control enough that a few tears escape her, “but I can’t remember your name.”

“I’m Jane,” Jane whispers, with a touch of mirth to her voice, and that, combined with the broad smile on her face when she pulls away, is worth saving. Worth remembering. Diana builds a little of that into her new self: Jane is Raph’s sponsor, she is kind and generous, and Diana can make her smile.

“Thank you,” Diana says.

“Have a good night, Diana,” Jane says, stepping back and retrieving her mug from the kitchen table. She holds it oddly, with her palm completely covering the side, and she sips from it as she looks at the three of them, still all standing there less than a metre from the doors. “Hello again, Frances. And Monica, you owe me £200.”

“I do not!” Monica exclaims.

“You’re going to make Diana pay it, then?”

Next to Diana, Monica sags. “I owe you £200.”

“What did she mean by that?” Diana says, when Jane’s gone, when the faint sound of her grippy socks squeaking on the wooden floor has been swallowed by the vast space just beyond the inner doors.

Frankie snorts, and Monica says, “We, uh, we have a bet on. Each year. It’s in bad taste, really. On who, um… On who—”

“You evil bitches!” Frankie exclaims, cackling loudly and slapping Monica on the back. “I knew you had it in you!”

“She bet on me?” Diana asks.

“No!” Monica says quickly. “No. She bet on just one washout. I think she thought it would be Ollie, actually.”

Another pulse of memory. Ollie’s perpetual belligerence almost rivalling her own.

Should she see Ollie? She feels like both Ollie and Raph deserve apologies; if the purpose of Dorley Hall really is rehabilitation — and being back here and seeing Jane again, with the knowledge that she, too, was once just like Ollie and Raph, if not like Declan, makes that seem all the more plausible — then she was an anchor around their waists, a negative influence.

Yeah, she fucked everything up for everyone she met.

“Can I get some sleep?” she asks.

“Sure,” Monica says, and unlocks the outer doors again. “I’ll show you to your room. Frankie? You can get to yours okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Frankie says, waving her off. She doesn’t follow the two of them back out into the corridor; she follows the route Jane did. In the doorway, she pauses and adds, “Hey, Di, if you need me, ask one of the sponsors to get me. Whatever you need.”

“Thanks, Frankie,” Diana says.

“G’night.”

Frankie vanishes into the dark, and Diana and Monica head out into the outer hallway, pulling their jackets tight again.

Funny layout to this place. The big double entryway with the noticeboard and the pretty tiles leading almost directly into a locked kitchen, and you have to take a hard right to get to the main staircase? Who designed it? Stenordale at least had made internal sense, even if everything had always seemed too far apart.

She adds it to the list of questions to ask someday, if she can keep her shit together long enough to ask.

“Oh, Diana,” Monica says, as they climb, “did you want to do the injection now, or—?”

“Will it help me sleep?”

Monica shrugs. “You might be a bit sore.”

“In the morning is fine.”

“I can leave you the kit,” Monica says. “You can do it yourself, and—”

Diana stops. “You want to leave me with needles? Here?”

Frowning, Monica says, “Yes?”

“Sharp needles? Needles plural?”

“Yes?”

“You’re really not scared of me, are you?”

“No.”

“Monica, I’m scared of me.”

“Uh-huh. That’s why I’m not, Diana.”

 

2004 August 4
Wednesday

There’s so little sky here.

Because today is a special day, they did not go north to Edinburgh or south to Newcastle; they went all the way south, to the centre of unbelief, to the greatest clamour of unclaimed souls for a thousand miles: London. Almost five hours on the train, surrounded by the unsaved, trying his best to close his ears to their babble, to their blasphemous ignorance.

Today is a special day, but not because it is Seth’s birthday. No-one outside his immediate family had even known about it. Father Adam was surprised when Dad pointed it out, and had ruffled Seth’s hair with the appearance of fondness. “You’ll make me proud,” Father Adam had said, “I know it.”

But there’s another side to that. Make me proud is the inverse of don’t shame me, and when Seth finally persuaded his mum to tell him what happened to the other Noah, he understood that a great shame indeed had been laid directly at Father’s feet, one that ought never be repeated.

Especially not on such a special day.

And today is special because yesterday was little Adam’s first ululation, the first time his voice was commandeered by the Voice; the first time the Words were spoken by him and not Father. It was the sign Father Adam has been waiting for, the sign the Father before him told him to watch for. Confirmation that the bloodline remains unbroken and undiluted, that the Voice is safe.

Four years old. Seth didn’t speak in tongues until he was almost ten, and part of him still wonders if he was copying the older children. Did the Voice really reach him that day? Has it ever?

It doesn’t matter; Seth is not the future of the nation. Little Adam carries that burden. And to celebrate his first witness, the family has travelled to London, selected one of its greatest monuments to wickedness, and begun to witness, just as little Adam did, to the ignorant unsaved.

Seth has not been selected to sing; he does not have the voice for it. Instead, he is required to hold a placard, to obstruct the men and women — especially the women — who try to enter the hospital, to minister to them, and to provide them with hand-printed leaflets.

If they are rude or dismissive or otherwise unreceptive, he has been instructed to repeat himself, to block their path, to ensure that they have no choice but to heed the Word. And Seth must be careful, for this is where Noah failed. A woman lost her footing in front of him, Mum said; a woman who on her way in had shouted defiance had fallen on her way out, blinded by her sorrow, and Noah had caught her and led her to somewhere comfortable where she could sit. He did not attempt to minister to her again.

He comforted her, not with the Word, but with meaningless platitudes.

Seth’s mother followed him, rushed over to bring him back to the fold, to return him to the embrace of the nation, but she, too, was deceived by the young woman’s sorrow, and she did not attempt to minister to her.

This morning, Mum took him aside and whispered, “Beware compassion, dearest Seth, for they will answer it with cruelty.”

And now Seth stands there with his sign, and a young woman approaches, furtive and afraid, and he must not be led astray like Noah, and he must not be weak like Mum. For on that day, almost a year before Seth was born, Noah was sent away, never to return, never to be heard from again, and Mum was confined to the nation. Because she could still be useful, she said, and she articulated the word useful with the same venom Father reserves for his sermons on the unbelievers, on the devils they carry with them, on the corruption that flows in their veins and causes them to sin.

 

2020 January 12
Sunday

Some of the girls are up early, even earlier than Steph. She can tell, because the sound of giggling reaches her almost as soon as she creeps out of her bedroom. Down the corridor and around the corner, in the first-floor common room, Steph finds Mia frowning at the disgusting gloop someone — almost certainly Mia herself — left glued to the bottom of the cafetiere.

Aisha’s there, too, and she spots Steph before Mia does, finger-waving from her reclined position. When Mia spots her and greets her with an inappropriate level of enthusiasm for nine o’clock on a Sunday, Aisha rolls her eyes and smiles fondly.

“Steph!” Mia squeals, bouncing over to her, the ears on her colourful onesie flopping up and down, out of time with her exuberance. “You’ve got to help us! We need coffee!”

“Feel free to decline,” Aisha says in her deeper, softer voice. “The last thing she needs is caffeine. Actually, on an unrelated note, do you have access to sedatives?”

Steph doesn’t get a chance to respond, because by this point, Mia’s got her by the shoulders and is looking very soberly into her eyes. “We need you to steal the third years’ cafetiere,” Mia says, “right out from under their noses.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be reformed?” Steph asks.

“Only from, like, getting in fights and stuff. Not from petty theft.”

“If I borrow it on your behalf,” Steph says, leaning on the word, “will you clean it when you’re done with it and leave it in here for someone to collect?”

“Yes!” Mia releases Steph long enough to lull her into a false sense of a security sufficient to overwhelm her with a sudden, bone-cracking hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She’s stuck on Steph like a limpet for several seconds, until Aisha, who got up from the couch with extreme reluctance, starts peeling her off, limb by limb.

“I’ll make sure she cleans it,” Aisha whispers.

“Thank you,” Steph whispers back.

Aisha walks Mia to the couch and firmly sits her down, pulling back her cat-ear hood and smoothing down her hair, and Steph leaves them to it. The last thing she hears from either of them as she heads for the nearest stairwell is Aisha suggesting to Mia that she perhaps dial down the shtick a little until after everyone in the vicinity has had a cup of coffee.

Steph takes the outside stairs; it’s a nice bright day, and she likes to look out over the campus. She’d like even more to go out there, but she’s not sure her newfound and extremely fragile confidence — buoyed up by her bee-sting breast buds; battered by the limited changes everywhere else — could survive contact with your average tactless cis student. What was it Melissa said to her up on the roof, when Steph insisted to her that she still looked male? Melissa told her she’s beautiful. ‘Obviously still transitioning’ does not equal ‘not beautiful’, even if cis people tend to see it that way.

So yeah. She’ll stay inside, and confine her excursions for fresh air to the roof, to the secluded area behind the hall, and to leaning out of all the windows that don’t have bars on them.

She’s supposed to be backpacking, anyway.

That’s a point; in the alternate reality she and Pippa have been constructing for her family, where would Steph be by now? She should go online later, decide on a rough location, and start picking out details to describe for Petra. Steph’s always wanted to see Italy; maybe she ought to be in Venice.

She’s musing on this as she exits the stairs into the second-floor main corridor. Seven closed doors suggest that the girls — and Paige’s clothing collection — are all still sleeping off their night out, so she tiptoes her way to the kitchen. She can probably steal the cafetiere, make coffee for the entire first floor, make Mia clean it, and put it back before anyone up here even notices.

Ah. There’s someone in the kitchen already. A woman — obviously! This is the second floor of Dorley Hall; if there are any unattached men here, they’ve probably been tagged for catch and eventual release, like a feral cat. Whoever she is, she’s very tall and quite big in basically all directions, especially, judging by a long and busty shadow that blocks Steph’s view out of the kitchen window, in the forward direction. She’s idly tapping out a rhythm on a box of Weetabix and swaying her hips in time with the beat while she waits for the microwave.

Probably a friend of Christine’s, or of someone else on this floor. Maybe an older graduate.

“Good morning,” Steph says quietly, so she doesn’t startle the girl.

Mission failed: the girl freezes for a moment, comes to a complete stop. As Steph watches, the girl’s shoulders stiffen, and for the second time in ten seconds Steph thinks of a cat, though this time it is one that has been cornered, one that no longer feels safe.

Shit. Did she just fuck something up somehow?

And then the microwave pings, which makes them both jump.

“Sorry,” Steph says. “I, uh, didn’t mean to, um… I just came to borrow the cafetiere. I’m Steph. From…” Shit, what are the chances this girl knows about the basement? High, but not maxed out. “From downstairs,” she finishes, wincing at her inability to get through a greeting without making an idiot out of herself.

The girl turns around, slowly, and yeah, if she grew that chest all by herself, then Steph needs to borrow her genes for a while. Worse, she’s pretty, too, in a striking sort of way, with full lips and a sharp jawline. She also has a faded red line running the length of her hairline, and Steph’s been around the second years long enough to know what that means: this girl, whoever she is, had facial surgery fairly recently. Which (probably) explains the height, and (definitely) explains how she, like most people in this place, can without even meaning to make Steph feel ugly and—

Wait.

Hold the fuck on.

“Hi, Steph,” the girl says.

Her voice is soft. Deliberately so. It’s also deep and a little scratchy, with a quality that the part of Steph’s mind that’s been running in fucking circles ever since it recognised the girl’s eyes and the little horizontal scar on her left cheek picks up on it, imagines what that voice would sound like if it were shouting, if it were yelling, if it were attacking her in the bathroom annexe of the basement at Dorley Hall.

Steph is curiously aware of her heart.

This girl.

This woman.

She has a new name. Steph heard it. She heard a lot of other things, too, about rehabilitation, about what a hard time she had away from the hall, but she also heard the name, so why can’t she think of it? Bad manners, Steph. Bad fucking manners, to look up at the face of someone who tried to attack you, twice, and forget their new name.

She remembers the old one, though.

He was in that fucking shower room, down in the basement.

He was in the common room, boasting about the awful things he’d done.

And now he’s here, and Steph absolutely, definitely cannot stay.

The girl, whatever her name is, says something else, but Steph doesn’t stick around to hear whatever else she might say, because not only is the girl the boy who Steph hit in the face, months ago, but Stef is suddenly once again the boy who hit him.

 

* * *

 

Three bangs on her door are all the warning Frankie has. Someone’s going at her door all closed-fist, and that means, tediously, that something else is happening in this bloody place, and Frankie’s about to find out what the situation is and why anyone could possibly be deluded enough to think it could be improved by yanking her out of her little fingerprint-controlled, limited-access and very barely gilded cage.

It also means she has only a couple of seconds’ warning to pull the duvet around herself, because the selection of nighties they have at Dorley Hall, like most everything else here, is curated with an eye to the young and the attractive, and she’s been forced to go to sleep every evening in one of two nightgowns, both of which have cute animal patterns on, are cut low on the chest, and terminate at the mid-thigh. As a woman in her sixties, whose figure hasn’t so much faded as solidified, she’s been wondering if she can get them classed as a hate crime.

“I’m coming in,” Monica says from behind the opening door, and when she emerges, she’s got her hand over her eyes. “If I look, am I going to see anything wrinkly?”

“If you did,” Frankie says, “it’d do you good. What’s going on? Correction,” she adds as Monica takes a breath, “what’s going on that you need me for?”

“It’s Diana. She’s upset. Like, upset upset. I’m going right to her, but I stopped to get you because she needs friendly faces, and we’re the closest things she has around here. She’s in the kitchen on this floor; I’ll leave the locks open for you.” She removes her hand — slightly hesitantly — from her eyes and then, with an almost imperceptible sigh of relief, claps loudly and repeatedly, like she’s rousing a summer camp of eager teens and not, for example, a woman who could use another hour. “Up up up up up!”

“I’m up, I’m up. Jesus fucking Christ, what do they put in the coffee here?”

“Progesterone,” Monica says, and ducks back out.

They’ve all got to have a clever answer for everything, don’t they?

Still, she makes sure to move quickly, because Diana doesn’t deserve to have her first day here marred by whatever the hell is going on; or maybe she does, because she’s guilty, guilty like Frankie is, though with perhaps a couple of orders of magnitude less area of effect, but—

“Blah, blah, blah,” Frankie mutters to herself. She’ll give herself a bloody headache if she thinks too bloody hard this bloody early in the bloody morning. Morality is for idiots, anyway.

She throws off the duvet, arthritically climbs out of the cutesy nightie, and starts assembling a borderline-dignified outfit. Some of the things in her meagre closet are new, ordered online with the minimal stipend she’s been grudgingly granted, but most of it comes straight from the Dorley Hall dress-up box.

Frankie hates getting dressed in a hurry: it makes her elbows ache. Maybe she should have some of Monica’s progesterone coffee; actually, come to think of it, maybe she genuinely ought to inquire about tapping the hall’s HRT supply. Isn’t estrogen supposed to be good for your joints or something? She’ll ask Monica; for better or worse, the tall, energetic, neurotic girl has become Frankie’s in with the Dorley people.

She doesn’t bother with shoes, instead slipping her feet into a pair of adorable pink bunny slippers she hasn’t yet worn outside her room for fear of inspiring the kind of hysterical meltdown in one of the sponsors that might cause Frankie’s heart to stop from sheer irritated resentment. But fuck it; they’re comfortable, and the corridors here can get cold in January.

They always did. Some things never fucking change.

She lurches off down the corridor, through the door that normally bars her from accessing the third years and doing God knows what to them — terrifying them with the ravages of age, presumably — and around the corner. She sees Diana through the doorway as she approaches the kitchen: the girl has somehow made her impressive height seem insignificant as she gathers herself minuscule on one of the chairs around the table. She’s got her thighs together and her feet tucked under her — You’re welcome, Frankie thinks; it’s a lot more difficult to sit comfortably like that when the girl still has her balls — and she’s desultorily spooning cereal from a bowl.

“Mornin’, Di,” she says, entering the kitchen.

Diana, her face streaked with tears but still surgically perfect, even without makeup, smiles weakly at her and gives her a little wave, and Frankie once again feels a stab of regret that she never got to meet Declan; the real Declan, the one that was brought to Dorley Hall and subsequently rejected. She’s only ever known Diana as a near-mute, then as a quiet, forlorn creature, and very recently as a vibrant but badly wounded young woman, and there’s no amount of missing context that reading someone’s file can properly supply.

She can’t imagine the girl hurting a fly. Even though she knows what Declan did; even though she knows what Diana did, eventually, to Jake.

“I’ll put the kettle on, then, shall I?” Frankie says.

Monica’s sitting next to Diana, a hand on her shoulder, and that’s not a role Frankie needs to usurp, so she makes herself useful instead, brewing coffee and buttering toast. When she’s done and she’s settled herself at the table opposite Diana, the girl’s cheeks are almost dry.

“Tell me what happened,” Frankie says.

It’s funny listening to her talk. The Declan/Dina Frankie knew, when she spoke at all, used simple words and short sentences, and seemed always ready to retract them, but Diana converses like a bloody adult, with only the occasional incorrectly pronounced word to clue the listener in that this articulate young woman learned most everything she knows out of a book or off a screen.

Diana lays it all out, that Steph made her feel like him again, and worse, that Diana wants desperately to resent her for it, and Frankie gets it, she gets it all too bloody well, and when Monica offers to give Diana a bit of space, some time to think, Frankie seizes on the opportunity to kick shut the kitchen door and get some alone time with the poor young thing.

“Got something to say, Di,” Frankie says. “One pariah to another. You know what I did, don’t you? What I used to do? It’s all right, you don’t need the details. Long as you know roughly. Well it weighs on me, Di. Weighs on me like a ten-tonne bloody anvil. Love to pretend it doesn’t, but who am I fucking kidding, right?

“I came back here once before. Few years ago now. And I thought about killing myself. Just walking into that lake. For a few reasons. One, because I saw the girls here, the new girls, and it was like a bloody chasm opened up in front of me, a pit of all the corpses I’d helped create, all the girls I made who came to nothing, and I knew right then that even though I’ve known soldiers and killers, I had the bloodiest hands of anyone I’d ever met; me. Bloodier than anyone’s, bar Dorothy. Two, because I felt the pull of this place, like I feel it now. I didn’t just bury bodies here, Di — I actually didn’t bury them here at all, mostly, but you know what I mean — I buried habits, I left parts of me here I never wanted to see again, and all it took was to step onto the grounds and I could feel them all coming back. Same as I do now. And three, it would have been so easy. So fucking easy, Di. Like clicking off on the remote. A burst of static on the telly screen and then nothing. I craved it.” She sighs. “I really could have done it, Di, I really could.”

Frankie takes a long drink from her coffee, giving Diana time to absorb everything she’s said. The girl doesn’t move, but Frankie’s pretty sure she can see that fast-developing brain of hers working away behind those strikingly sharp eyes.

“You want to know why it’s good that I didn’t?” Frankie says eventually.

Diana nods.

“Because I’m here now,” Frankie says. “And that means I can help you. I can share information with Beatrice and the girls. Shit, I think I made a pal for life in Ollie. Or a grandson.” She snorts. “Granddaughter. Whatever. You know how it is with him, I expect. Kid needs an old lady to hold his hand now and then. I can do that. I might be able to do that better than anyone else here.

“Thing is, Di, I know I can’t unbury those bodies and make it right. I can’t undo any of the things I did. But I can hold someone’s hand when they’re hurting. That’s what I can do. You attacked Steph, yes?”

“Twice,” Diana whispers.

“Right. You should know, Di, that that’s never going away. Ever. Nor’s anything else. What I did, what you did. It’s all done. And some of the things we did, they’re permanent.

“Not all of them, though. You know, I was here when Val came through. After Dorothy murdered her parents, when she brought this scared little boy here. And I didn’t do jack to help her, Di. Fucking nothing. Not until she was being dragged off to Stenordale, and I had a sudden attack of conscience. Got her five minutes to say goodbye to her friend. You know what that was worth?” Frankie raps a knuckle on the table. “Fucking piss. Fucking nothing in the great scheme of things. But it was a little thing that was worth doing.

“And look at Val and me now! Twenty years ago, if you’d told me Val Barbier was alive and that I’d one day be in the same room as her again, I’d’ve wondered just how many times she was going to bloody well stab me. Fast-forward to today, though, and we’re— Well, okay, we’re maybe not friends, but we understand each other. We can help each other. And I know what you’re going to say, that we’ve barely seen each other this last week — or you would say that if you’d been here to see it — but that’s not my point. My point is, we didn’t get stuck as bitter enemies. We moved on. Mainly through mutual hatred and a lot of wine, but we did. And you’ll get there with Steph. Probably a lot sooner, and with a better outcome, because all you did was try to hit her a couple of times.”

“You don’t get it,” Diana says. “She saw me like— like I was Declan. Like I was still him. It scares me, because I know how easily I could be him. And it makes me feel like people can still see him.”

Frankie leans on the table. “No, I do get it,” she says. “Honest. You remember Maria?”

“Aaron’s sponsor. Shit! Bethany’s sponsor.” She corrects herself with a little pinched frown, frustrated that she’s not instantly perfect at the new names and faces that are par for the course around here. “That’s what I meant.”

“Yeah, and doesn’t she seem nice? Soft spoken, kind, and she’s done wonders with someone who was, I have it on good authority, a little shit when she got here. And worse.” Diana nods, reluctantly agreeing with the assessment. Frankie gives it a beat or two. Sips her coffee. She wants her point to make an impact. “First day we got here, Maria attacked me. With a knife.”

Diana’s eyes go wide. “With a knife?”

“Yeah. Proper kitchen knife. Because she was here in the old times, just like Val. And Maria had it rough. She was too difficult to break, even after Dorothy killed her family, just like she killed Val’s. But they kept trying to break her, and it got worse and worse. And all the time, I was there, too. Working for Dorothy. Maria wasn’t mine, but I was there. I was part of it. When she got hurt, when she got cut, when she got tied up and put in the dark, yeah, I was often there.” She shakes her head. “That girl,” she mutters, “the things she’s survived… You know some of it, Di, but she… she survived years of it.

“So,” Frankie continues, forcing herself out of the distant past, “she came for me, as was her right, and I would have let her cut me. I would have let her do it. I think I would, anyway.” She shakes her head. “I would have let her carve me up. People need closure, Di. If they’re going to be around you, if you’re going to be in their lives, even a little bit, they need to shut the book on what you did to them. So the girl, Steph, she needs to confront you, and whether she’s going to hit you in the face or forgive you, she needs to choose it for herself.”

“She needs to… hit me?”

“Whatever she needs to do. Like I said: you can’t unbury a body — except literally, I suppose — but a harsh word? A fight? You can get past those. Steph gets to decide how, though, and to do that, she needs to be able to confront you in an environment where she feels safe. Not here—” Frankie makes a show of looking around, “—in a cramped kitchen, alone with you.”

“Because she’s scared of me,” Diana says flatly.

“Yes. But she’ll get over it. Question is, are you scared of her?”

“No. Not really. I’m scared of what she thinks of me, but—”

“She can think about you anywhere, Di,” Frankie says. “But she can’t resolve her feelings without you in the room. So let her get it out of her system. Whatever she needs. Okay?”

Diana hesitates, and then nods. “Okay.”

“Good.” Tapping on Diana’s empty bowl, Frankie adds, “I didn’t think of you as a Weetabix girl.”

“We have it at home,” Diana says, shrugging. “It’s nice with brown sugar and hot milk.”

 

* * *

 

Hmm. No Steph.

Steph’s warm!

Miss Steph.

Need Steph.

Find Steph?

Bethany reaches sleepily for her phone, which she habitually leaves on the bedside table — always in the same place, whether it’s her room or Steph’s — and when her hand doesn’t slap immediately into concrete she concludes, okay, fine, this is her room, not Steph’s, but then her hand doesn’t come down on the bedside table, just on…

…more bed.

She feels around with her hand some more, and finds only bed. Acres and fucking acres of it.

What the fuck?

Bethany sits up, momentarily panicked, and quickly looks around, trying to get her bearings: the walls are too damn far away, they’re not concrete, and they aren’t marked by stains she tries not to think about; the bed is a large double, the size of her parents’ bed and possibly the largest thing she’s ever slept in; and the window—

The window exists.

Fucksake.

She’s upstairs. In Steph’s other bedroom. The nice one, the one Steph got for being the best, first and only trans girl in the basement; Will — possibly — aside.

She flops back down onto the pillow, exhausted by her sudden burst of energy. Feeling dumb about it, too, she guesses, but how was her subconscious supposed to remember she finally spent a night above ground? It’s having enough trouble remembering she’s supposed to be a girl now, and that’s something she does every single day.

Finding her phone, much farther away than usual, she flicks away at the screen, checking the time, checking to see if she has any messages. Steph hasn’t left a note in their private channel, so she probably plans this to be a short outing. She’ll be back. Possibly with coffee.

Good. It’s weird being up here without her.

Bethany groans at herself. How is she so pathetically dependent? Steph leaves the room for ten minutes and all she can do is whine at the door, waiting for it to open?

Oh well. If she’s dependent, she’s dependent. She can work on self-reliance at the same time she works on the girl stuff. And maybe a bit of dependence is good, actually?

Bethany discards her phone, rolls out of bed, and immediately starts shivering. She’s only wearing a tank top and a pair of shorts. Weird for it to be colder up here than it is in the concrete basement, though.

Ah: window’s open a crack. Cold air’s streaming in, mingling with the warmth from the radiator. Bethany goes to close the window, and stops.

Hand on the sill. Feels important. Strangely new. Except it is, isn’t it? Something so mundane, and this is the first time Bethany has ever done it.

Feels almost sacred.

The sounds of life from outside the building, of voices somewhere down there. And Bethany’s breath, faint in the infiltrating cold, misting around her face.

She doesn’t shut the window. Instead she leans on the sill and looks down, finds the girls who are talking. Walking on grass, heading for the lake, dressed for warmth. She watches them until they disappear out of sight, the murmur of their voices long gone.

Bethany doesn’t know them. She doesn’t need to know them to be happy for them.

Closing the window, she’s surprised to find herself crying, but it makes sense, it makes perfect sense on this perfect Sunday morning.

Aaron never had a place in the world. He was like a misshapen jigsaw piece, moved around by his family, by the school, and even by himself, always an imperfect match. He wasn’t the son anyone wanted; he wasn’t like the other boys at school; and here, at the university, he bucked and shifted and never found comfort. Just new ways to hurt people. New ways to make himself alone.

Bethany… She fits. She fits almost too well; struggles to function on her own. The opposite of how she once was.

And that leads unavoidably to thoughts of Steph. Steph, who also seemed never to fit, not until she came here and slotted so perfectly into the machinery of Dorley Hall that some sponsors even defer to her opinion. Bethany still remembers when she first saw it, when she first started to understand who Steph was, who she could be, who she will be: it was the day after she — after Aaron — finally emerged from his room after days and days of desperate self-pity, only to find this radiant creature reaching out for him. And giggling at him, fetching him a clean toothbrush.

Steph fits; Bethany fits.

Though she’s not altogether certain what the girl, Bethany, does when she wakes alone in a plain yet comfortable room, with her girlfriend away.

Maybe she washes her face. That’ll do for a start.

 

* * *

 

She’s making new memories. Monica’s initially reluctant to perform the estradiol injection, suggesting that Diana do it herself, but Diana insists. She doesn’t tell Monica why. But when Monica has her sit on the bed and roll sideways, Diana twists so she can watch, and as Monica works, Diana wallpapers over Declan’s bullshit fear of needles and the idiot bravado with which he approached every prior injection administered by Monica.

This is a good thing. This is something she needs. This is something she wants. Not everything is a battle. Sometimes a needle is just a fucking needle.

She still doesn’t want to take her progesterone, though.

“You can leave the progesterone until tonight,” Monica says as she makes the needle safe, “but you have to do it every night. Sorry. I’ll leave you a box of gloves and some lube so it’s easy.”

“Monica,” Diana says, “I have never willingly put anything up my own arse.”

“Yeah, well, you never wore a skirt before, either.”

Monica’s sharp intake of breath suggests that she’s wondering if she just crossed a line, if drawing attention to Diana’s recent gender history in such a lighthearted fashion is inappropriate, so Diana laughs to let her off the hook. She’s not sure she’s quite there yet, but she envies the ease with which the women here joke about their lives. While she was making breakfast, she found a mug on the draining rack with a tacky picture of a woman printed on the side, along with the text, She was a dancing queen, young and sweet and an abductee. She looked at it for a very long time, with Declan beating against the walls of her mind, her every instinct insisting on her outrage, her disgust. So she made herself laugh at it.

And then Steph.

After that, after she cried herself dry, Frankie and Monica took her to a storage room and let her play for a while. It was the right decision: if there’s one thing about being Diana that she’s learned she loves without equivalence or hesitation, it’s the clothes. She can choose colours! She can choose soft fabrics! She can sheath her legs in cotton and wrap her chest in silk! And though her eventual choices for an outfit today were more conservative than some of the things she found, she earned a pair of raised eyebrows from Frankie and a delighted little clap from Monica.

Injection complete — and with the requirement to shove progesterone up her backside relegated thankfully to bedtime — Diana pulls her skirt back up and belts it tight, taking a moment to fuss over the wine-coloured sweater so it doesn’t crease up under the belt. With Chiamaka’s advice for dressing herself firmly forward in her mind — dress for your shape and dress for the impression you want to make — Diana picked out the sweater along with a navy blue pencil skirt and a pair of beautiful boots she wasn’t sure she would have been able to say no to even if she wanted to. She’ll never be a petite girl — nor even average-size, like Stephanie — but neither is Chia, and a week in her company, paying attention to how she dresses and carries herself, has given Diana a good idea of how to dress to emphasise her assets.

Hence the clinging sweater; hence the pencil skirt and the belt. Like Chiamaka said, her chest is proportioned such that it makes her waist look dainty by sheer force of perspective.

“So,” Monica says, “Diana.” She’s picking at her lower lip with a finger, strangely nervous. “Aunt Bea would like to see you. She took pains to remind me that Valérie will be present, and suggested you bring both myself and Frankie to advocate for you. If you’d like to go right now, that’s fine, we can do that, but…”

Diana, now perched on the end of the bed with her legs crossed at the ankles, can see where this is going, mostly because she saw it on one of Chiamaka’s granddaughters just a few days ago. “Yes?”

“You can tell me to shut up if you want, but I brought some things from my room, stuff I haven’t used yet, so it’s clean, and, um, well…” Monica’s looking every which way but at Diana. “Would you like me to do your makeup?”

“Yes,” Diana says without hesitation. “I would love that.”

More new memories.

 

* * *

 

She loves a new room. A new bed. New pillows. New sheets. New sensations; especially when they crinkle just so. Shahida’s revelling in this, in waking in a new place, and that’s before she even starts thinking about who she’s sandwiched between.

Abby on her left and Melissa on her right.

Melissa’s bedroom is nothing like her room back at the hall. The rooms there are nice, and the room Shahida and Melissa have been sharing, have gradually made their own, is like a little apartment unto itself: a bed and a wardrobe and a TV and couches and even a bathroom, all slotted neatly into place. But Melissa’s bedroom here is nothing but a bedroom, which feels palatial but strangely empty. She has a freestanding wardrobe and a freestanding mirror—and no art or photos on the walls, because this place is a rental—and floor-to-ceiling windows shuttered with thin vertical blinds that barely restrict the daylight at all. It could be wonderful; Shahida wants to buy this place, wants to redesign it, build cubbyholes into its corners, build an elevated reading nook into the vast amounts of empty vertical space. It screams ‘wasted potential’. High ceilings for the sake of it.

Abby and Melissa are both coming round, too. It’s not a surprise: Melissa’s bedroom is so full of morning sunlight it’s like a natural alarm clock. One she can’t ever turn off.

“Morning,” Abby murmurs, rolling over and kissing Shahida shyly on her shoulder. Shahida smiles at her, raising a delighted eyebrow, revelling in the newness of this, the simple joy of it.

She gets to have them both. And they both get to have her, but then, Shahida’s always had herself, and the dumb bitch has made some bad decisions over the years, so that’s the part of the equation she’s naturally less excited about.

“Oh my God,” Melissa says, hiking the duvet up to her throat. “Did we…?”

Shahida shrugs. “We sort of did,” she says.

“It was a bit messy,” Abby says.

“Sorry,” Melissa says. “I’m, um, out of practice, so—”

She’s interrupted by Abby: “Messy’s good. Do you want to be perfect at threesome stuff first time? Where’s the fun in that?”

Nodding seriously, Shahida adds, “I’m looking forward to iterating on our first experimental findings.”

“Oh my God,” Melissa says again. “If I hide all the way under the duvet, do you promise not to look for me?”

“No,” Shahida says. “Hey, who wants coffee?”

“The crucial question,” Abby says, her eye on Melissa, who is still cowering mostly under the sheets, “is which one of us gets up and makes the coffee?”

Shahida taps herself on her chest. “Not it. Hey, Em, are you still under there? Do you want coffee? You don’t need to be so shy.”

“I don’t think so many people have simultaneously seen me naked since I was in the basement,” Melissa says.

“They don’t get you naked for surgery?” Shahida asks, frowning.

“There are gowns,” Abby says. “Have you never had surgery before?”

“Nope. I’m incredibly structurally sound, generally.”

“Neither of you,” Melissa says, “is taking my mortification seriously.”

“Kiss it better?” Abby suggests.

“Steph is going to scream,” Shahida says, “you know that, right? She’s going to be so happy for us.”

Abby laughs. “I just realised,” she says, “we just settled probably a dozen bets back at Dorley Hall.”

Sitting up, the duvet still gathered almost up to her eyes, Melissa says, “I can never show my face there ever again.” She’s only a little bit muffled.

“You’re planning on taking the duvet with you, then?” Shahida says, leaning over, pulling down a section, and kissing Melissa on her barely exposed shoulder, the way Abby did to her.

“None of this,” Abby says, “is getting me my coffee.”

“It’s still not going to be me who makes it.”

“Okay, hear me out: we order coffee, and maybe muffins, too, and then only one of us has to get out of bed, and only for long enough to bring it all back in here.”

“You’re a genius,” Shahida says. “Incredible work.”

“These are the organisational skills I bring to the polycule,” Abby says.

“We’re a polycule? Huh. I suppose we are.”

“Um,” Melissa says, “what’s a polycule?”

“You really don’t know?” Abby asks. “This isn’t a bit?”

“I’ve heard the word. I just… I don’t know. Never asked.”

“Abby,” Shahida says, “what are you teaching girls in that programme of yours?”

Abby counts on her fingers. “Fashion, lying, novelty mug design, and nothing else.”

 

* * *

 

Diana always thought the interior of Dorley Hall would be more orderly, more gridlike: with the layout of the basement being such a clearly designed thing, she expected the rest of the building to be just as modern, just as intentional.

But it’s a maze.

She murmurs as much to Frankie as they wind through the hallways to what Monica calls the back stairs — apparently so they can avoid rubbernecking first years on their way to Aunt Bea’s flat — and Frankie just shrugs.

“Old buildings, innit,” she says, as if that means anything. Stenordale was laid out almost like an office building internally, and while there were a lot of rooms, they were positioned quite mundanely. Diana’s one other opportunity to look inside a grand old building of similar apparent vintage to Dorley Hall was at school, and Dad wouldn’t sign the permission slip, and Declan was on a run of detentions and restricted lunches anyway, so he didn’t get to go. From what she remembers overhearing the next day, the overriding impression of the National Trust stately home was that it was ‘old’.

Ugh. Her various genders are, at this point, just getting confusing. Especially here, where Declan feels more present in her memories than ever.

The back stairs connect via another winding hallway to a door that spits the three of them out in the middle of… somewhere else. How does Monica keep the layout of this place straight in her head? It seems so random! From somewhere down the hall, Diana can hear talking, interspersed with laughter, from voices that are feminine if not always entirely female-sounding; second years? She listens closer, interested: there’s one of them who sounds high-pitched but strained, and whose voice seems to descend into her chest when she laughs; there’s another whose voice is more measured and consistent, remaining at a pitch similar to Chiamaka’s usual tone, but with less variation, almost as if the speaker has yet to regain all her former expressiveness with her new voice.

They both have a quality to their voices that reminds Diana of the music teacher at school, the one who often segued directly from spoken word to song; there’s something about the way they’re speaking that positions their voices right in the middle of that transition away from normal speech.

Is voice training like learning to sing?

God, she hopes it is. Declan always wanted to learn to sing. Another secret he held so close to the hot, terrified centre of himself that it fucking curdled.

Declan, Diana decides for approximately the thousandth time, was a fucking idiot.

“We’re here,” Monica says quietly, and glances at Diana for— What? Approval? Permission? Diana nods, hoping that’s the right response in this situation, and Monica opens the door to Aunt Bea’s office.

It’s her flat as well, Diana knows. Monica told her: business gets conducted in the first room; the rest is solely for Beatrice.

(Be-a-trice; it’s a good name, a name with rhythm. Diana’s decided she won’t be ‘Aunt Bea’; too blunt.)

Inside, Diana finds a room drenched in sunlight, so much so that after the gloom of the hallway she has to shield her eyes and blink away the afterglow, and the effect is such that when finally she can see well enough again to make out Beatrice, sitting at her ominously large desk, hands clasped and resting on its surface, the details of her come in gradually, piece by piece, like a painting in progress.

Long fingers, tipped with clear-coated nails, delicately shaped but worn short, like Chia’s granddaughters do. Hair that seems almost silver in the light, but which reveals itself to be blonde, and dyed that way, judging by the roots. And a sharp nose, strong jaw and pale white skin, all of which she remembers as Declan did: facing him down on almost his final night here, judging him, condemning him. Pitying him.

Today, though, she wears soft makeup, a casual and sunflower-yellow t-shirt, and a smile.

It’s Valérie who speaks first, startling Diana, for she hadn’t even noticed her, standing as she is in stark shadow, out of the blinding light.

“Diana,” she says, wielding her name the way Declan might have, but with more compassion, more interest. “It is good to see you.”

“Alright, Val?” Frankie says from behind Diana.

“Diana,” Beatrice says, and the way she says it is different too, more like Diana imagines a doctor might preface bad news: with care and regret. “Won’t you please sit?”

Moving stiffly, inhibited by the presence of so many people, so many who know her, who can see her whole self, her history, the things she has said and done which cause her to retch, Diana sits.

Under Beatrice’s gaze, she waits.

Again, Valérie is the first to speak. This time she approaches Beatrice’s desk, enters the light, and places her hands on the wood. She leans down, almost like she’s bowing in supplication. “I am sorry, Diana,” she says. “I should have helped you. I saw in you something that was no longer there, and I punished you for it.”

In her eyes, sincerity. But she should be like Maria with Frankie; she knows everything. She should have a knife.

Diana might submit.

“Don’t say sorry,” Diana says. Her voice is guttural. It scrapes heavily across her tongue. “Don’t. I wasn’t… someone who deserved help.”

“Everyone deserves help,” Monica says. Diana doesn’t look round, but she sounds like she’s standing with Frankie, right behind Diana. Like an honour guard. Or just like a guard.

“I didn’t. Maybe I still don’t. I’m grateful for it,” she adds quickly, “but it’s—” And she has to cough, to cover her mouth, because she’s staining this fucking room with her presence, with her voice, and the effort of holding herself stiff is deepening her voice further, robbing her of the soft affect she’s tried so hard to cultivate. And she’s big, too fucking big, comically so, it suddenly seems, around these kind, feminine—

There’s a scraping sound, immediate and too loud, and it forces all of them to look, Diana included. She expects it to be Frankie, dragging a chair over and obliterating the whole world with her studied insouciance and measured vulgarity as usual, but it’s Monica, and when she deposits it heavily right next to Diana and sits, Diana is still too consumed by herself to have even a chance of preventing what comes next.

Monica holds her hand. Takes it between both of hers, raises it onto the desk where Beatrice’s hands lie clasped and Valérie still rests on hers.

Declan always felt he had huge hands. Powerful, abrupt, just another part of him turned toward violence by nature and nurture both; wielded gleefully. And Diana’s have slimmed a little, yes, and have been decorated with colours at the tips and jewellery at the wrist, but she’s been hiding them as much as she can. At home, at Chiamaka’s, at the front desk, when Diana’s voice gives her away, people always look down at her hands.

Her hand in Monica’s. Almost the same size. Almost the same shape. And Monica’s are unadorned today, but in Declan’s memories there are times when she wore her nails in pinks and oranges and reds, and did Declan ever properly look at Monica’s hands? Did Declan ever find them revolting, the way Diana does hers?

Did Declan ever really think about them at all?

“It’s okay, Diana,” Monica’s saying, quiet and insistent.

Eyes flickering across the desk to Beatrice’s hands. Not all that different either.

Monster, Declan reminds her.

Fuck off, Diana suggests.

“Valérie,” Diana says, and she delights in the minutely raised eyebrow that is Valérie’s only reaction to her name being pronounced — as far as Diana knows — precisely correctly, “you don’t need to apologise.” It’s easier to speak now, easier to find her softer voice, her compromise between ambition and ability. “I know what happened to you. I would not ask you to treat someone who has done the things I’ve done with generosity.”

There she goes again, talking like a newspaper. Chiamaka ribs her about it sometimes, and every time it’s a victory: Chiamaka never heard how Declan spoke.

“Nevertheless,” Valérie says, “I would like to start again with you.”

“And with that,” Beatrice says, inserting herself before Diana can reply with anything more than a smile, “Valérie has summarised the aim of this session. Diana, I regret sending you away. Not only because of what was done to you, and not only because of what would have been done to you absent Dorothy Marsden’s interference.”

Diana winces. Yeah, she doesn’t really know the details of that, only that the woman, the backer for this place, has a use for the men who are too repulsive for rehabilitation. ‘To be irredeemable is a tool in itself,’ she remembers Aunt Bea telling her, in icy tones out of a throat held tight. ‘You will learn to make yourself useful.’

“I regret it,” Beatrice continues, “because I should have looked deeper. I made… an emotional decision.”

“Aunt Bea—” Monica protests.

“A decision based on the established tenets of the programme, yes, absolutely,” Beatrice says, nodding curtly toward Monica, “but we have bent and broken our own rules before. We re-evaluate them all the time. I’m starting to feel that every time we do not, we have failed someone.”

“Aunt Bea,” Diana says, spitting her name ugly because that’s what’s needed right now. “I’m guilty. I did what I did. To Tracy. I know it. I knew it was wrong as I did it. I knew I was taking from her. Hurting her. I drew strength from it. I… built her pain into the… the myth of me. I’m guilty, Aunt Bea.”

“Diana…”

“I didn’t need to be taught right from wrong. I didn’t need to be shown the error of my ways. I needed to understand how pointless it all was. How irrelevant. With respect, Beatrice, I do not think you would have taught me that here. I don’t think you could have.”

“You did not deserve what happened to you.”

Diana shrugs. “I’m trying not to think about it like that any more. If I think about what I deserve… then I might never take another breath. What I think is…” She closes her eyes, assembles her thoughts. “I was a lost cause. I needed to be dealt with.”

“That is very carceral thinking, Diana,” Beatrice says. To Diana’s frown — and ignoring Monica’s surprised snort — she explains, “Justifying imprisonment as punishment and not rehabilitation. Imprisonment for its own sake, as its own end.”

“I don’t mean…” Fuck. What does she mean? Why is it so hard to think about this? Why is it so difficult to find a way through? Beatrice and Valérie, they seem intent on absolving her, absolving Declan, and she won’t have that; she can’t.

So how does she justify herself at all?

Why is she even here? Why didn’t she take the hormones and run?

What was it Frankie said?

Right.

She opens her eyes. Meets Beatrice’s gaze directly. Wonders if she might wither in it. For there is knowledge there, and where there is knowledge, there is judgement. Beatrice is surely running up against her instincts, and Diana would lay bets her instincts say rapists should be disposed of.

Diana agrees.

“I should have died,” she says softly. “But I didn’t. I was brutalised and I was raped and I knew there would be no end to it. And it was like death. And that’s what I would like to believe. Because it would be comforting. Declan died; Diana lives. But I don’t get to die. Maybe I don’t deserve it. Maybe dying would be easy. Dying would mean that I don’t see Jake in my dreams. It would mean I don’t see Tracy in them. It would mean I would stop remembering what I did to her.”

“We have few innocents here, Diana,” Beatrice says. “Very few. We cannot create them.”

“Yes,” Diana says. She takes the moment they all allow her to organise her thoughts again, so they can spill out, one by one, to be counted. “It’s not about innocence,” she continues. “It’s about not doing it again. But it’s more than that.” Again, they wait for her. “Fuck, this is hard to say,” she mutters, her spoken persona — one-third Chiamaka, two-thirds simply the woman she wants to be, someone admirable and articulate — failing her. “It’s about stopping it,” she says. “That’s what I want to do. I don’t just want to be good or whatever the fuck, I don’t want to walk away, I don’t want to hide from it, I want— Shit.” She can’t say it. It’s too difficult, too big. Too presumptuous. “All the shit I did? All the shit I would have gone on to do? I want— I need to push back against it. I need to do everything I can to stop it, to save people from it.” She glares at Beatrice. “I never want to stop hating myself. Hating Declan. I never want to forgive myself. The guilt is mine. I want to… I want to use it.”

“Are you saying,” Beatrice says, “that you would like to… help?”

Diana collects herself. She’s Diana, she’s the woman she made out of nothing; she’s the end of Declan, not just his opposite. Why did she come here? Truly? Why did she stay?

Because there’s got to be a point to all this.

“Yes,” she says.

 

2004 October 31
Sunday

Difficult to resent Little Adam when he’s on your knee.

It’s Halloween, and most of the others are out, down in Newcastle, picketing. Seth wanted to go, but there’s a rota: someone who is trusted and who is of age must stay behind to supervise the children. And, spoken only in whispers, to supervise those who are not trusted. So Seth is here in the living room of the farmhouse, the place where Father Adam lives, watching over the children.

Watching over little Adam. And though he is undoubtedly the future of the church, of the nation, he is also enthralled with his picture book, and with the childish stories Seth’s reading him.

Mum’s here, too. One of those who are no longer trusted. Making herself useful: preparing a meal for the others, who will be tired and hungry when they return. But it’s all in the oven now, so she says, and she’s leaning against the doorjamb, smiling at Seth.

At Seth and at the future of the church.

Seth reads and Adam recites the parts he knows, and sometimes Adam sucks on his own finger and sometimes he sucks on Seth’s. At Mum’s direction, he bounces Adam gently on his knee, and when Adam starts to tire, Seth carries him to the blankets in the corner and wraps him up.

“They’re so sweet at that age,” Mum says. “Just a couple of years younger and they’re despicable little bastards, and a couple of years older and they’re starting to think they know it all already, but— Oh, sorry, Seth,” she adds, noticing his frown. “They never did quite get me to stop swearing.”

Seth shrugs it off. He follows her back into the kitchen, making sure he can still see Adam’s corner from where he stands.

“Was I like that when I was four?” he asks.

“No,” his mother says, leaning over to check on the pots on the stove, “you were sweeter. Like butter wouldn’t melt.” She looks up, smiling sadly. “You still can be sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, wincing as he remembers the last time he shouted at her; just two days ago, after she was censured — again. “But Mum—”

“I know, I know.” She waves a hand at him, dismissing his apology. “You are what they made you. I know.” And then she looks past him, through the door. “Still, I suppose you’re lucky, in a way. Better off than him. It’s not fair, what’s going to happen to him.”

Seth looks around. There’s no-one else there, so she must mean little Adam, but what could possibly be unfair in Adam’s future? He’ll inherit the nation; the world. “What do you mean?” he asks, turning back to see his mother leaning against the counter, worrying at her lip. “What’s going to happen to Adam?”

“He’ll be the Voice of God.”

 

2020 January 12
Sunday

“Stupid. Stupid! I’m so fucking stupid. ‘Oh, hey, what’s up, new girl? Oh, you’re Diana, the traumatised girl who spent months being actually tortured while I was complaining about the Weetabix? Oh, how about I act like you’re the devil himself and run the fuck away?’ Stupid boy. Stupid idiot fuckwit boy!”

She kicks a cardboard box. It doesn’t go flying across the room in a satisfying arc; it comes apart and sags limply to the floor, defeated by wind resistance, by physics, and by the fact that Steph can’t kick for shit.

“Where do I think I fucking am? Would she even be here, wandering around, microwaving her cereal, if she wasn’t fucking safe? What’s wrong with me?”

She tries kicking another one and misses entirely. So she gives up on the whole catharsis-by-cardboard-violence thing and sits heavily on the bare mattress.

She’s unlocked a random second-floor room, one of the ones on the other corridor, one of the ones that are all empty and serve variously as storerooms, emergency bedrooms for unexpected guests, and repositories for all the hall’s empty boxes. And she’s been ranting at its bare walls for what seems like hours.

So fucking stupid. Why wasn’t she more careful? More thoughtful? Diana’s at a delicate point in her development; she might be regressing right now! Because of Steph! So what if she used to be Declan? Bethany used to be someone else, too, and Steph rarely sleeps alone any more.

“Idiot,” she mutters, and kicks at nothing.

“Knock knock,” someone says, accompanying their words with quick taps on the half-open door. Steph looks up from where she’s been contemplating her latest failed attempt to exact proxy revenge on wilted cardboard to find Edy smiling at her, leaning cautiously around the doorjamb like someone checking in on an excitable zoo animal.

Consciously unhunching her shoulders, Steph says, “Hi.”

“You need to talk?”

“Not really.”

“Well,” Edy says, rounding the door and sitting herself on the mattress, “tough. You’re going to.”

“Ah,” Steph says, “this must be some of that patented Dorley Hall torture.”

Edy wraps her in a hug. “Yes,” she says. “Do not resist.”

 

* * *

 

Tabitha said he might see Diana today. And, unfortunately, he knows exactly what that means: the prodigal bastard son’s come back as a reportedly beautiful woman, and so Leigh must pay close attention to his appearance for the first time since his abortive excursions into his mother’s closet, and that fucking hurts. Because, as he examines himself in his wardrobe mirror, he knows he’s not ready.

He can’t be Diana’s distorted mirror; he just can’t. But he also can’t escape it.

Too tall — almost as tall as Declan.

Features too squared-off — almost like Declan’s.

Still too thick around the stomach, too firm in the places he should be soft — almost like fucking Declan.

Diana got away from it all, and here he is embodying it. And not just physically.

Fuck.

He shouldn’t envy her. Not according to Tabitha. It wasn’t a shortcut she took; it was a descent into deprivation and depravity, and it’s a miracle she’s come out of it alive, let alone functional. Though Leigh would dispute, if Diana is as articulate and kind as Tabitha said she’s been told he is, that anything of Declan came out of it at all. It sounds like the kind of experience that would murder someone, that would inspire someone else to rise up in an empty mind.

He hasn’t said that, though. He used to say that about the programme; he doesn’t want to be a broken record. And what does he know about that shit, anyway?

Turning in the mirror, examining his profile, he wonders what he will look like when this is all done with, when he’s had done all the things Diana’s had done. It’s something he’s been allowing himself to toy with just recently: the hope, however far-fetched, that he can seem normal, that he can perhaps even be attractive, when he graduates. And though Tab provides a lot of justification for that hope — she’s not exactly super built but she is fit and tall and beautiful and she has a boyfriend — Leigh never met her while she was… whoever she was before. He doesn’t know what she used to look like, how she used to carry herself. But Diana? Leigh remembers Declan very clearly. If Diana can make it, maybe he can, too.

Hope, nurtured long enough, becomes belief. And it would be so nice to believe in something, every once in a while.

Eventually decides: fuck it. He’d feel worse trying to dress up and inevitably failing at it than otherwise, so he’ll dress the way he usually does when he visits the first basement, and he’ll throw a hoodie over it all like always. Yes, the sports bras Tabitha has him wearing have a tendency to show off what he has up top, which is essentially nothing right now, but they’re sports bras; they’re supposed to flatten you out. He feels less uncomfortable wearing one than he does going without, these days.

He won’t be meeting Tab until later, but he’s hungry, so he might as well get out of his room; at least he can get some late breakfast.

Adam’s room is silent as he passes, the way it always is. Edy said she wanted to talk to him about Adam, him and Steph, though what she expects either of them to do, Leigh doesn’t know. Whatever; Leigh puts Adam out of his mind, quickly relieves himself and washes his face in the annexe, and then enters the common room straight from the bathroom, where the remaining confirmed-still-boys and their sponsors have already congregated: Raph’s there, eating a bowl of cereal at one of the metal tables with Jane; Martin and Pamela are talking quietly on the couch by the door; Ollie and Harmony are positioned on the other couches, the ones by the TV, and Ollie is holding court.

“Maria,” he’s saying, “the little shit’s sponsor. She can’t be—”

“Yep,” Raph says.

“Fuck off. No way!”

“He’s right,” Jane says. “She is.”

“What about the God girl, the one with the cross? She can’t be.”

“She is,” Harmony says. “I told you—”

“What’s going on?” Leigh asks, helping himself to the impromptu breakfast bar someone set up on one of the tables. Huh; they rate metal cutlery again.

“Full disclosure,” Jane says, nodding her head in Ollie’s direction.

Leigh sits down at Raph and Jane’s table with his cornflakes. “How’s he taking it?”

Jane just points.

“Even Aunt Bea?” Ollie says, and Jane has to cover her mouth. “She was never a man, was she?”

“Yeah,” Leigh calls, “even her.” He has to admit, that realisation, when he came to it, made his head spin. But only for a few moments, after which everything about this place suddenly made perfect sense.

“Fucksake. Okay,” Ollie adds, rearranging himself on the couch to better project to the entire room, “so who didn’t used to be a man? What about Frankie?”

“Frankie,” Jane says, “was always a woman. Tragic L for womanhood, really.”

“Oh.” Ollie sinks back into the couch cushions again, frowning. “But everyone else?”

“Yeah,” Raph says. “Everyone else. That’s how they know it works. Trust the process, man.”

“Oh, fuck off, man,” Ollie says, showing Raph his middle finger.

Raph meets Leigh’s eyes and they share a smile, and shit, that’s new. The ground seems to shift under Leigh’s feet; since when was Raph, of all people, so… normal?

And how exactly is Leigh defining normal right now?

But then Raph whispers something to Jane, and she laughs, and Leigh gets it. Yeah. Of course. Sisters already. Looking around the room, Leigh takes them all in: Jane with Raph; Harmony with Ollie; Pamela with Martin. And Leigh with Tabitha; Bethany with Maria. Edy, the God girl, with Adam, the God guy. Almost like they were matched with the woman most likely to reach them, to find common ground with them, to get them through this.

Almost like they planned it all from the start.

Steph with Pippa feels like the odd one out, but Steph was always the odd one out anyway. Leigh wonders what it says about Monica that it was she who had Declan.

Hell, what does it say about Tabitha that she got stuck with him?

 

* * *

 

Edy set her up with some proper coffee from the machine downstairs and some pastries, and Steph’s now taking it all back to her room on a wooden tray Edy kindly provided. Edy’s also promised to bring the second years a spare cafetiere from downstairs and supervise the cleanup, which leaves Steph no other task but to return to her room, over an hour late, with an apology and some coffee in the usual horrifyingly inappropriate mugs.

When she opens the door, though, she can’t find Bethany. She’s not in bed, and it doesn’t sound like she’s in the bathroom. Putting the tray down on the bedside table, she looks around the room and eventually finds Bethany crouched half-in and half-out of Steph’s large wardrobe, wearing only her underwear and guiltily holding one of Steph’s lacier bras, looking for all the world like Gollum, caught trying to steal the One Ring.

“Uh,” Bethany says, holding the bra up over her chest, “it’s not what it looks like.”

 

* * *

 

Melissa’s flat came with a glass dining table that she’s basically never used. Normally she keeps it shoved against the wall in the main room, covered in random crap — mail, books, various devices when they’re not in use and need somewhere stable to charge — but someone has pulled it out from the wall, tidied up all the rubbish that was on top, and set it with table mats she didn’t even know she had. Worse, she doesn’t know whether to suspect Shahida or Abby, because they’re both, in slightly different ways, equally likely to do such a thing.

“Ta-da,” Shahida says as Melissa stands unsteadily in the doorway. “Lunch!”

“Late lunch,” Abby clarifies.

Squinting, Melissa tries to focus on the contents of the plates they’ve laid out. “Where did you even find food?” she asks, accepting the hand Abby offers and trying to stiffen her arm so it’s not obvious that she’s shaking a little.

And then she stops trying to hide it and takes the damn help, allowing Abby to keep her steady as she wobbles her way across the room and into a seat. Both of them have known her long enough to know that she sometimes gets the shakes in the morning, especially when she hasn’t eaten anything yet that day and little the day before; double especially when she’s been stressed.

Although she can’t exactly say the last day or so have been stressful. Exciting, perhaps. Unexpected, definitely.

“Well,” Abby says, sitting down next to her and releasing her hand, “there’s nothing in your fridge, as you well know, so—”

“We stole your keys,” Shahida says, taking the seat on Abby’s other side, “after you fell back to sleep. And went shopping!”

“I do like to finish sentences sometimes, Shahida,” Abby says. She turns back to Melissa and adds, “Oh, and we stocked your freezer and threw out all your shakes.”

Shahida spears some broccoli with her fork. “Don’t worry; it’s all ready-to-cook stuff. Just throw it in the oven and eat.”

“You’re not going to have to learn, like, recipes, or anything,” Abby says.

“I’d stay,” Shahida says, “and make sure you eat, but Abs and I agreed that since she has to go back down south for work, we should wait to re-consummate our new relationship until we can all be together again.” She shrugs. “And I’m still job-hunting; it’s probably better if I’m not surrounded by gorgeous women who distract me.”

“And Liss?” Abby says. “We’ll be checking in each night to make sure you’ve picked out a meal and eaten it.”

Melissa slumps over her shepherd’s pie. “Is this what being in a relationship with the both of you is going to be like? The two of you ganging up on me all the time?”

“Yes,” Shahida says.

“Sorry,” Abby says.

“Fair enough,” Melissa says with a shrug, and starts eating. It’s not like she isn’t the happiest she’s ever been, shaking hands aside. “Hey,” she adds, when she’s finished her first mouthful of pretty good shepherd’s pie, “what am I going to get to gang up on you about?”

“Deadlines,” Abby says.

“Nothing,” Shahida says. Both of them look at her, and she grins at them. “What? I don’t have any flaws.”

 

* * *

 

It sucks that Steph is so understanding. It sucks that she is so nice. It sucks that she is sort of okay at makeup. Because now Bethany is wearing women’s clothes again — actual, for real women’s clothes, not just the plausibly deniable oh-no-my-nipples-hurt sports bras she slobs around in downstairs — and she can’t stop fucking fidgeting in her skirt long enough to comfortably eat her weird raisin pastry thing, which is too damn flaky and sticky and threatens with every bite to ruin the makeup Steph spent a whole twenty minutes on.

But none of it matters, because by sitting still, by allowing Steph to pick out clothes for her, by allowing her to paint her up, and by accepting from her a pastry that’s practically falling apart and a mug of coffee with Disqualified from the battle of the sexes for doping on the side, she got to help Steph through a difficult moment.

Diana’s back, and Steph’s managed to convince herself that by not reacting perfectly to a surprise appearance in a random kitchen of the girl who was the guy who tried twice to knock her to the floor, she is somehow a terrible person and responsible for unravelling the Dorley project as they all know it.

She’s so dumb. Sweet, but terribly dumb.

“Next time you need a little cry,” Bethany says, after carefully manoeuvring another bite of pastry into her mouth, “come cry on me. It’s what I’m for.”

Steph, whose eyes are still a little red, laughs and says, “Maria might dispute that.”

“I ought to be very offended that you picked Edy to cry on over me.”

“I didn’t!” Steph protests, waving the remains of her pastry for emphasis. “She just sort of showed up. Oh, actually, can you keep a secret?”

“Um—”

“She told me what she’s getting for Maria for her birthday. And she wanted me to check with you that it’s okay. She wants your permission.”

“Sure,” Bethany says. “Why?”

“Because she got her a mug that says, The wages of sin is Beth.”

Bethany just stares at Steph for a moment. “Oh,” she says eventually.

“There’s sort of a cartoon picture of you on it.”

“O…kay?”

“Is that… all right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bethany?”

“Let me get this straight,” Bethany says. “Edy, who is Maria’s girlfriend, thinks that an appropriate gift for Maria’s birthday — and this is a woman she loves deeply, you understand — is something that references… me?”

“That’s the gist of it, yes.”

“But… why?”

Steph smiles lopsidedly at her. “You are kind of special, you know.”

“Oh, I’m so not.” Bethany turns the idea around in her mind. Imagines Maria opening a wrapped present and extracting the mug. Tries to picture her reaction; fails. “It’s a mug,” she says. “About me.”

“Yes.”

“About me.”

“Yes.”

“Is this the only present she’s getting her?”

“I think so,” Steph says. “I mean, what do you get for the woman who has everything? Apart from, I guess, more people to torture.”

Bethany doesn’t even notice the joke, nor Steph’s subsequent musing that maybe she’ll get it put on a mug herself. Because the idea is consuming her. In her mind, Maria unwraps the present. Over and over. But her imagination cuts out immediately after. “But,” she says again, “why?”

“I think it’s just— Oh, hey, Bethany,” Steph says, interrupting herself. She puts down her Your rights end where my syringe of ketamine begins mug and shuffles over on the bed towards Bethany, taking her in her arm, and Bethany’s initially confused until she realises that her cheeks are wet and she’s shaking, and as soon as she’s gotten rid of her crumb-riddled plate, she buries herself in Steph.

It makes no sense. None of it: why Edy would get that mug; why Bethany is having this reaction. It’s overwhelming. It’s ridiculous. But it’s happening, so she’s got to roll with it.

Like with everything in this place.

 

* * *

 

They picked somewhere Steph would feel safe: that cavernous dining hall on the ground floor, cleared out of random observers. They cut down on Diana’s support team, so it’s just Monica with her, someone Steph trusts. And, though Diana was loath to, she’s taken off her boots; they were just too severe.

She’s keeping them, though. Monica promised. She’s going to show up back home with a whole new wardrobe and maybe even with a half-trained voice and blow them all away.

And now she’s waiting for Steph.

She doesn’t have to do this. Monica said so; Bea said so. Frankie argued for it, though, and that was the tie-breaker, because Valérie said, in her snappish, soft-hearted way, that everyone needs closure. She looked at Frankie when she said that.

Diana hears Steph approach before she sees her; she’s talking to someone else, another girl from here. It doesn’t take much to recognise her, though whether the biggest clue was her barely altered voice or the fact that she seems like an unstoppable fount of nonsense.

“I can’t believe our feet shrink. That seems like propaganda, like a way to get youth with big feet who have trouble shopping for them to take estrogen. It’s bullshit, Steph.”

“It’s so not. Christine says I can wear size nines now.”

“Really? Shit.”

“What’s so bad about our feet shrinking?”

“Nothing, really, I guess, it’s just… Well, how will I wear my collection of antique loafers? I’ll have to get inserts, I suppose, but it’s just not the same. No, Steph, don’t laugh, you don’t understand; they’re priceless, and if I don’t wear them constantly, I can’t justify keeping them around. They’ll have to go to someone who doesn’t appreciate antique loafers the way I do.”

“Please, Beth, show me to your collection of antique loafers.”

“I can’t. They’re on loan right now. And— Oh. Hey. Shit. There she is.”

Yeah. There she is. Diana waves at the two of them as they emerge from the echoey central stairwell, feeling like she ought to get off on the right (non-booted) foot. After a little hesitation, Steph waves back. Bethany just boggles at her with raised brows and widened eyes.

Bethany… doesn’t look how Diana expected. Oh, Diana knows she’s the only one of them to have had facial surgery, that none of the ones who stayed behind will have anything so invasive done until their second year, when the hormones have had time to work — Monica’s already insinuated that there’s room in the funding for some touch-up work if Diana isn’t happy with how her face fills out after another year or two on hormones — but she’s already seen that Steph’s face shows signs of subtle changes that she almost envies; where Diana has had carved a strong yet feminine jaw, has had her nose softened and her forehead shaved down and her hairline adjusted, Steph looks like herself, only more so. Like she’s becoming the person she always had it in her to be. Frankie called hormone therapy ‘a second, worse puberty’, but Steph’s appearance reminds Diana of someone in what one of Chiamaka’s books called the first blush of womanhood. She has everything ahead of her.

And Bethany is similar. Aaron is still there, but it is as if the exaggeration of his best features has already begun, and Bethany’s final face — for all that, yes, she’s probably going to have similar forehead work to Diana one of these days — is visible in potentia.

What a luxury, to be able to adjust to the changes a millimetre at a time, and not simply wake up one day to stare a stranger in the face.

She doesn’t let her jealousy show, and she wonders what they think of her. Certainly Bethany’s eyes spend several seconds resting on Diana’s chest.

“Hi,” she says as they approach.

Steph crawls to a stop, too far away for a hug or to shake hands. She stands frozen at the edge of the little circle of couches, armchairs and tables by the fire, and seems momentarily lost for words.

Eventually she finds one: “Sorry,” Steph says.

Diana smiles the gentlest smile in her repertoire, the one she’s practised in the mirror, the one that makes her seem the least threatening, that most successfully downplays her size and her mass.

“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” she says.

 

* * *

 

She forgot how tall Declan was. How big, too, though in Diana that attribute appears to have been more generously distributed than before, concentrated as it was in Declan’s beer belly and thick forearms. Bethany remembers distinctly those arms reaching for her in the shower annexe downstairs. Remembers getting hurt by them.

So, all in all, it’s downright weird how unintimidated she is by Diana. Steph and Diana are playing apology chicken right now — sorry for charging at you in the shower; sorry for punching you in the face; sorry for trying to hit you back; and so on, as if any of it is important. If Bethany started apologising for all the awful shit she’s done, she’d never stop, and it suddenly hits her just how much that’s part of the programme here: you don’t get to apologise, not ever, because the people you really hurt, the ones whose injuries, physical or mental, got you dragged under the dormitory at Dorley Hall, will never see or hear from you again. Maybe the lack of closure is part of the programme; maybe you’re supposed to always be trying to make up for things you can never take back.

And in all this, Diana’s just… another girl. She’s big, yes, in every possible direction, but Monica’s pretty big, and Tabby’s only a little less so, and Bethany’s well used to both of them by now. If anything, bloody Paige is more intimidating than Diana, because she might actually offer nuanced and devastating critique on your choice of clothes, whereas on current evidence, Diana will just apologise to you.

“I can’t believe you’re the same person,” Steph’s saying to her, while Bethany just sits cross-legged on the end of the couch, sipping tea, listening.

“I wish I weren’t,” Diana says, in that soft voice of hers, that’s like if Declan decided to do an impression of a woman in an advert for upscale perfume. “I’m still the guy who tried to attack you. Twice. I’m just… trying not to be.” She stares into her delicate little teacup — decorated with swirls of flowers; tasteful — and shakes her head. “I have to live with who I was. Who I am. But I also…” She looks up suddenly. “I don’t want you to be afraid of me, Steph. And that’s not on you; you can be afraid if you need to be. What I mean is, I don’t want to be the kind of person people are afraid of. I want to be the kind of person people come to for help. And that’s so far from what I’ve been all my life… It’s like starting again.”

Steph’s hand is twitching, but whether it’s because she wants to reach for Diana or wants to punch her, Bethany doesn’t know. The former, probably?

“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Steph says, “just tell me.”

“I will,” Diana says. “I just want to be someone Mum would be proud of, you know? She was a nurse. She hated who I was, but she tried not to show it. I think… I think one day I want to find her and show her I’m someone she can be proud of.”

Bethany burrows into the couch a little more. Must be nice, to have someone in your family you want to impress; she was never enough of a little Lord Fauntleroy for her mum, never managed somehow to overcome the deficiency of a normal upbringing to ingratiate herself with the aristocrat thugs they insisted on surrounding her with. If her mum could see her now…

She squirms. If her mum could see her now, with her hair growing out, with her mouth plump with lipstick — twice over; Steph repaired her makeup job after she had a little cry — with her legs stuffed into glossy brown tights, with her proto-tits like squishy marbles lurking inside a push-up bra, she’d be fucking horrified. She’d probably call the police on this place, and that’s about all that’s stopped Bethany from taking advantage of her relative freedom and running out the door, flagging down a taxi and presenting herself at her parents’ doorstep, tits out. Sorry about all the cash you wasted on tuition, Mum and Dad, but I’m a lesbian now.

Impossible to imagine being wanted, even now, but she can at least revel in the certain fact that her parents would disown her so fast they’d break the sound barrier.

She is wanted now. By Steph. By Maria, inexplicably. She needs to keep that at the forefront of her mind, because it’s too easy to forget. She shakes her head and tunes back in.

“Steph,” Diana’s saying, “this is important, okay? Remember when you punched me?”

Looking uncomfortable, Steph says, “Yeah. I’m still sorry about that.”

“You didn’t do it right,” Diana says.

“What? Oh. Yeah. Pippa told me. Said I shouldn’t have put my thumb inside my fist. Which, yeah, I sort of worked out on my own.”

“It was your first punch, then?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to—? I could show you how to—”

“Oh! No. No, it’s okay. I don’t think the sponsors want us teaching each other how to punch.”

Diana laughs. “Always was kind of funny that you had a sponsor. I just never realised why.”

“Pippa… She’s more like a sister, I think. I’ve only known her since October but already… I couldn’t imagine life without her.”

“But she didn’t show you how to punch,” Diana says.

“Um. No. She just said—”

“Okay. Steph. You need to know this, because it’s not just about where you put your— Okay? Can I…? Is this okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s fine.”

“Okay, so stand up, just like— Woah! Yeah, okay. Good. Now put your leg back just a little bit. You need a solid base before you can— What?”

“Sorry. I just never thought you, of all people, would be showing me how to defend myself.”

“Steph, it might be one of the only useful things I learned before I came here.”

It doesn’t surprise Bethany when it all ends in hugs. There’s a lot more talking first, obviously — Steph loves a project, and even though Diana’s not going to be around much, they promise to keep in touch via whatever mechanism the hall allows — but then they’re hugging, and Bethany’s watching still, wondering if she should get involved.

She makes the decision when Diana looks at her, eyebrows raised.

“I, uh, think I’ll sit that one out,” Bethany says. “Nice tits, though.”

“Thank you,” Diana says.

“Hey, Steph, when do you think I’ll get tits like that?”

It’s Monica who replies, breaking her supervisory silence of the last half-hour or so. “When Maria agrees to it.”

“Oh shit,” Bethany says. “I’m going to have to be so good, aren’t I?”

Diana giggles, Steph rolls her eyes, and Monica says, “I’m afraid so.”

 

* * *

 

Shahida hates to be leaving so early, but Abby wants to see her family before she decamps somewhere local for work tomorrow, and Shahida herself really ought to get some face time with her mum and maybe go see Rachel, so they’re saying their first tearful goodbyes as a throuple. As a polycule.

She snorts. She can’t believe Melissa had to have ‘polycule’ explained to her! Was she even paying attention, all those years she lived at the hall? From what Jane was telling her, the current crop of second years are hardly the first to have emerged from the basement basically inseparable. But it tracks with Melissa; she always did have a tendency to isolate herself, to prepare for herself the smallest world possible and inhabit it alone. She remembers talking to Em about that once, and Em just breaking down, managing to say through floods of tears only that she was happy Steph worked out who she was when she did.

The memory causes her to hug Melissa extra hard, causes her to trail hands with her all the way out to the ludicrously expensive weekend parking Abby found. Causes her to have to force herself to let go and go with Abby to the car.

This is going to be a difficult week.

“Wow,” Abby says, pulling the car out onto the main road. “That was harder than I expected it to be.”

Shahida twists back around in her seat from waving to Liss and clips her seat belt. “It really was,” she says. She’s fairly sure she’s going to spend the whole next week reliving the memory of Melissa standing on the pavement, waving them off, and especially the last second or so, of Melissa turning around, ramming her hands into her hoodie and starting the walk back to her flat. Alone. Already closing herself in. “We’ll be on Consensus,” she adds, mostly to herself. “Every night.”

“We could still stay,” Abby says.

Shahida’s already fiddling with her phone, looking for a playlist. She needs some noise. “I’m not sure I could,” she says. “I need a job, Abs. And if I’m around Melissa — or you, for that matter — I think I would be too distracted to look for one.”

Grinning and adjusting her driving sunglasses, Abby says, “You think I’m distracting, do you?”

“I’m not falling for your bait, missy,” Shahida says, placing her hands deliberately between her thighs and squeezing them there, so she doesn’t do anything foolish, like reach out and touch her new girlfriend while she’s driving.

“I’ll have you know, Shahida Mohsin, that I’ve never baited anyone in my life. I’m just naturally beautiful; all I have to do is sit very still and quiet, and the gorgeous women flock to me.”

“Oh, really?”

“I mean…” Abby says, and sweeps her left hand around the car, coincidentally encompassing the entire seat that holds Shahida.

Shahida checks the mirrors, checks ahead and behind, makes sure they’re on a clear stretch of road with no cars coming, no pedestrians waiting to cross, no blind spots and no turnings ahead, and then she pulls her hand out from her lap and reaches over to poke Abby in the shoulder.

“Ow!” Abby says, pretending agonising pain, switching hands on the wheel to rub her shoulder.

“Serves you right.”

 

* * *

 

When Diana left the hall, she did so via the back entrance, and was so heavily sedated she didn’t really know what was happening. And when she originally arrived, she just woke up in her cell with Monica sitting in an out-of-place office chair, waiting for her. So descending the concrete steps to the first basement is not the terrifying experience she expected it to be. Oddly, it’s more like going down to the games room at her old local, where the landlord had turned an old shelter under the pub into a cold and damp but secluded place in which to play darts and to continue drinking after-hours.

She already said she didn’t want to go all the way down, though; the first basement is as far as she wants to go, and it’s unfamiliar enough, despite the dull concrete walls, that she doesn’t feel Declan’s instincts stir inside her. Just a minor ache of claustrophobia, which is eased by Monica’s presence.

She’s meeting Will. And just like with Steph, she’s meeting him somewhere he feels comfortable.

For some reason, that place turns out to be a mini-gym. It’s the last thing she expected to be under the hall, but here it is, sparsely equipped with a pair of free-standing sand-ballast punching bags, a stand with some light free weights, a bike, and a bench. And there, sitting against a wall on a mat, wearing standard basement-issue sweats but with a sports bra clearly visible under his hoodie, is Will.

He’s no more different-looking than Steph or Bethany — less, probably — but it’s more jarring with him. Like Diana, Will’s lost a lot of muscle mass; like Diana, he probably hopes to lose more. He’s broad like she is, tall like she is, and his hair has hardly grown out at all, and yet…

And yet he looks like a completely different person. She can’t explain it.

He looks up as she enters — and how could he not, with the noise of her heels? He probably heard her coming before she even started down the stairs. He looks up and he smiles, and though it’s a wavering, unsure kind of smile, it’s new; it lacks the edge she expects from him, the sneer that says she’s just said something stupid as hell and he’s about to correct her. And that’s probably fortunate, because if there’s anyone who’s ever been able to make Diana feel stupid, it’s Will.

But he’s changed, hasn’t he? The way they all have. So she shouldn’t worry.

“Hi,” she says, wishing as ever she knew how to modulate her fucking voice. Next time she visits — and it startles her to realise that there will be a next time, that she wants to see Monica and Frankie again, that she wants to see Steph again, that she wants to get to know this place and understand it and maybe become a part of it…

Concentrate, Diana!

Next time she visits, she’ll sound as good as she looks.

“Diana, right?” Will says. Tabitha, his sponsor, is leaning against the wall nearby, and before Diana can approach, Tabitha reaches down for Will and helps him up. They exchange a brief hug, and then she’s gone, along with Monica, leaving them alone.

Will gestures to one of the benches, and sits down on the other one. Diana, taking it as an invitation, sits on the one he pointed to, and crosses her legs. Double-down on the femininity; finding her comfort zone.

Hah; she kind of wants to go back in time six months and taunt Declan with that.

“It’s good to see you again, Will,” she says, and then she frowns, shaking her head. “No, actually. Total lie.” She stretches her arms out in front of her, fingers interlocked, and relaxes. Drops once again out of the persona she’s been adopting while she’s here; it seems too aspirational for Will.

If she’s honest with herself, it’s too aspirational for her. But if you aim high and miss, you still got pretty far.

“What I should have said,” she says, “is that it’s fucking weird and uncomfortable seeing you again, Will. I hated you. And I’m pretty sure you hated me.”

“True,” Will says, and the admission seems to get him to relax, too.

Diana looks around the room again. “Appropriate venue for a fight.”

“I think I could take you. Always thought I could. I mean, if Steph could put you on the ground—”

Diana snorts. “I can’t believe I got sucker-punched by Stephanie fucking Riley. Did I look ridiculous when I went down?”

“Like a complete idiot,” Will says, laughing.

“I showed her how to punch,” Diana says. “Just now. Up there. I thought, if she’s going to go around hitting people, she needs to know how.”

“You’re her sponsor now, then?”

“Not hers, no.”

There’s silence between them for a bit. Diana can feel Will’s eyes on her, on the outfit she chose to feel confident in front of Beatrice and fashionable in front of Valérie and which now feels overly showy. But that’s her self-consciousness whispering to her, her fear of seeming stupid in front of Will, so she steps on it as hard as she can.

“What’s it like?” Will says suddenly. “I don’t mean all that shit that happened to you, I mean—”

“They told you about that?”

“Some. Enough to know I don’t want to know more. And, uh, Diana, I’m sorry about it.”

“I killed the guy who did it to me,” Diana says, shrugging. “I’m not saying I don’t carry it with me, because I do, but… Well, he’s dead.”

“And what was that like?” Will asks, leaning forward.

“It was like killing Declan,” she says flatly.

Narrowing his eyes, Will says, “And is Declan dead?”

“I fucking wish,” Diana whispers. “I worry about him, Will. All the time. I worry about being him again. About doing what he would do. And I like to think I’ve got pretty good at not being him, but the truth is…” She balls her hands into fists. “The truth is, I was thrown in at the deep end and I’m having to work all of this out while I try not to drown. And it’s like he’s the mud at the bottom of the lake, he’s the thing I’ll sink back into if I don’t keep trying.”

Will doesn’t say anything, and Diana’s looking away, looking at the floor, keeping herself still and safe, but he still doesn’t say anything, so she forces herself to look up and she finds him staring at her, frozen almost the same way she is.

“Will?” she says.

“Don’t—” he says instantly, but he shuts himself down just as quickly.

She wants to go to him, but she doesn’t know him well. Not this version of him, the Will who is uncertain, who seems like he’s fighting himself just to sit in the same room as her.

“I get it,” he says. He sounds hollow. Cold. There’s a tremolo to his words; he’s shaking. “I really fucking get it, Diana.” He laughs. “And it’s the ultimate fucking kick in the teeth that I do.” He’s still looking at her. “I’m a lot like Steph. In a lot of ways. And I’ve been hanging onto that. But I’m also a lot like you. And I’ve been holding onto that, too. Holding onto it like a grenade without a pin. And now—” he laughs again, a grating laugh that seems like it bleeds his lungs on its way out, “—here you are, looking like that, walking around free, and now I’m thinking that maybe I was just like me all along. That the difference between us is that you’re strong and I’m weak.”

“No,” Diana says firmly, because she’s not having this bullshit. “Absolutely not. I’m not strong, Will! I never was. I’m fucking— I’m malleable.”

Another laugh. “Funny to hear you say a word like that.”

“I know. And it’s a good word, isn’t it? Mall-e-able. Did you know that the redundant vowel sound present in many English words is called a schwa? I never did. Not until this week. But it’s the second ‘a’ in ‘malleable’. It’s the ‘er’ in ‘caterpillar’. I’ve been reading a lot. I almost don’t do anything else. Because if I’m not occupied, I’m scared I’ll just… become him again. By default.”

“Yeah,” Will whispers.

“When I was Declan, I became the person I was treated as. You know? I was handed a shape and fucking hell if it wasn’t easy to fit into it. It was the easiest thing in the world, being Declan. Being an abusive, violent rapist.” She’s spitting the words now. “It was easy and it was just habit. And it wasn’t like other people didn’t try to teach me different. But by the time they even noticed who I was, it was too late. I had life on easy mode: the big stupid fucking guy who treats people like shit.

“And then I came here, and it was even easier. Monica and the others, they saw a violent thug, and they were right. And they tried to hurt me, tried to push it out of me, but it was all I was. All I knew. Fuck, they put bruises on me and all it did was remind me who I was. Made me feel alive. Made me feel like I mattered, just when I was starting to think that I didn’t.

“And then Stenordale. Then Dorothy and Jake. They showed me what it was to be on the other side of it. And everything they did to me… I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed that that is what it took for me to understand who I was. What I was doing. What I’d done to people, truly. To understand that weakness isn’t contemptible, it’s just… Fuck.”

“Diana?”

“I hate who I was, Will,” she says, looking back at him the same way he looked at her. “And I hate that it’s all still inside me. All the instincts, all the bullshit. It’s difficult to get through a day without looking at a knife and wondering what it would be like to make it all go away. Can you understand what it’s like to look back at your whole life and not just see a monster, not just see someone who deserves to die but who got spared because he pulled out a little bit more violence at exactly the right time, but to see someone so stupid, so deliberately fucking thick they barely counted as conscious? Because that’s what I see, Will. When I look in the mirror and I don’t make myself see Diana, the woman I’m trying my hardest to become… That’s what I see.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I can. And it’s…”

His vulnerability, the suddenness of it, the insanity of seeing it on someone like Will, pulls her up. Drags her up from the bottom of the lake and deposits her gasping on its shore. Because he’s got his hands together like it’s the only way he can control them and he’s made his lip bleed with his teeth and he’s still looking at her, but not, she doesn’t think, like someone who is judging her.

Like someone who understands.

“Will?” she says.

And then he snarls, “Fuck this,” and stands. Shakes out his hands. She wonders for a moment if he’s going to fight her, if this is something she’s going to have to defend herself against — and if she ought to — but then he rolls his shoulders and shakes out his hands again and she realises he’s loosening his limbs, like you might before warming up.

This is his space. The punching bags, the funny little pink free weights; they’re his.

Right.

“My name,” he says. “It’s not— Fuck. It’s Leigh. Tab and me. We talked about it. And it’s Leigh. It’s not permanent. Or it might be.”

“Leigh,” Diana says. “I like it.”

“I know about looking back, Diana,” Leigh says. “I know about seeing nothing but endless stupidity. I know about wanting to go back and throttle yourself for how fucking stupid you used to be. And I know about looking in the mirror and seeing that same bastard looking back at you. I’m trying to break away from him, Diana.”

She waits for Leigh to look at her again, and she smiles. “Hard to think of you as stupid,” she says,

“Yeah?” Leigh says, and shadowboxes for a moment. “Yeah? Knowing shit isn’t wisdom, Diana. It’s not being smart, it’s not being clever. Sometimes knowing things is self-harm. You find the wrong information and you— you wrap yourself in it because it’s comforting. Because it says all the faults you find in yourself aren’t your fault. You were just built that way. You were just… just AGP, just a perverted man, and the things you wanted were just… fuckin’ paraphilias. Something to be resisted. Repressed. Cured. And I’m not much better than you, Diana. I hurt people. A lot. Put my own little brother in hospital because I found out he was gay and I couldn’t fucking deal with it. I saw something of myself in him and I fucking lost it because if it was okay for him to just be himself, then what did that say about me?

“Weak,” Leigh says. “It says I’m weak. And stupid. And you know what? At least when you were a cunt, you had fun with it. That was always obvious. Declan, he was a bastard but he was a jolly bastard, right? I couldn’t even be that. I hurt people and I hated myself for it and I kept doing it because I’d compressed myself into this tight little bag of gunpowder, and every so often there was a spark, and I’d go off. Like a natural fucking disaster.” Shadow boxing again.

“You know why I like to know things?” Leigh says. “Because knowing shit isn’t doing. It isn’t being. And it’s definitely not thinking. It’s an excuse not to think. Oh, some fuckwit, decades ago, decides that the trans women who don’t want to fuck him are just straight men, stroking themselves off to pictures of women’s underwear? I read that and I thought, yeah, that’s me. And that makes me stupid, so fucking stupid; more stupid than even the other trans women who took that shit from him and rolled in it because they were afraid who they might be if they stopped convincing themselves it was just a fetish. No, I’m stupid because I diagnosed myself with pervert straight man disease and I don’t even fucking like girls!”

Leigh throws a punch hard enough to rock the punching bag on its base, and then suddenly, as if afraid of herself, she pulls herself back in, cradles her hand against her chest, steps away from Diana, towards the wall.

“Shit,” she says. “Shit. Shit. Sorry.”

“Leigh?” Diana says, standing.

“Stay away,” she says, shaking her head, holding herself tight and small.

“You won’t hurt me,” Diana says.

“I will,” Leigh says.

Diana doesn’t say anything else. Just walks closer, step by slow and careful step, until she’s almost on top of Leigh. Leigh responds by turning away, so Diana reaches in for her hand, the one she thinks is so fucking scary. She pulls it out from her chest, holds it between them, and when Leigh finally looks up at her again from the almost-crouched and contorted, protective position she’s adopted, Diana says, “You won’t.”

Leigh cries. She unfolds into Diana’s arms and she cries.

 

2004 December 29
Wednesday

Seth stands three purges strong. Three expeditions among the wicked unaware and three successful purges of the sin and the doubt and the hatred that accumulates among the unbelievers. Father looked upon him with pride, and even Dad seemed pleased, though when he recounted his acts for the table at the celebratory dinner, his mum looked away, and did not eat.

Not even the jail cells of the unbelievers can hold him. That the woman declined to press charges, Father declared, implies that Seth’s witness has taken root in her soul, that she might one day be saved, that she might find her way to belief, and that even though she may never come to reside in the nation, she will hear the Voice and she will do His bidding.

Little Adam seemed resentful that night, and Seth struggled with his pride and his pleasure; he ought not to have revelled in the child’s temporary demotion from the centre of attention, but it felt good to be the first to wash his hands and his mouth, the one invited to take the first bite, the one to initiate the final prayer of the day.

Your grace is your most precious gift. Please, Lord, make me worthy of it.

He is trusted now. And while he is not in charge of this expedition, this opportunistic knife thrust into the heart of the devil’s operation in London, this holy witness against the grand cathedral of sin, he is its key component; he is its soul. And though he is buffeted by the cold wind through his thin coat, though he has been spat on and shoved and shouted at, he will continue his work, for the hospital outside which they have assembled their outreach is the wicked place in which they treat the unworthy, the homo sexuals, the trans sexuals, the hyper sexuals, and the women who murder their unborn infants. Seth does not know what any of these things are, save the last, but he is compelled to agree that they must be wicked, for the Voice has spoken, and Seth has listened.

And as the night crawls in and the clouded sky provides no moonlit respite from the garish decorations strung around the square, Seth makes himself a conduit of the Voice, an extension of His will, and in the armour of the Lord he will witness!

 

2020 January 12
Sunday

She’s staying one more night. When she came back up to the dining hall she texted Chiamaka to let her know she’d be back on Monday some time, and then she accepted Monica’s offer of a late lunch all the way upstairs, in the tiny little kitchen they have on the third floor. And just now Chiamaka’s texted her back to say she’s looking forward to having her back, that the B&B just isn’t the same without her, and Diana has to blink back a few tears of her own.

This is the first little glimmer of a real place for her. Something she can do; someone she can be. She can help Chia at the B&B. She can come back here and talk to Monica and Frankie and Valérie, and stay in touch with Leigh and Steph and maybe even Bethany. This could be Diana’s life for the next little while.

And the thought of coming back here often is much more exciting than she ever thought it would be. Not just because she wants and needs their help — with her voice, with hormones, with money — but because she wants to get to know her intake. Properly. As Diana. She wants to see who they will all become. She wants to say hi to Raph again. She wants to know what the hell is going on with Martin. And she wants to help, if she can.

It’s the weirdest thing.

 

* * *

 

“So,” Steph says, closing her door behind them and shutting out the rest of the hall; at least until Pippa shows up in a couple of hours, with pizza, like she promised. “Diana.”

“Diana,” Bethany agrees, kicking off her shoes and flopping backwards onto the bed. “Hey, Steph?” she says. “Did you, um, did you, uh, that is…?”

“Beth?”

“Did you think she was hot?”

Steph giggles. “Yeah,” she says. “She was so hot.” The sun’s getting low, and she doesn’t want to get back up from the bed to close the curtains, so she does so now before joining Bethany on the bed.

“Right?” Bethany says. “Tall, pretty, huge tits… She’s going to be unstoppable. She could have any girl she wants.”

Steph’s already lying back, so she reaches for Bethany’s shoulder and pulls, dumping her onto her back and yanking a laugh out of her.

“Not any girl,” she says, rolling over to face her.

“Oh?” Bethany says.

“I mean, I’ve got a girl,” Steph says. “And I happen to think she’s prettier—” she leans over and quickly kisses Bethany on the lips, “—and more my size.”

“Smaller tits, though.”

“For now.”

“Yeah,” Bethany says, returning Steph’s kiss. “For now.”

 

* * *

 

Tabitha brings her a wet cloth and a dry towel, and Leigh cleans herself up, then she shucks off her hoodie and goes a few rounds with the punching bag. She’s still worn out from the conversation with Diana, though, so it’s less than twenty minutes later that she’s hugging Tab goodbye and heading back downstairs. It’ll be time for dinner soon, and she’s got something she wants to get off her chest before they all congregate.

Raph’s the only one there, though, sitting on the couch with Jane, talking. His hair’s at that awkward stage where he’s stopped shaving it off — a habit which didn’t last that long down here — and now it’s long enough to be giving him all sorts of unaccustomed sensations, so he keeps running a hand through it and twisting the odd strand around in his fingers. They both see her enter, so they share a wave and Leigh thinks, what the fuck, right?

“Hey,” she says, and Raph and Jane both adopt comically near-identical attentive expressions, “I just, um. Shit. Uh. I saw Diana.”

“Oh,” Raph says. “Huh. How is Declan two point oh? Upgraded in all the right places?”

“Very different,” Leigh says, as Jane taps Raph on the shoulder and both mouths and mimes huge tits at him. “Anyway, we were talking and I told her some stuff and now I need to tell you some stuff, and if I don’t do it now I might never do it and I’ll fucking hate myself and… Oh, Christ.”

“What’s going on, Will?”

Fast. Clean. Like bad news. Like a slap in the face. “Leigh. Call me Leigh.”

“Oh my God!” Jane exclaims, and claps twice in involuntary excitement.

“Leigh?” Raph says, nodding, considering it. “Okay. Sure.”

“I love it,” Jane says, doing a very good impression of not having even heard the name Leigh before. “Leigh.”

“Raph,” Leigh says, “you’re not… I mean, is that it? Just ‘sure’?”

“It’s going to keep happening, isn’t it? Why not roll with it?”

“I guess.”

“So… is that it?”

“Yeah,” Leigh says. “Uh. That was it.”

She’s about to leave, to go shower maybe, or go grab a book in bed or something, but then Raph waves at her again and says, “Hey, Leigh, we were thinking we’d have a late dinner, and we’d have kind of a movie night. In here. With pizza and popcorn and shit. Steph and Beth aren’t in, they’re off doing their own thing, but Martin’s up for it. Probably Ollie.” He makes a face. “But he’s been behaving himself, so fuck it, it’s probably fine. And Harmony will tase him and throw him back in the cells if it’s not. Which would also be fun. You wanna join? We were going to do the Star Wars prequels.”

Will would have told him to fuck off, would have gone read a book. Would have been miserable. But Leigh doesn’t need to share his habits. She can cultivate new ones. And though Raph wouldn’t be her first choice for a friend, he’s here and he’s making the effort and, well, she’s stuck with him for the next three years.

“Why not?” she says.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes, Adam hears the others. Through the thick concrete walls. Crying or shouting or screaming. Less so now, though; Edy says the others are adjusting, getting used to things. The first month is always the most distressing, she says.

She says a lot.

She says too much.

She knows about the church, about the nation. She knows about the Voice. She even knows it’s gone silent. She knows everything.

As much as it frustrates him, it’s good that she does. Because he knows nothing any more. He has no guide, he has no wisdom, he has no insight save that which she gives to him. And she gives freely, shares with him all that she knows.

Almost all that she knows. How does she know about the farm? He told her a story from his childhood, about the time when he was six that he walked unsupervised all the way out back to the old playground, and she gasped, eyes wide and hands over her mouth, like she already knew how dangerous it was there. Like she’d seen the eroded cliffside and the fence that spills down into the ocean. Like she’d felt the spray in the air, just as he had.

He thinks of that often. Especially now, in his empty room, when even the crying from the others has gone silent. He wants to ask her again, certain that this time she might tell him, she might admit to having visited them once, having seen him when he was younger.

He wants her to admit their connection, whatever it is.

But she can’t, because he made her promise.

He’s bitten his nails to stubs and he’s scratched his arms until they bleed and he’s worn his lower lip into a ragged mess, and still he is no closer. And he wishes he could talk to her, about this, about anything, but he made her promise to stay away until he asks her to come back, and he cannot ask until he has made peace with the silence in his head.

 

2004 December 31
Friday

For a moment, it’s just like home. At home, Seth sleeps on a thin mattress and he wakes to plain white walls. But at home, he’s always too cold, because the wind from the sea never stops, and that’s his first clue that he is not where he ought to be, not where he expects.

The second is that he does not remember wrapping up the witness, returning to the safe house in Barnet, the one owned by the sad little convert woman who feeds them meat from tin cans and sleeps them six to a room. And he does not remember catching the train the next morning.

Above him, a light switches on. It’s embedded in the ceiling — nothing at home nor at the safe house is like this — and it is bright. Too bright. Bright enough that he is forced to cover his eyes and roll onto his front, and as he does so, there’s a tight pinch of pain from his stomach.

That’s new.

He rolls over again and sits up. Shields his eyes from the light with one hand and with the other frantically feels around his belly, searching for the source of the pain.

There’s a bump. Almost like a zit, but deeper, and it itches. It’s difficult to see; it’s so bright that all colour has been bleached from his vision, and he sees only in blinding highlights and invisible shadows. And then, as suddenly as the light switched on, it halves in brightness, and halves again, until it is bearable, until he can uncover his eyes and look around properly.

He sits on a cot. It is bolted to the wall. Against the wall behind him is a metal toilet and a basin. And the wall in front of him—

Is not a wall. It is barred.

Did he get arrested again? He didn’t strike anyone this time.

As his eyes finish adjusting to the lower light, he sees a woman on the other side of the bars. She sits cross-legged on the floor, her chin propped on her hand, her elbow propped on her knee. She wears her black hair long and chooses modest clothes and, unlike most of the young unbeliever women he has encountered, she doesn’t wear obvious makeup. When she speaks, she sounds like the Londoners he’s spent the last few days picketing against.

“Seth,” she says softly. “My name is Maria.”