42. Finger Bones

2020 January 13
Monday

They’ve not been back in Steph’s room — her room underground; her real room, the one she’s supposed to spend most of her time in — for five minutes, and Bethany’s already antsy. Steph can’t blame her, not really, not when they spent one of the best nights of Steph’s life up there, up where the air isn’t blown in via AC and the windows open and there are windows at all and the worst they can expect of their neighbours is that they might not clean the cafetiere. Down here, they have to be on their guard, because even with Raph starting to sort his shit out, Martin’s continued state of sanguine acceptance and Adam’s… whatever the hell is going on there, there’s still Ollie.

Steph hadn’t understood how privileged she’d been to be among people she absolutely trusted, until she wasn’t any more. Every time that dividing door closes, the one that cuts off the basement from the stairwell, it’s like it’s heavier, like it shuts with more volume and force. Like it’s more final.

Ugh. She’s being dumb. January’s basement is not October’s basement. No-one’s coming after her, and even the people who are miserable are just quietly getting on with it. And on the remote chance that Ollie does try his luck — something which seems even more unlikely than it ever did with, say, Leigh, because Ollie’s aggression has been focused mainly inwards — then he’s the only one who will. He’ll be twitching on the ground before he takes two steps. Hell, Raph would probably help sit on him.

Still. Sucks to be back here, where everything is uncertain.

Bethany’s problem, however, seems simpler:

“Fuck,” she says, “right back in the concrete shoebox.”

“You okay, Beth?” Steph asks her. Bethany’s pacing in circles in the tiny space, covering the distance between the small bed they always seem to almost fall out of and the door so massive it has to have a powerfully sprung hinge so that in its last few inches it doesn’t inadvertently take off someone’s fingers.

A theme here: discomfort and heavy fucking doors. An environment designed to be unwelcoming and yet still keep you in.

“Yeah,” Beth says. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.” She stops, folds her hands over her chest, winces, and then wraps them around her belly. “I don’t want to be down here again, Steph. It’s fucking oppressive, man. I can feel the concrete. Can you feel concrete? Is that insane? Did I spend one night in a nice bed with the window open and go insane? Does that happen?”

“You’re not insane,” Steph says. “I’m feeling it too, a bit.”

“You think maybe we could have another night? You think that would be fine? You can just let us up, right? You can do it? Because, Jesus, Steph, suddenly I’m looking at these walls and they look just like my walls, and all I can think of is—”

“Got it,” Steph says, reaching out and taking one of Bethany’s hands, prising her fingers away from her side and pulling her closer, into a hug. “Let’s go.”

“I was going to say, ‘and all I can think of is all the jizz on my walls,’” Bethany mumbles.

Liar, Steph thinks, but she thinks it with a kiss to Bethany’s forehead. She can lie about that all she wants. Why does Beth spend so much time in Steph’s room down here? Because hers is home to some truly shitty memories.

Still, it feels more intense this time. Much more. For both of them. Maybe when you spend time away, you change, and on returning to a place that you used to fit into, however grudgingly, you might find that you stick out a little more, that its blunted edges dig in a little more painfully.

It would seem an extreme reaction to develop over the course of a single day, if the contrast between life above ground and below were not so great, and if Bethany in particular had not become adept at rapid personal development.

So, fuck it: they’re going back upstairs. She can ask for forgiveness later, possibly while delivering a nice, calming hot chocolate to Maria.

 

* * *

 

Stupid Steph. Knows her too well. Sees through her lies immediately, quickly enough that she doesn’t even get to finish lying. Which objectively sucks, because her lies are good, and when they’re not good, they’re entertaining, and that’s at least as important.

Still, she probably should ask Maria for some cleaning shit and a big sponge, and give her bedroom walls the soaping of a lifetime. Though, knowing her, she’d probably accidentally make mustard gas or something, and take herself out in the dumbest of all possible fashions. Just sitting there in her room with a mixing bowl and a random sampling of science’s craziest chemicals, trying to make Fairy Liquid and coming up with something that dissolves skin, but slapping it on the walls anyway because yeah, the ghosts of wanks past are kind of bothering her.

Bethany’s spinning out. She knows it. Can feel it like it’s physical, like her brain’s a fucking dynamo and coming back down here pulled the cord and started it going, and now the only way to stop it is to remove herself again, or she’ll keep spinning until she comes off her axle and—

Shit.

Hits the wall?

Explodes?

Where is she going with this?

Nowhere except round in fucking circles, that’s where.

“Hoodie,” she says to herself. It’s the sole reason she came back to her room: she got buttery croissant on her top and now she needs a clean one. Or something to wear over it to hide the stain.

Huh. Very allegorical. She should write poetry.

No. No, she should never write poetry. You need way bigger tits to pull it off.

“Hoodie,” she insists to herself.

Stupid concrete walls. She said to Steph that she can feel the concrete, and yeah, she can, but she can also feel the dirt, the cold, wet dirt that surrounds them on all sides. Thicker and more foreboding than the man-made intrusion into the ground that is the basement, it feels as if at any moment it could choose to reject them all, could fold over with an earthen sigh and trap her even more completely than the doors and the walls and the locks that currently keep her at the mercy of the Sisters.

And she loves the Sisters! Well, she loves Maria. Loves her with a frightening intensity. Claims her as a sister closer than any of her blood relatives. But she’s still holding the keys to Bethany’s cage, and it seems that no amount of good and promising behaviour is enough to dismantle the lock.

Not yet.

Even the light is a privilege down here.

Shit.

It’s too easy to imagine the lights shutting off and incapacitating them all, and it doesn’t matter that Maria’s reassured her that there are independent circuits and backup generators and batteries that can run the emergency lights for more than long enough to effect an evacuation; Bethany can sense the possibility of absolute darkness at the edge of her vision, like an encroaching concussion.

She’s hidden in too many small places. Now they’re coming back for her.

“Fucking hoodie,” she mutters through her teeth. She slaps herself around the cheek, strides over to the wardrobe, pulls out the first clean hoodie she can find, adds a set of clean underwear, a pair of joggers and a tank top to the pile, and exits her room before it can drag her down, before she becomes so afraid of the dark that she goes looking for it again.

 

* * *

 

Steph’s about to go fetch her when Bethany finally emerges, clutching a pile of clothing to her belly with both hands as if it is a life preserver. Steph’s got her own little bundle, but she also has a bag, so she holds it out and stands there for a few moments until Bethany, who seems locked in her own world, gets the idea and drops her stuff inside.

They’re out of the bedroom corridor and about to turn off towards the stairs when Steph hears people talking in the common room, and though normally she’d dismiss that, especially now, she stops short when she realises that one of them is Adam.

Adam! When did he last leave his room except to wash and relieve himself? And where’s Edy? If Adam’s out, and if she still wants Steph and Leigh’s help with him, she’d be down here already, right? Checking her pocket for her phone, Steph cuts through the bathroom into the common room, with Bethany following behind her, silent, probably wondering why they aren’t getting the hell out like Steph promised.

In the common room, Martin’s sitting up against the cabinets on the far side, resting on a bean bag chair, with a small pile of books next to him. As they enter, he shoots Steph an alarmed look, which discombobulates her almost as much as Adam’s presence: Martin has been almost eerily calm for so long now that Steph almost forgets how he arrived here, as a strung-out, moody, barely recovered addict with a severe self-hatred problem.

“What happens next?” Adam’s asking him. Adam’s standing there, arms folded, unthreatening except perhaps in that he is an unknown quantity. When he hears Steph and Bethany walk up, he turns to look at them, his expression more quizzical than anything else. “I want to leave,” he says to Steph as she carefully drops off her clothes bag on the couch. He says it all simple, but one look tells Steph there’s nothing simple about him right now.

“Why don’t I get Edy for you?” Steph says, keeping her tone calm and neutral.

“I just want to know,” Adam says, and Steph realises that he’s not just got his arms folded, he’s holding them steady, because he’s shaking, he’s shaking like a cornered animal. “I want to know what comes next, and I want to leave. I don’t care how. I… don’t think I even care who I leave as. Hah!” He exclaims suddenly, making Martin jump and prompting Bethany nervously to manoeuvre herself in front of Steph. “Serve him right, wouldn’t it? But— Yes. Yes. I need to talk to my father.”

Heedless of whether she should be showing Adam the depth of her access, because he’s kind of fucking scaring her right now, Steph pulls out her phone and says, “I’m going to call Edy. Why don’t you sit down, Adam?”

“Yes,” Martin says, “why don’t you sit down?” But he doesn’t bloody well do anything about it, so when Adam turns away again, when he starts looking around the room like he might find the solution to his problem under the metal tables or stuffed into the couch cushions, Steph makes irritable gestures with her free hand. Martin, finally, stands and gingerly taps Adam on the elbow and suggests, “Sit down?” in a voice which suggests he, too, is shaking.

“I need to go,” Adam says.

“And Steph’s going to call and ask about that,” Martin says. “Until she— Until that’s done, you should sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down. I need to get out of here. I need to talk to Father. I need to find my mum. I need to get her away from him.”

“You won’t do her any good making a nuisance of yourself now,” Martin snaps, his accent briefly elevating itself a couple of social classes from the position, Steph realises, at which he has been mostly slumming it. “So sit down, and let Steph call Edy, and maybe Beth— maybe someone can get you some water.”

Martin’s making significant eyes at Bethany as he guides Adam to the couch, and Steph’s glad that Bethany doesn’t fight him. She trots off, and returns from the lunch room a moment later with a plastic cup of water from the dispenser, handing it to Martin rather than Adam.

With the situation — with Adam — under something approaching control, Steph returns her attention to her phone.

It’s rung through to voicemail twice now.

On the third time, she’s about to give up when Edy finally answers with a wary, “Yes? Steph, listen, I—”

“Adam’s out of his room,” Steph says quickly before Edy can finish. “He’s here in the common room.”

“Of all the…” Edy mutters, sounding distant, as if she’s covered the mic. “Look, just keep an eye on him for a minute, okay?”

“I really need to—”

“Just for one minute, okay, Steph? Remember what you agreed to.”

“I agreed to talk to him,” Steph says. “Not to sponsor him. He’s asking to leave, says he needs to see his parents.”

“Does he seem unstable?” There’s an edge to Edy’s voice.

“How should I know? I don’t even know what he’s been thinking for the last, what, million years?”

“Hold fire, will you? Two minutes.” Twenty seconds ago it was ‘one minute’. Steph doesn’t say so, though; Edy seems stressed. “Okay?” Edy adds impatiently.

“Two minutes, Edy. No more.”

“You don’t give the orders around here, Steph.”

“What?” Steph snaps, astonishment sharpening her voice. That’s… not like Edy at all.

There’s a pause, during which Steph can almost hear the tension on the other end of the line, and then Edy says, “Sorry,” and hangs up.

What the fuck was that?

 

* * *

 

It’s been more than the two minutes Steph said Edy promised, and there are more people here now. Raph’s back, looking different in a way Bethany can’t identify except that he keeps fiddling with his chest — join the fucking club, mate — and he’s brought Jane with him, and that means there’s some fucking supervision at last, that means the girl scout camp counsellors are here to make sure none of the nascent girls burns any of the others with her s’more, so it’s time to be off. Bethany doesn’t want to spend another minute down here, not with Adam restless and sponsors snapping at Steph on the phone; if there’s weird shit going down, Bethany wants to be somewhere she can see the sky, somewhere the people are a fuck of a lot closer to normal, and not down here, not in the place where Declan came at her and Steph in the shower annexe, in the place where she locked herself in the dark for days and failed very hard at not wanting to die.

So she’s picking at Steph’s sleeve, unable quite to vocalise her desire to get the fuck out. Steph’s still holding her phone in one hand, checking the screen constantly, waiting for Edy to call back or text or send one of her happy little update messages on Consensus or something, but she gives up on it after another couple of minutes.

“Fuck it,” Steph says. “Jane?” Jane, sitting at one of the metal tables with Raph, looks up. “Keep an eye on Adam, would you? Edy will be down in a moment, but Bethany and I…” She doesn’t say aloud that they’re going upstairs. Opsec, as Christine would say, for all that that seems to matter down here any more; Bethany’s lost track of who knows what and who is supposed to know what.

“Uh,” Jane says, but Steph and Bethany don’t stick around for the resolution, because they’re gone. Out the door. Obligation discharged. It’s like Steph said to Edy, they’re not sponsors. Bethany’s a programme member and Steph’s, like, a goat, or something.

Bethany’s already got the clothes bag over her shoulder, but Steph checks it anyway, offering up an apologetic smile when she confirms that everything’s still in there, and then she walks confidently up to the door to the stairs and places her thumb against the reader.

Red light.

“What?” she mutters, and tries again.

Red light.

It should make a loud buzzing noise, like the wrong answer in a game show. It should flash up a screen with ACCESS DENIED on it. It should do something, anything.

What it’s doing is: fucking nothing.

One more try.

Red light.

Steph’s still got her phone in her hand, and this time she calls Pippa.

Voicemail.

She tries Edy again.

Voicemail.

Maria.

Voicemail.

She tries Christine, but the call fails, and Steph understands why before Bethany does, swearing at the screen and wondering aloud what the fuck is going on. It takes Bethany way too much time, time her roiling belly is making good use of by churning itself into a whirlpool of anxiety, to spot on the screen that the wifi has been cut off.

No more network calls. No more network.

Bethany’s got her own phone in her pocket, and though she doesn’t usually have the same access as Steph, she does now: the network’s been disconnected.

Their only access to the outside world now comes in the form of waving at the security cameras, which is what Steph’s doing, and more fucking power to her, because Bethany’s dropped her phone and the clothes bag and is sliding down the stupid ugly concrete wall, hugging herself and trying to convince herself that her trust hasn’t been betrayed, that everything up to now wasn’t an elaborate bait and switch, that this isn’t part of a new form of captivity, where they punish you extra hard by giving you a taste of the outside world and then taking it away.

Shit.

They’re not done with her, are they?

 

* * *

 

They’re all in the common room now. All the boys and girls of the basement, plus Jane. No-one but Martin wants to share the couches by the TV with Adam, who seems under control only because Martin is continually and softly talking to him, so Steph’s taken a quivering Bethany to the couch by the door, the one she vividly remembers the sponsors clustering around on her first day in the common room, months ago.

She’s promised Bethany that this is not a new torture, that it’s not a new tactic, following up the bad food and the zero sunlight and the solitary confinement and the presence of Martin and all the fucking tasers with isolation, with the steady removal of their privileges. Though the longer it goes on, the less sure she is. She wants to get up and quietly ask Jane what’s going on, but Jane’s just sitting there with Raph, tense, tapping her nails on the metal table, and when Steph catches her eye again, she just shakes her head.

And then, finally, there’s the loud, ugly noise of the main lock turning over, and moments later, Pippa, Edy, Pamela, Harmony and Tabitha all show up together. Pippa immediately joins Steph and Bethany on the couch, Edy and Pamela go straight to Adam and Martin, and Harmony finds Ollie, who’s colonised the bean bag chair by the supply closet, leaving Tabitha to nod at Leigh and take up station by the door.

“We’re on lockdown,” Tabitha announces. “That means all network access has been terminated, all doors have been double-locked, and the basements have been isolated from the hall and from each other. For now, that’s all it means, but—”

“What’s going on, Tab?” Leigh asks before Steph can.

“We don’t know yet. As soon as we know, you’ll know. I promise you that.” Tabitha smiles without humour, and her stance softens. “This isn’t a bit, I promise. It’s not a ruse. It affects us as well as you.”

“We got the lockdown code flashed to our phones,” Pippa whispers to Steph. “Straight from Aunt Bea’s account.”

“What happens next?” Steph whispers back.

“I have no idea. It’s my first lockdown. And the code was just that: a code. More information to follow, or so I’m told.”

Steph just nods. She’s unmoored; if Pippa doesn’t know what’s going on, and Steph’s network access has been cut just like everyone else’s, then there’s no way to orientate herself. At least, she amends, if Pippa doesn’t know what’s going on, then that really does mean it isn’t targeted, that it’s exactly what it appears to be.

Pippa wouldn’t lie to her.

Next to her, Pippa’s sitting cross-legged on the couch, her shoes kicked off, her feet tucked under herself. She’s got her phone sitting on her thigh, and she can’t take her eyes off it. Not the behaviour of someone trying to deceive her; Pippa is legitimately nervous about this.

Steph leans against her, shoulder to shoulder, and Pippa, after a moment, presses back, and reaches out a hand. Steph’s got one hand busy holding Bethany, but the other’s free for Pippa, and when Pippa takes it and grips it tight, Steph’s suddenly not sure which of them needs reassurance the most.

 

* * *

 

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It’s a genuine emergency. Everyone looks freaked and Tab gave a little speech and Steph’s been whispering to her again that this is just a temporary thing, that it really is a genuine emergency, that it’s not intended to break down Bethany’s resistance — like she even has any left! — and Bethany’s clinging to all that as hard as she’s clinging to Steph’s arm. What’s weird is that Pippa, in her silence, contributes as much to convincing Bethany as Steph; Bethany’s seen Pippa amused, she’s seen her angry, but she’s never seen her scared. Not like this, anyway.

Unnerving. But if something is happening, then they’re under all that dirt and concrete, right? With generators and batteries and all that shit, yeah? They’re safe, aren’t they?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Over by the telly, Edy’s talking with Adam, holding his hand, and as Bethany looks around, she notes with something almost like amusement that every sponsor is holding their subject’s hand. Even Ollie, the biggest and strongest guy left — strong everywhere but the skin on his wrists, aha; shut up, Bethany — has consented to be comforted by Harmony. They’re all just sitting there, waiting to find out what the hell is going on. Did the university get a bomb threat? Did all those army women out the back decide to stage a coup? Did Frankie get bored playing nice and start performing genital topiary on the second years?

Shit. They’re going to be here all day.

Funny how quickly panic collapses into boredom. The sponsors all seeming genuinely spooked really helped push down Bethany’s fear, and though it’s not gone — can she even remember a time she wasn’t scared? even BB, Before Basement? — now she’s just waiting with the rest of them. Hell, she might be more calm right now than Pippa.

It could be anything, just as long as it isn’t a new torture tactic. Just as long as it’s not her fault.

No. Maria would be here, if so, and gently telling her off, showing her how to be better. That she’s not here is yet more evidence that something actually is going down; she runs the place, basically, doesn’t she?

Still. She misses her.

She’s got Steph on one side and Steph’s got Pippa on the other, and Bethany would quite like her own sister with her, too. There’s room on the couch and everything.

She would quite like her here.

But she’s not, because whatever’s going on is more important than Bethany, because Maria’s in charge, and Bethany’s just got to be okay with that.

Okay?

Okay.

Yeah.

She forms her spare hand into a fist, earthing what nervous energy remains.

Lays it out flat again.

Into a fist.

Flat.

Into a fist.

Flat.

Into a fist so tight her fingernails cut into her palm.

 

* * *

 

Edy’s whispering to Adam that he can’t leave, that he’s not ready, just like she wasn’t ready, and that he needs to trust her, and that she’s sorry this happened on the day he wants to talk, that this isn’t his fault, that it isn’t targeted at him, that they’ll talk about his mum just as soon as they can, and the rest of the room is practically silent as everyone listens, because no-one’s ever been sure what to expect of Adam when he loses his religion. Or has it taken from him, deliberately, by Edy and by the hall, because it is a destructive, manipulative thing that he is best off without. Because he can only become a new person when the framework of lies on which his old self was constructed, and by which it was constricted, is properly examined, understood and discarded.

And they’re all aware that becoming a new person, especially down here, can be violent. Witness Diana, Leigh, Ollie. Adam needs a careful hand.

What he’s getting, apparently, is a lockdown, and a roomful of anxious sponsors.

Bad timing, like Edy said.

And then a half-dozen phones all vibrate at once, astonishingly sudden and loud in the near-silence, and most of the room jumps. The sponsors all fumble for their phones, and Steph tries to look at Pippa’s, but she’s angling it away, scrolling through, obviously trying to understand and process what’s going on before she presents it to Steph and Bethany.

Slowly, though, Pippa comes to a halt. She stops scrolling, despite there being more on the screen to see, Steph’s pretty sure.

Pippa just ceases, her hand slack.

The common room is genuinely silent now. All the sponsors, Edy included, are reading from their phones, and—

Except they’re not. Steph looks around, and Tabitha’s holding her phone limply in one hand, staring right through it. Jane’s gripping hers tight, and Raph’s got his hands on her upper arms, gently massaging them. And Pippa…

Pippa’s crying.

Quietly. Softly. Steph wouldn’t even have noticed if it weren’t so quiet in here, if she wasn’t still touching her, if she couldn’t feel her shoulders shaking. Gently, she reaches out and turns over the phone in Pippa’s hand.

Pippa doesn’t resist.

Steph scrolls to the top. LOCKDOWN NOTICE, the first line reads, and Steph intends to skim-read so she can quickly become to Bethany what Pippa was clearly planning to be for her, a buffer against whatever the hell is going on, but it soon becomes clear that this is not the kind of shit you skim.

This is the kind of shit you can’t look away from.

The police have found bodies at Stenordale. New bodies, buried in the central quad. Four so far, but the excavation is ongoing. Beatrice notes that insider intelligence suggests they should expect at least nineteen.

Nineteen bodies. All originally from Dorley Hall. From here. From home. All of them victims of Grandmother and of the old man Smyth-Farrow, the one who kept Valérie Barbier imprisoned. The one whose tastes ran to the truly depraved.

Nineteen bodies. Boys and young men, stolen from their lives, mutilated, murdered, buried.

Nineteen bodies. Any one of whom could lead the police here, to the hall, to the place where they were first imprisoned.

Nineteen bodies. Separated from Maria and Pippa and even Bethany only by an accident of time. She could have known them. She could have loved them.

There are pictures. Delicate finger bones. A ribcage, worn and broken. Something that was once a skull.

Nineteen bodies buried in the soil, in the dark, and now coming back, one by one.

Next to Steph, Pippa collapses, and all Steph can do is pull her into an embrace, quickly scrolling the phone away from the most macabre of the photographs, because Pippa doesn’t need to see any more of the women who might have been her Sisters, filthy and dismantled like broken toys.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes Christine feels as if she’s playing a huge trick on the world, on everyone around her. This girl sitting right here, half-paying attention in her seminar, used to be a boy; used to be a terrible boy! If only the girl sitting directly in front of her, the girl who smiled so sweetly at her when she came in late and sat down quickly, knew who Christine used to be! Christine’s a woman now, and the things she could do with the access her new body grants her…

All rather ruined, of course, by the immediate subsequent sense of nausea. She knows now what she did, how comprehensively she hurt people. She knows now that the excuses she provided herself — in complexity and abundance — were not just invalid but actually rather pathetic: a cry for help from someone who would, if only he would stop hurting himself and the people around him, have access to all the help he needed.

It’s not that her value system is entirely different these days, though it has evolved, obviously; it’s that she learned just how poorly she was categorising people. And now she’s left with a need to help, to place herself into people’s lives in a constructive fashion, to be someone who can face herself in the mirror every morning and confront those old memories with everything she’s done since. She’s become someone who can be trusted. Perhaps more vitally, she’s become someone who trusts.

But if she wanted to…

Yeah. If she wanted to, she could.

Ugh.

Indira let her know early on that there will be times when temptations rise again, when old habits make themselves known. When this happens, recognise them for what they are: something akin to intrusive thoughts of the soul; self-harm born of lingering guilt.

It is not, Indira told her repeatedly, possession of a weapon that makes you dangerous. It is choosing to use it, it is becoming someone who will use it, who will again and again put themselves on the other side of the moral calculus that says, yes, this weapon is worth using, and the suffering of its victims is worthwhile. Or, at the very least, excusable. And the thing about Christine, like Indira before her and like so many of their Sisters, is that she very quickly decided never again to be that someone.

The weapon has atrophied in her hand.

But if she wanted to.

Fuck this. Quietly she packs up her shit, stands from her seat — grateful that she picked one exposed to the aisle — throws her backpack over her shoulder, and quietly leaves the lecture. As she leaves, Professor Dawson catches her eye, and Christine shakes her head sharply. They both know what that means: Christine has to get the fuck out for unspecified personal reasons, and Prof Dawson will be emailing her later to make sure she’s okay.

Sucks to have a professor who cares, because sometimes you have to explain yourself.

Christine’s been a woman for a while now, and a happy one for almost as long, but there are still bad days, and it seems like this will be one of them. The last thing she wants to do is explain; she would prefer, instead, to bury herself.

 

* * *

 

Vick’s phone buzzes three times and, yeah, there’s that sinking feeling. Vicky’s got her phone set to silent almost all the time, but she had Christine mess with it such that official updates from Dorley always set off the vibration, so she doesn’t miss them. Lorna’s tempted to go into Vick’s phone and erase whatever incoming bullshit the hall’s trying to spring on her, but a) it’s probably important, because it always is, because that fucking place attracts crises like shit attracts flies, and b) Vicky’s been in the bathroom like four minutes already, so she’ll probably be back before Lorna gets done.

It’s been such a nice morning! A brisk run at the crack of dawn because they’re both trying to get into shape; coffee from the little place near their house to perk her up; breakfast with Paige and Christine. And yeah, it’s downright strange to count them among her closest friends after what went down between them, but the last time they talked about it, Christine waved it off as being a result of the ‘Dorley Hall Reality Distortion Field’, which Lorna’s completely prepared to accept is a real thing that is most likely powered by human suffering or leftover Weetabix. When Lorna looks at her friend, very rarely does she remember the awful things she said to her; nor does she often remember the things Indira said in return.

So. A good day, including a breezy — if basic — lunch here at Café One. A good day up until precisely this moment. She glares at Vicky’s little Android phone, lying deceptively innocently on the table beside her empty sandwich packet. Hmm. Vick’s still not back. Maybe she could…

No. They both need to know what’s gone wrong, if only so they can formulate the perfect excuse to avoid it. She’d try to find a way to get Paige and Christine out of it, too, but Christine’s folded in, like she said, and Paige goes wherever she does, so… Sucks to be them, really.

“Hey, sweetie,” Vicky says, supplementing her greeting with a kiss to Lorna’s soon-to-be-reduced forehead. “You wanna get going?”

“In a minute,” Lorna says, taking Vicky’s hand and guiding her back to her seat. With her other hand, she taps the table by the phone, and Vicky’s gaze alights on the notification waiting for her.

“Oh. Crap.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Settling quickly back into her chair, Vicky unlocks her phone, frowns at it for a moment, and then throws it irritably into her bag. “Double crap,” she says.

“What’s going on?”

“It doesn’t say. I’m just supposed to come in for a briefing. But I’m also not to rush; I’m to act as if I’m a normal student. No skipping classes, no running across campus screaming that the world’s about to end.”

“It really says that?”

“Nah. Code phrases. Cloak and dagger stuff; you know the drill.”

“Yeah,” Lorna sighs, “I really do. And hey,” she adds, frowning her disapproval, “you are a normal student.”

Vicky kisses her hand and then starts gathering up her trash to throw away. “I’m really not,” she says. “Normal students don’t have their foundation year in a windowless basement.”

“That’s because Saints is high up the league tables. It gets the good funding.”

 

* * *

 

Christine’s phone’s been buzzing; she’s been ignoring it. She’s too busy alternating between enjoying the view and slightly freezing to death. Sucks that the bench atop the highest hill — if you can call it that — on campus also naturally attracts all the wind in the local area. Christine dressed for January this morning, yes, but she didn’t dress for this kind of windchill.

Still worth it.

She comes here when she’s afraid, when she’s angry, when she’s contemplative, and when she’s too annoyed with the hall to do this on the roof. Why did they have to go and have a fucking point? It was so easy being him, being miserable, hurting people, and now she’s got to carry all this guilt and shame around and also she’s got to endure leers from male students and, stupid girl, she dressed nice today, that’s why they’re all looking at her, and if they only knew…

“Oh, God, shut up, Christine,” she whispers.

She could murder a cigarette right now.

“Bad thoughts?”

“Shit!” Christine jumps half a fucking mile in the air and almost falls off the stupid nameless bench. “Give me a fucking heart attack, why don’t you?”

Paige loops her arms around Christine from behind and kisses her on her hair parting. “Sorry. But I’ve been texting. And you didn’t answer. So I came looking.”

Leaning into Paige’s arms, bending her head back to look up at her, Christine says, “Yeah. Pretty bad thoughts. Nothing new.”

Paige keeps one hand on Christine as she walks around the back of the bench to sit next to her. Christine immediately rests her head on Paige’s shoulder, and Paige cradles it, rocking her ever so slightly. “You want to talk about it?” she asks. “Or do you want to talk about literally anything else?”

“Just came out of nowhere,” Christine says quietly. “The panic. The fear. The thought that I could become him again so, so easily.”

“Not quite so easily,” Paige says, nudging Christine’s breast.

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. And I also know that you’ll never be him again. You’ll never be like him again. You know how I know that?”

“Tell me,” Christine whispers.

“Because you’re my Christine. And she doesn’t do things like that. Because she’s the kindest, most thoughtful woman I’ve ever known.”

It’s even less than a whisper this time. “Thank you.”

Paige holds her for a long time, long enough that Christine warms in the shared body heat. Long enough for the fear to fade, for him to fade, for Christine Hale to reassert herself: the woman she created. The woman she loves.

Maybe it’s because half the first years have started to actualise. It’s bringing everything back.

“Paige,” she says, “I think I want to see Mum again.”

She can feel Paige nodding. “You should talk to Indira about it,” Paige says. “Though, perhaps, after the current crisis.”

Christine jerks out of Paige’s embrace. “There’s a crisis? Again?”

“Apparently.”

All the air lets out of her in one long, exaggerated wheeze.

“Fuck,” Christine says.

 

* * *

 

Lambert had to go. Had to debrief her liaison with the pigs. Possibly her plant or her double agent or something. She was cagey about it, and well she might be, with Frankie in the room, doing her best impression of a good girl, in case Elle Lambert suddenly remembers what Frankie used to do for a living and decides either to honour her or bury her with Crispin Smyth-Farrow’s discarded toys.

Even without her, it’s tense. Trev’s spooked, which Frankie was briefly a little confused by — the girls aren’t his first dead bodies. But it makes sense, really; one thing to listen to Valérie talk about the girls she buried, another to see them unearthed. Frankie’s got to turn her sudden laugh into a cough, because it’s just occurred to her that maybe old Dotty did Trev a favour, pulling him out of that van and slapping a pair of tits on him; if the lad can’t take a few rotten skeletons, he would have made a shit soldier. Probably would have got himself killed in his first real firefight.

He didn’t do badly during the escape, though.

Maybe Frankie’s just letting her thoughts latch onto anything that occurs, however stupid, so she doesn’t have to look at the pictures. Because all those corpses? They’re her doing as much as Smyth-Farrow’s. As much as Dorothy’s. Frankie probably knew the names of every single one, even the ones who were assigned to one of the others. She starts thinking back, trying to remember which of the ones she sponsored ended up at Smyth-Farrow’s.

Too many.

Pleading hands reaching out from the dirt, stripped of flesh, stripped of identity. Just bones, anonymous, picked clean, and really fucking dead.

Not that her other girls fared better. If there’s a single girl from her time at Dorley who still lives, who wasn’t pulled out by Bea and Elle and Maria, Frankie’d be bloody astonished.

It’s a good thing she’s decided she’s not interested in chasing redemption, because there’s no chance redemption’s interested in her.

“You had to tell them,” Val’s saying. “You couldn’t have let my girls rest?”

Bea pinches the bridge of her nose. “The police won’t. And if they pick up a lead, however tenuous, that points to the hall…”

“Yes, yes.” Valérie’s talking into the table, her chin resting on her folded arms. “I know. I just…” She closes a fist and smacks it into the wood. “Fucking piss and shit.”

Beatrice sent out an all-sponsor alert to supplement the lockdown command she posted the second she first saw the bodies. Threw in basically all the information they’ve got. Frankie tried to tell her that maybe she should edit, reduce the impact of it all — or at least take out some of the gore — and Bea shrieked at her, so Frankie bloody well dropped it like it was hot.

The girls back at the hall got the whole info drop. Frankie wonders how they’re taking it.

She catches Trev’s eye, raises an eyebrow. He shrugs at her. He asked Lambert if he could talk to her about a delicate matter, and she outright asked him, in front of the rest of them, if he wanted her to find someone who could whip his tits out for him. He had to say yes. So he’s staying a while, just a few days, long enough for Elle to bus in a surgeon she knows, someone who might be willing to go beyond Mrs Prentice and ignore best practice — which was hardly established with a case like Trev’s in mind — and make him flat-chested again, with a course of testosterone on the side.

Of course, he’ll always be prettier than he used to be, unless he persuades Lambert to shell out for some facial masculinising surgery, but that’s so far outside her wheelhouse she might genuinely explode at the thought of it. Except she did it for that one girl, didn’t she? The escapee who couldn’t hack it; word is he’s a quiet, reserved guy with a wife, a couple of adopted kids, and a job for life somewhere in the labyrinthine Peckinville Group of Companies. Nice work, if you can get it. All it costs is your balls.

Bit of a shame, though, isn’t it? About Trev. Bit of a waste. Frankie’s no Elladine Agnes Tranter Lambert — thank all the bloody mercies; she wouldn’t be able to sign her own name without pissing herself laughing — but she’s still inclined to think of woman as, well, sort of the natural state of humanity. Men are the weird carve-outs, the guys with the stunted chromosome and the awful habits. What did Valerie Solanas say? ‘The male is aborted at the gene stage,’ or something. Boy, did she have some ideas.

Bloody hell, what is she thinking? Trev’s Trev. He’s no more a woman and no more a candidate for becoming one than Frankie’s a bloody wildebeest. Just because she can’t imagine why anyone would want to be a man doesn’t make it not a valid state of affairs.

Even if she feels sort of itchy about it.

Going to be weird to see him looking like a bloke again. Dotty didn’t have him long enough for a complete course of hair removal, so maybe he’ll grow the world’s saddest beard.

Shit. Maybe Frankie’ll buy him a prop one for Christmas this year. Maybe she’ll get him some nice rubber bollocks and stick-on chest hair, and all.

She’s drifted off from what’s happening again. Defence mechanism, probably. That’s her life’s work up on the screen. As if she were a serial killer, and those poor dead girls are her trophies.

Christ alive. Shut up, Frankie. What can you do? You can make sure this never happens again. You can slip the knife to old Dotty and maybe you can stick around long enough to help do in the Smyth-Farrow kids. And then you can get Monica or someone to drive you out somewhere scenic, like the Lake District, and never come back.

“No,” Bea’s saying, “you’re getting the scale wrong. One murdered trans woman, the cops don’t give a shit about. Nineteen? All in one place? They’re probably making jokes about it down the station, but they’re going to follow it up. If only because when the papers get hold of it — and they will, believe me — they don’t want to be seen to be slacking. What if a nice cis woman slipped in among the monster corpses?”

Beatrice’s accent’s creeping back in. The old one, the one she had when Dotty brought her in to replace a batch of boy-girls who’d just got shipped out. When she was David, a just-off-the-street boy from a council flat. Frankie’s always wondered if it takes constant effort to keep up the Elladine impression; apparently, it does.

She wishes Beatrice’d drop it more often. Though maybe not, if it takes circumstances like this.

“Béatrice…” Val says quietly, reaching out from her slump to take Bea by the arm, but Beatrice stands, walks away from her, starts pacing by the wall.

“Sorry, Valérie,” Bea says. “I know they’re… they’re your girls, but I’ve got ghosts of my own. And… Shit. Sorry.”

Val joins her, lets Beatrice walk into her embrace, and after a moment, Frankie’s pretty sure Val whispers something like, “Tell me about your girls sometime.”

They hug for a long bloody time, and Trev sits there and watches them. Frankie just sits there, and thinks of the Lake District, and how wide and deep a body of water must be before you might never be found.

 

* * *

 

Quaint. That’s what this place is: quaint. It reminds Monica powerfully of certain older parts of Almsworth, of the little shops on backstreets that sell bric-a-brac and overly sweet cups of tea. But it’s also a working B&B and, judging by the ledger, a reasonably popular one, considering the area.

That’s the thing about B&Bs, though, isn’t it? The Travelodge out by the A-road is for people just passing through, and the smattering of AirBnBs that doubtless infest the suburbs are for people who post pictures of their accommodation to Instagram, but if you’re a small family or an older couple and you’re looking for the authentic British seaside experience, you’ll choose a town like Cherston-on-Sea, and you’ll choose a B&B just like this one.

The tablecloths in the dining room will have the classic red-and-white-check pattern, she’s absolutely sure of it. And there’ll be little pots of jam and marmalade on every table at breakfast. And—

Shit, is she getting nostalgic?

Monica doesn’t think about her childhood much. To do so, she must get through her teen years, which lurk in her memory, ready to capture her if she ventures too far into the past. But right now, she has a clear image of herself, seven or eight years old and come with her family to stay in a seaside town very much like Cherston, in a B&B very much like Chiamaka’s. She remembers a top-floor room with bookshelves full of ancient children’s books — books that shared a vintage with Narnia, but which did not endure the way C.S. Lewis’ work did. She remembers clutching one of them in her hand, a novel about two boys who ventured to far-away lands to rescue animals from poachers and return them to zoos, which she chose because of the pencil annotations inside the front cover from previous kids, kids whose scepticism had been overcome by the story. She remembers taking it with her down the stairs, looking wide-eyed up at unpleasantly vivid landscape paintings mounted to the slanted ceiling of the stairway, and reading all the way through breakfast.

Breakfast on a red-and-white tablecloth, with little pots of jam and marmalade.

There’s a clink as Diana places another cup of tea in front of her, the spoon rattling in the saucer. And then Diana’s there with her, pulling up one of the wooden chairs and offering her an arm. Which Monica takes without embarrassment because, fuck it, if she didn’t want Diana to see her crying, she should have hopped right the hell off of memory lane before it took her all the way back.

Diana doesn’t say anything. Perhaps she doesn’t know what to say. Perhaps she’s intuitive enough to realise that there’s nothing she can say. Monica, who ought in this situation to be the responsible one, and who definitely should not be crying off her minimal makeup before an unaffiliated civilian returns, has fallen apart, and needs time to put herself back together.

“Memories,” she says eventually, “of who I was before. Of the boy I had to wreck to become the woman I am.”

Diana nods. “Was he… Were you… nice?”

“I was a kid,” Monica says with a shrug. “Just a kid. I had it all ahead of me and I screwed it up.” She sniffs wetly. “This is a lesson, Diana. Sometimes, and you’ll never know when, it’ll all just fucking come for you.”

Nodding again, Diana says, “I know.”

A giggle pushes through Monica’s constricted throat, though it doesn’t exactly sound pleasant. She needs to wash her face and blow her nose, soon. “You’re so wise, Diana. How is this you? After everything, how is this you?”

“Because it wouldn’t be him,” Diana says simply.

“You’re so wise,” Monica says again. And then she pushes her chair back and stands, looking around for a bathroom or cloakroom or something. Diana points the way with a gentle smile, and Monica grabs her bag and leaves to make herself presentable again.

Her phone’s vibrating, somewhere under all the crap she carries around, but it’s been going for about half an hour now, and she has more important shit to think about. Dorley Hall can cope without her for one day.

 

* * *

 

Vick’s hand tenses in Lorna’s as they return to what still, to Lorna, sometimes feels like the scene of a crime. Of all the crimes. She came here once, righteous fear trembling in her chest, to confront the whole fucking place, to demand knowledge, and she’s wondered since if she’s truly happier for the possession of it. It’s an idle thought: she’s closer to Vicky than she’s ever been, and she sees more of Paige and Christine and the others now that they don’t have to keep secrets from her, so it’s all to the good; but sometimes the secrets are a problem. Keeping the big damn secret has meant she’s been spending less time with their housemates and their other friends and more time with the girls who are, as Christine says, in on the joke.

Place is a fucking black hole; once you’re in its orbit, you’re never getting free.

At least they have nice food, usually.

As they cross the threshold, Vicky gets another message. This one’s come in over the hall’s main Consensus instance, and it tells her — and ‘guest’ — to head up to the second floor, so, still gripping hands, they take the stairs up from the dining hall.

Lorna can’t help noticing on her way past that the doors to the basement are gone. In their place is an unassuming set of shelves, stocked with vintage books, the exact mirror of the bookshelves in the other corners of the room. Christine once told her it’s done with an arcing mechanism that lifts the two-piece shelves up and lowers them into place; she also said the idiots who ran Dorley before used a sliding mechanism that left grooves in the wood.

They’re being directed to a room on the second floor Lorna’s never seen before, and it turns out to be for a good reason: most third-year socialising happens in their rooms, in their kitchen, in other parts of the hall, or — increasingly — out of the hall altogether. Paige, Christine and the others aren’t like the second years, curfewed in their own little slice of Dorley Hall. So the little lounge area goes unused, and — judging by all the boxes that have been turfed out into the corridor — is usually just used as a storeroom.

Paige catches Lorna’s eye as they enter, and nudges Christine, who shakes herself back to awareness and smiles at Lorna and Vicky. They join them, Vicky tutting at the thin layer of dust that covers the back of their chosen couch. Around the room, Lorna recognises Jodie, who waves enthusiastically at her, and Julia and Yasmin, who smile and nod respectively. Another handful of faces, most of whom Lorna can put a name to, even if she doesn’t know them especially well, represent the contingent of graduates who still live somewhere in the hall, but who aren’t, to the best of Lorna’s knowledge, involved in the programme any more.

There aren’t any second years about.

Up front, Indira’s sitting on a stool, legs crossed, arms folded, fiddling in one hand with a pencil, seeming for all the world like a substitute teacher waiting for her first class of the day to file in, so she can judge how hard a time they’re going to give her.

And she knows it, too, because the first thing she says, after checking her phone and presumably deciding that everyone who is going to be here is here, is, “Good afternoon, class.”

A handful of girls laugh.

Christine says, “Good morning, Miss.”

Julia says, “What the hell’s going on, Indira? I took a half-day for this.”

“First,” Indira says, leaning forward on her stool, all traces of amusement wiped from her face, “I must emphasise that everyone is okay. No current residents or graduates of the hall have been harmed. But a situation has come up that may — again, I must emphasise, may — affect the security of the hall. And that means you all need to know about it, in case your lives are disrupted, and in the very unlikely event that police or security services have questions for you.”

“Security services?” one of the girls from upstairs says. “What the fuck, Dira?”

And so Indira launches into it. She gives them the potted history of the woman known as Grandmother. They get a summary of the Smyth-Farrow family tree, including the two middle-aged siblings who control a small PMC but whose main job appears to be to act as a funnel for American right-wing money and influence in the UK. And Indira briefly covers Valérie Barbier’s awful life story — which makes at least two of the girls cry — and Trevor Darling’s involvement.

It’s all an appetiser. The main course is the burning down of Stenordale Manor, the killing of several employees of Silver River Services, the Smyth-Farrows’ PMC, the escape of Dorothy Marsden, and the discovery of at least nineteen bodies on manor grounds. More are expected, Indira says; the grounds are quite extensive, and Crispin Smyth-Farrow was known for his playfulness.

These are the people Beatrice overthrew. These are the people whose infinite capacity for violence has gone unsatisfied in recent years precisely because the hall was taken from them and repurposed. These are the people who have been floundering for almost two decades, robbed of their purpose, and whose recent regroup has been, Indira assures them, extremely limited.

Lorna still wants to throw up. And she’s not the only one. A handful of unused bedrooms across the hallway have been opened up, and some of the girls Lorna doesn’t really know — and Yasmin — have rushed out. As they file back in, wet-faced and still very obviously shaken, Indira continues in a softer voice.

“I’m sorry that you have to know all this. There are pictures for those who want to see them, but none of you are involved with the programme, so they are strictly optional. I would advise against it. Yes, Christine, I know,” Indira adds quietly, “but you still don’t have to see them.”

“Thanks,” Christine whispers, while Paige leans into her.

“We do not expect your lives to change at all,” Indira says to the room. “The victims mostly predate electronic record-keeping, and back in the day, men like Crispin Smyth-Farrow had people who intercepted paper records. We are not even convinced that the authorities will be able to identify them as trans women — or, yes, as men changed against their will; yes, Selena, we all know what Dorothy used to do here. I didn’t think I needed to go into detail about it.”

“Sorry,” mutters the woman standing at the edge of the room, who’d got almost four words into a counterargument before Indira stopped her.

“Stenordale Manor sits on soft, damp soil, and even the most recent burial was approaching twenty years ago; the old man slowed down considerably in his old age, from what Ms Barbier says. There are bones, yes, but they are in an advanced state of decay. It may be enough, I am told, to obscure the surgical alterations that were performed on many of Marsden and Smyth-Farrow’s victims.”

“So, what,” Julia says, “we’re just hoping no-one puts two and two together?”

“They would have to put a lot more together than that, Julia,” Indira says gently. “Every one of those bodies is connected to the hall, yes, but the connection is tenuous in the extreme. They were never officially here, you understand.”

“Why get us all together, then? Why yank Yas and me out of work just to tell us how fucking terrible this place was before Aunt Bea’s benevolent new regime?”

“Because we have enemies. And while we operate largely from a position of mutually assured destruction, it is not impossible that someone could slip the police an anonymous tip. That they could ‘find’ a stack of lost records placing some of the victims here, or connecting them to Beatrice or even to Ms Lambert. So, for the foreseeable, we will be airtight. Your lives, as third years and graduates, will be largely unaffected, but you should be aware that the outer locks to the kitchen, dining hall, and other areas connected to the programme will be sealed at certain times of day. We will lock down entirely for twenty minutes every eight hours so the doors to the facility can be opened and sponsors can go on and off shift. So if any of you have a burning desire to see Steph or anyone else, you are welcome to, but you’ll be down there for the whole shift. Also,” she adds with a wry smile, “the Peckinville installation in the back garden is being redressed as a fake recruitment station, as quid pro quo for the funding we receive from the Peckinville Group, so if any of you feel a burning desire to work as a mercenary, you should think about visiting; it would really help with the façade.”

“Not funny, Indira,” someone says.

Indira shrugs. “We’re not locking down to outsiders, not for the moment, but we are restricting access to those who are in the know, as much as we can, anyway. Most of you here know Lorna Fielding.” She points in Lorna’s direction; Lorna tries not to cringe under Indira’s attention. “She’s approved. Shahida Mohsin, Amy Woodley and Rachel Gray-Wallace are also expected over the next week or so, so don’t feel like you need to deputise yourselves into throwing them out, or anything.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Julia mutters.

“Hey, Dira,” Christine says before Indira can say anything else. “Afternoon shift change is at four, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Put me down for a couple of afternoon shifts this week. There’s going to be pressure on the sponsors and, well, I want to go see Steph. And the others, obviously. Bethany. But yeah. I want to see Steph.”

“I’ll come, too,” Paige says. “Same shifts.”

“Are you sure?” Indira says. “You’re on sabbatical, remember? And you—” she points her pencil at Paige, “—are not on staff.”

“Dira, this is actually an emergency,” Christine says.

“More of a flap.”

“Dira.”

“Fine,” Indira admits with a frown, “it’s a bloody disaster. I’ll put you on the rota. Is your class schedule up to date?”

“Yeah.”

“Good girl.” She’s tapping on her lip with her pencil, still looking at Christine. “You’re really sure? Afternoon shift lasts until midnight. That’s a long time in the basement.”

Christine’s standing and pulling Paige up with her, and they step gingerly over Lorna and Vicky as they make their way out of the crowded little room. “So send down something nice to eat,” Christine says as they leave.

“You’ll get packet sandwiches,” Indira calls after them, “and you’ll like it!”

“Cow!” Christine calls back from somewhere out of sight. It has the benefit of restoring a little levity to the room, and the girls start talking amongst themselves. Next to Lorna, Vicky leans into her, and Lorna decides that they’re going to blow the week’s food budget on a really nice takeaway to make up for all this. Maybe make it a romantic night in. Maybe reconnect with their flatmates, people she can rely on to never call her in for a macabre briefing like this one.

“Right!” Indira says, clapping her hands, as the chatter starts to die away. “Any questions?”

 

* * *

 

Edy’s upset. That’s the thing that’s overridden everything else. Adam came roaring out of his room, desperate to leave, to do something, to run home and start breaking apart with his hands every lie that was told to him his whole life, and he is still so full of that energy he can almost feel it waiting in his limbs, waiting to carry him through solid concrete. Waiting to take him home. Waiting to tear it to pieces. Waiting to take Mum from that place.

But now that he’s out here, now that he’s been speaking with Edy, he feels stupid.

He’s been hollowing out. His certainty revealed as the lie it always was; the rock on which he has his whole life stood, torn away like paper. He believed. He took the things that he was told, and he built a universe with them, a pantheon of one man and one god and a slew of earthly angels.

All stupid. He read the books she gave him. Didn’t understand most of them. But they showed him how little he knows, how restricted his perspective has been kept. There is always a Father, and it was to be him one day; what did he need to know but how to prepare the Father to come after him, and how to punish and preach to the world of the wicked unaware?

So out of his room he came, and no farther, because he has no power here. No power, no knowledge. Nothing. Idiot boy’s ready to destroy the world he was given; can’t even get there. Can’t get past a single locked door.

Mum’s still up there. And he was so cruel to her.

But Edy’s upset. She’s been the only consistently and reliably kind person he’s ever known, apart from his mum, and she’s upset.

The farm will still be there tomorrow. It’ll still be there next year. The way Father likes to talk, it will still be there in a thousand years.

He will go there. And he will not reveal the truth to the family, because he does not yet know it. But he can lay bare the lies. Perhaps, if Edy comes, she can do the rest.

She’s shuddering quietly in his arms, and he will be to her as Mum was to him: the only source of kindness amid lies.

 

* * *

 

“Hey,” Tabitha says softly, addressing the room but not wanting to break up any of the small groups that have formed, little islands of love and comfort. “Shift change is coming up.”

“I’m staying,” Pippa says, speaking up first. She’s sitting with Steph and Bethany, and ever since she cried herself dry, she’s been helping keep Bethany calm, which, yeah, sterling service; Tabitha’s read Bethany’s file, and being trapped in a place like this, when tensions are high, and she has recently tasted something approaching freedom? It’s got to fucking suck. Ought to be helpful in the long run, though; there’s no bully coming to hurt her, no headmaster coming to dismiss the attacks on her, the persistent, deliberate trauma, as mere ‘boys will be boys, especially the rich ones’. Just Maria, coming down with the next shift, probably to take her somewhere private and talk with her. To be her sister.

“Same,” Jane says.

“You sure?” Tabitha checks. “You’ve been awake a long time.”

“I’ll nap in Raph’s room if I need to.”

Nodding, Tabitha returns her attention to the rest of the room. Not a single sponsor wants to go, which is a bit fucking annoying, because she wanted to get out, but she can send Levi an apologetic text through the relay. And it’s not as if she was going to leave Leigh, anyway.

“I’ll tell the girls upstairs to make extra for dinner,” she says.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t know exactly why Monica’s upset, only that she becomes fragile again when she takes dinner in the dining room, but that’s okay, because it’s sausages and mash; Diana can hold Monica’s hand and still leave them one free each to wield a fork. Even if it does earn them a raised eyebrow from Chiamaka. But they get a smile, too, and Diana’s learned to treasure smiles of a certain sort: smiles that say that she’s welcome, that she’s loved, that she’s safe. They’re so different to the smiles Declan used to cultivate in women, the leers from the girls who like a big, strong lad; the brittle, tight, closed smiles when he let his rage off the hook.

It was all a performance. Men get angry. Raph had it right: it’s a dance you’re all doing, and the audience is other men. Women are there to get thrown around or trampled on.

“Diana?” Monica asks quietly, her fork halfway to her mouth.

“Oh. Sorry.”

She almost lets go of Monica’s hand, and only doesn’t because Monica’s holding onto her pretty tight. Nothing like as tight as Diana was just holding her, obviously. With luck, she didn’t hurt her, but she probably did, because Diana has such large, strong—

Huh. Oh yeah. Monica’s hands aren’t much smaller. So easy to forget.

“Everything okay?”

“It’s like you said,” Diana says. “Sometimes it just—” she glances over at Chia, who’s finished her small plate already and is sipping tea and scrolling her phone, “—effing comes for you.”

Monica snorts. “Well, hello, Pippa,” she says. And then, when Diana frowns in confusion, she adds, “Pippa. She, um, doesn’t swear? Like, ever. Churchy habit, I think. Or it might be an anger management thing.”

“I don’t think I ever noticed.” Diana lets her frown deepen. “I let so much slip past me before. One of the many things I’m angry with him about.”

As they finish their potatoes, a handful of guests come and go, and are served potatoes in their turn by Chia’s granddaughter — who throws a wink at Diana when she sees that she and Monica are holding hands; goodness knows what information she thinks she’s gathered, but Diana’s probably going to have to find her and quietly explain that she and Monica are definitely not dating, and even more definitely never will, because…

Well.

She’s Monica. She’s the woman who beat the living daylights out of Declan; she’s the woman who came back for Diana as soon as she learned there was someone to come back for. Diana’s gathered that most of the girls at Dorley settle in to a sisterly relationship with their sponsors; if she and Monica are going to be like that to each other, then it’s a little disappointing to be such a cliché — Diana’s discovering within herself a desire to be unique — but what other word is there for a woman who beats the shit out of you and then stands between you and the world?

“I should check in,” Monica mutters to herself, and starts rummaging in her bag. Diana wants to tell her not to, wants to ask her to stay, but she knows there’s no point. So she sits there and tries not to feel let down that her — say it — sister is going to be going away tonight. And then Monica says, “Uh,” and covers her mouth, and Diana’s on alert again.

“What’s going on?” she whispers.

Monica looks around. “Not here. Is there somewhere private we can go?”

“Um. Yes.” Diana raises her voice. “Chia,” she says, and across the dining room, Chia puts down her phone and smiles attentively, “we’re going up to my room. For just a minute. If that’s okay?”

“It is okay,” Chiamaka says, nodding. Behind her, her granddaughter just grins.

Diana’s going to have to straighten that out.

The route to her attic room takes them up several narrow flights of stairs, all of which Monica climbs in silence. She’s holding her phone in a closed fist, and the screen keeps coming on and trying to respond to the fingerprint reader, which is confused about the palm currently pressed down on it. Diana finds it hard to look away; it’s the source of a mild but growing fear that something might have happened, and as astonishing as it feels, Diana has people in her life now that she worries about.

She’d thought them all safe until she saw Monica’s expression. Nothing could get through all that concrete, surely?

Monica doesn’t even look around when Diana closes the door to her room behind her, and that’s probably for the best, since it’s still quite bare. It’s larger than her room at Dorley Hall, though; larger, too, than her prison at Stenordale Manor. Over both her previous accommodations it benefits from having its lock on the inside, and Diana tests it daily, just to be sure.

She doesn’t lock them in now. She doesn’t want Monica to feel trapped.

“Um, Diana,” Monica asks, “do you have a computer?”

“Yes,” Diana says, pointing, and Monica gratefully settles into the little chair and boots up the ageing PC Diana’s been using.

“The hall’s in lockdown,” Monica explains as she waits for the screen to populate itself with icons. “But because I’m off the grounds, I won’t know why until I log in on the secure server.”

“Is it safe to do so from here?”

“Apparently. Something about tunnelling and an imaginary— no, a virtual machine. Don’t ask me for details. I’m going to run an EXE on your computer, if that’s okay?”

“What’s that?”

“Just a program. An app.”

“Oh. Sure.”

Monica plugs her phone into the PC with a short cable, and after a few moments, a complicated-looking window pops up on the screen, with scrolling text like something out of a movie. Then it disappears, to be replaced with something that looks mostly like an ordinary browser window, into which Monica quick-types a series of credentials, which she backs up with more typing on her phone.

“Just imagine I’m not doing this in front of you,” Monica says when the screen fills with DORLEY HALL SECURE SERVER. She clicks around until she opens up something labelled LOCKDOWN BRIEFING, and as soon as she opens it, she stands out of the chair, tries to hide the screen with her body.

“Monica,” Diana says.

“Diana. You don’t want to see this. It’s— It’s about Stenordale. I don’t know more. I haven’t read it yet. But it’s— You don’t want to see it, I’m sure.”

Memories — of a room with the lock on the outside; of being brutalised; of Jake — rush into Diana, and she steps back, steps away. “Stenordale burned,” she whispers.

“I know. I don’t know what this is.”

“I want to know.” Diana moves closer, and Monica makes no move to stop her. “I think I need to know.”

For a long while, Monica looks at her, frowning slightly, studying her face. And then she smiles just a little, reaches up to tuck a lock of Diana’s hair behind her ear, and turns to sit back down. “Okay,” she says.

Diana pulls up the other chair, the one with no back that she sits on to do her makeup, and they hold hands again before they read.

 

* * *

 

Another one of Elle’s people drives them back to the hall. Frankie sits very quietly, tries not to be noticed, and misses Trev already, because Val isn’t saying anything, and Beatrice is muttering angrily under her breath. Frankie hasn’t caught most of it, and what she has heard is sort of worrying. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say the grand old matriarch of Dorley Hall is only barely holding off a full-blown panic attack.

Is she overreacting? Fuck only knows, honestly. Lambert had one of her analysts come in and talk about bone decomposition and damp soil and how at some point Smyth-Farrow had someone surface the most recent bodies and bash in their poor skulls and— Yeah, okay, bloody hell; Frankie might be on the verge of a panic attack, too.

Those were her girls…

She takes shallow breaths, grips the door handle, and forces herself to think logically.

The problem’s not the bodies, not really, not directly. The chances of them being traced back to Dorley Hall are remote, and even Dorothy’s in the clear, save a really dedicated and lucky forensics team; from what the analyst said, the chances of them identifying any given body as belonging to a trans woman — or, you know, whatever — aren’t exactly high, and it’s only the presence of so many bodies in one place that will suggest to a halfway intelligent investigator that where one or two of them are trans — whatever — then there’s a high likelihood the rest of them are.

The real problem is threefold:

One: the Smyth-Farrow kids. They’re the wild card. Frankie knows only enough about them to have decided she bloody well hates them, possibly more than she despised their father, because they grew up with front-row seats to his cruelty — if not his depravity, though it’s hard to believe he kept himself in check entirely around them — and seem to have decided that their main problem with it was that they weren’t included. How they will respond to the unearthing of a bastard’s dozen bodies at Stenordale, the smoking ruins of which are still Silver River’s property and thus controlled by them — or fifty-one percent controlled by them — is anyone’s guess. Given their chosen allegiances, Frankie can imagine practically any outcome, from a bland press conference to a scorched-earth campaign against anyone and everyone who has recently pissed them off.

Two: Dorothy. But she’s always a problem, she’s the oldest problem they all have, and has been since Crispin died, and so far, she’s been content to bide her time. The old bitch seems to be immortal, so unless she catches Bird Flu 2 or whatever it is that’s currently menacing China, they’re stuck with her. Which isn’t so bad, because she can’t screw them over without equally screwing herself, and at least in that instance Beatrice can trot out a hundred-odd happy women to testify that, yes, actually, they volunteered for womanhood, and the year underground was like an ascetic retreat, and all the Ready Brek they had to eat was properly fortified with vitamins and iron, your honour. No, Dorothy’s not likely to try anything, especially not if she’s hiding from the Smyth-Farrows; their investment burned down on her watch, after all.

But it doesn’t mean she won’t try to slip some information in through private channels. That’s what Frankie doesn’t know: how many of old Dotty’s contacts remain, and how many of them are still willing to put themselves out there for her. That’s what Frankie’s chewing on.

Finally, three: the trans nature of it all. Yeah, like the analyst said, the chances are low they’ll spot the poorly documented signs of vintage nineties facial feminisation on the more intact skulls, but low isn’t zero, and if it gets out that almost twenty presumed trans women were buried in the back garden of one of Britain’s glorious aristocratic families? Frankie’s got no clue whatsoever what that will do to this country’s lurid fascination with trans women, but it’s got to be an accelerant, right? Some mad columnist or twitter fanatic will spin an insane theory that makes the dead look like they earned their graves, the Mail will pick it up and spend a few salacious days working over the corpses with their best scandal hunters, and then the bloody Guardian will bring in one of their heads to nod very seriously about how this, tragically, means trans women should be extra-special super-duper stopped from going to the toilet, lest a serial killer accidentally open the jugular of a real woman on his way past. The one thing it’s guaranteed not to do is inspire sympathy in the press; dead trans women get the same treatment as dead sex workers or dead immigrants. Even someone like Frankie, who purposefully disconnected herself from the world as much as possible, who spent years rescuing dogs and doing little else, hasn’t been able to avoid building an awareness of the omnidirectional malice of the British papers; they used to use The Times to line the kennels.

So, to sum up: shit. No wonder Beatrice is muttering to herself.

Frankie risks another glance at Val. Last time she did that, Val caught her looking and glared at her, but this time, Valérie seems beyond noticing anything at all. She’s staring out the window, watching the scenery glide by, and Frankie suddenly wonders what she thinks of the car. Weird thought, but a better one than everything else occupying Frankie’s head right now. She remembers Val commenting during their escape that cars seem to have grown since the eighties. Did they even have chunky four-by-fours like this back then? They had Land Rovers and Range Rovers, but they were for farmers and landowners, respectively, and none of them had a ride like this. Elle Lambert’s fleet of jet-black Range Rovers glide along as though the road is coated in Teflon, and the inside trim is more like you’d expect in a limo. A far cry from the van they stole, or the car they also stole, or anything Val’s parents buzzed around Paris in when she was a kid. Crappy little Citroëns, or something.

Val should ask Lambert for a car. Val should get the hell away from the hall, from all of this. She’s seen enough, done enough, more than anyone except Beatrice, Maria, and the other survivors of Dorothy’s regime. She shouldn’t be dealing with disasters; she should piss off to the Côte d'Azur in a luxury car and never come back. Reconnect with her countrypeople and drink a lot of tacky fruit drinks.

And Frankie’s got to admit, the idea of Valérie Barbier strutting around the beach in a bikini is an arresting one. She’d be on the front cover of some fashion mag within a month. Showing the real girls how it’s done.

Christ alive, Franks, where is your head going? She needs to get her mind out of the gutter and concentrate on the important things, like—

Wait. It’s not Ready Brek everyone in the basement always complains about, is it? It’s Weetabix.

It is Weetabix, right?

Jesus. She’s losing it.

 

* * *

 

Monica wonders if a small attic room with tilted ceilings and small windows has ever felt so open, so free. Because Diana’s standing there by one of the windows, as close as she can get without having to duck, looking out on the cold early evening and thinking… what?

They’ve been talking about Stenordale. About what it was like to wake every morning in her room there and to have to wait to discover what violations were going to be administered that day; she might get off light, helping Valérie Barbier with dinner — though Valérie disdained Diana’s help after she found out why she was ejected from Dorley Hall in the first place, so those duties became sparse after a while — or she might have to shadow the Silver River man around the premises, or she might have to prepare herself for a more private encounter. Diana said that very quickly, she stopped feeling trapped, because she stopped feeling anything much at all; her surgeries and the limited time she was allocated to recover from them had already left her shell-shocked, and after that, it seemed like every new blow to her equilibrium came while she was still adjusting to the last one. Declan ran from the experience, and Diana was yet to be born. Sometimes there was Dina; sometimes there was something like Declan, but so shattered by his treatment that he was more memory and instinct than anything else; more often, there was no-one.

“I think they were the same as me,” she’s saying, still looking out of the window, speaking in the gentle, husky whisper Monica’s come to think of, quite naturally, as Diana’s voice, not anything connected to Declan. “I think maybe they woke up as nothing, too. I hope… I hope they were nothing when they were killed.” Now she turns, her eyes shining and red for the first time. “It was easier to be nothing.” Monica stands, walks slowly over. “It was better.” Monica wraps her arms around Diana’s belly, allows Diana to lean into her. “Nothing can’t be hurt. Nothing can’t be made to do things. Nothing can’t be violated.”

“You’re safe, Diana,” Monica says.

“And I feel selfish for it. Lucky. But selfish.” She sighs, her wide ribcage taking Monica’s head with it as it rises. “At every turn, I’ve been given more than I deserved. Chia’s been more generous than I could possibly have expected. And you, you tried to help me, and I pushed you away. And now you’re helping me again. Money. Clothes. A real identity.”

“It’s coming. You’ll be Diana Rosamond.”

“I know,” Diana whispers. “And I couldn’t be happier. But it was only in that place that I came close to getting what I deserved.”

“Diana,” Monica says, leaning away so she can look her in the eye, “you did not deserve to die there.”

“Maybe not. But neither did those girls.”

Neither of them says anything else for a while. They look out the window together, at the unwinding evening, at the sea-blown rain, at the wide, darkening world. Diana cries gently, and Monica just tries her very hardest to be her sister.

 

* * *

 

It got around. Of course it did. The basement’s not exactly large, and once Steph read it on Pippa’s phone and gave the gist to Bethany, and Jane told Raph, and Tabitha reluctantly gave in to Leigh’s pestering, it was inevitable that most of the rest of them would find out. If only because Ollie really, really wanted to know why Raph, the fucking collaborator, is hugging his sponsor now, and also why Harmony had to excuse herself to go sit alone in the bathroom for half an hour.

So it got around, but quietly, because still no-one seems to know exactly how much Adam knows, and nobody, not even Ollie, wants to ask him outright.

Tabitha got the TV in the common room to play quiet music, so they don’t have to sit in silence, and Martin suggested they play a board game or something, but it was only when Raph asked Jane to open the storeroom and came back with a bunch of spare mattresses that the mood even slightly changed. They shoved the couches to the edges of the room, pulled them apart for cushions, and supplemented their makeshift beds with bean bag chairs, and now they’re all sitting in little clumps, more connected than before, still talking quietly, still sombre, but no longer just randomly weeping in the corner.

Almost all of them: Adam’s gone back to his room, and Edy’s gone with him. She told him she didn’t want to be alone, and that there are things they need to talk about. She made significant eyes at the rest of the room when she said that, which Steph took to mean that they can probably — finally — talk completely freely down here from, say, tomorrow morning onwards.

Deeply weird to see Adam and Edy together now, considering what Steph knows — look at their eyes! they’re the same! — but it’s kinda cool that someone here gets to have an actual blood relative for a Sister.

Briefly she thinks of Petra. Not a helpful thought. She misses her. Or she thinks she does; she was so screwed up from basically the moment puberty started that she sort of big-brothered on autopilot. Did she ever really know her little sister?

She shakes herself. Now is hardly the time to berate herself, and when Pippa leans around and throws a questioning look her way, Steph smiles to let her know that nothing’s wrong.

Because nothing is wrong. Petra’s getting the letters. She knows she’s loved.

Yeah, by a big brother who hasn’t even existed for months; who never really existed at all. Who sends bullshitty letters and discarded his phone, who barely even bothered to visit while he was still at uni for real. Who spent years entirely checked out, and then quietly dwindled away.

She must be the luckiest girl in Britain.

“Insane to think all that shit used to happen here,” Raph’s saying, and Steph frowns, forcing herself to concentrate on what’s being said and not the stupid bullshit inside her head. “All the sex stuff.”

“Yeah,” Leigh says sarcastically, from where she and Tabitha are sitting together on the only couch that hasn’t been disintegrated, “now they just do the kidnapping and coercive identity realignment thing. Just parts one and two of the three-part plan.”

“They didn’t do that,” Harmony says quietly.

“What?”

“The identity thing. That’s us. That’s the important difference. They didn’t do it. What they used to do was—”

“Harmony,” Maria says. “Don’t.” She’s with Steph, Pippa and Bethany, close to the centre of the huddle of mattresses and cushions, and she’s letting Beth idly play with her hair, twisting it into knots that she’ll probably have to tease out in the shower later.

“Right. Sorry.”

“We don’t need to go into detail.”

“I know.”

Soft music plays. Pippa leans against Steph; Steph leans against Pippa. Maria’s stopped Bethany from playing with her hair so she can hold her hand, or have her hand held. Everyone’s so quiet and everyone’s so fucked up.

Nineteen bodies. Steph finds it hard enough to contemplate one; that a man could be so twisted as to commission the transformation of nineteen men — twenty, she corrects herself; Valérie — only to murder them…

And every single one of them began their journey here, inside these walls.

Yeah. She gets why Bethany feels so claustrophobic now.

“What’s going to happen?” Ollie asks. He hasn’t said much until now, apart from to sneer at Raph. He’s just been sitting awkwardly with Harmony on the edge of the cluster of mattresses. “Is Frankie going to be okay?”

“Frankie?” Pippa says.

“Yeah,” Ollie says, without elaborating.

“Frankie is with Aunt Bea and Ms Barbier,” Maria says, leaning into her ‘official’ voice. “She’s safe, Oliver.”

He nods and says nothing else. It’s weird; he’s the only one down here not connected to someone else somehow. Everyone’s holding hands or leaning on each other or outright sitting in each other’s laps, and there’s Ollie, who tried three sitting positions when he first came over and rejected every one, only to end up with both legs spread out in front of him. He’s having to hold himself up, his arms splayed out behind him, and it doesn’t look comfortable. Is he feeling how different he is now? How much everyone else has moved away from what probably still feels natural to him?

“Hey,” Bethany says, “so, uh, when are we going to get to go upstairs again?”

“I don’t know, Bethany,” Maria says. “We’ll know more in the morning; we need to wait for Aunt Bea to brief us properly.”

Tabitha says sharply, “All we’ve got to go on right now is what you saw on our phones. So we’ve locked down hard. And don’t have a choice in this; we’ll relax it when we know it’s safe to do so. We’ve been over this, Bethany.”

“Sorry,” Bethany says quickly.

“No,” Tabitha says before Maria can interject, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t… Yeah. I shouldn’t. Sorry.”

“What’s so great about going upstairs, anyway?” Raph says. Ollie’s laugh is sharp and humourless; Raph ignores it. “You still can’t leave, right? A lock for every door and a bar for every window?”

“Better bed, better food,” Bethany says, and eyes Raph. “Better company.”

“You’re such a little shit,” Raph says, but he’s smiling, and Beth doesn’t seem to mind.

“And the windows do open,” Bethany continues. “You can smell the fresh air, and… Fuck.” She leans against Maria, who pulls her in closer, into a hug. “Not much point, anyway. I don’t know who I am up there, same as I don’t down here.”

“Bethany—” Steph starts.

“No, I’m serious,” she snaps, leaning forward, straining against Maria’s embrace, “I fucking don’t. I looked at those fucking bodies and I kept thinking, I kept thinking, like… Shit. Fucking self-indulgent bullshit. Sorry.”

No-one says anything for a moment, and then Maria, in her kindest voice, says, “What were you thinking, Bethany?”

“That they died knowing who they are.”

Steph wants to protest, because Bethany’s seemed so solid lately, comparatively speaking, but Pippa and Maria have both warned her about pushing Beth too hard, about not giving her the space she needs to develop as her own woman.

Bethany looks around the room. Winces as she seems to realise how everyone’s looking back at her. Mostly sympathetically, or so Steph thinks.

“I’m an accessory to Steph,” Bethany says eventually. “You all see it, don’t you? You’re all thinking it, right? I don’t sleep in my own room; I sleep in Steph’s. I borrow her clothes. I go upstairs when she does, and when I talk to people, it’s like I’m Steph’s. I’m Stephanie Riley’s Bethany. Practically her fucking pet.”

“Hey,” Steph says, but Bethany cuts her off.

“You know it’s true. It’s like I can’t function without you or Maria. And that’s not a person, is it? That’s a— a growth on your arse that you can’t get rid of.”

“No, Bethany,” Maria gently chides.

“I keep telling myself that I’m faking it until I make it,” Bethany continues. “Like Mia said. And I’ve got good at that. Or I thought I did. But I look into the future, and where I used to see this sad fucking life for Aaron, a butt-slapping piece of shit working a crap suit job he doesn’t care about, you know what I see for Bethany? I see Steph. I see Maria. Fuck me, I even see some of you. But I don’t see me.” She’s getting louder now, and when she pauses, she’s chewing on her lower lip, really wrecking the skin there. “I’m supposed to be a person, aren’t I? A real girl? Not just Steph’s girlfriend.” She hesitates only slightly before the word, and Steph would consider that progress if not for the surrounding context. “Not just Maria’s Sister. Not just the idiot who pined so hard for a girl he didn’t even know that well that he borrowed half her fucking name. Jesus Christ, I walk into a room with no-one in it and I feel like I ought to switch myself off until someone shows up! Until I have to perform Bethany! And I like her more than Aaron, and she doesn’t get the shit beaten out of her as much, but I’m— I’m fucking empty. And I don’t want to be.” She slows and quiets, leans back into Maria, stops pulling away from her. “I feel like I’m flickering between two states: Steph’s girlfriend, and just a blank piece of paper. And I hate that. I don’t want to be that any more. I don’t want to be this shitty little thing that does nothing but pine for Steph when she’s not around. I should be more. And I feel like I’m betraying Bethany by not being more! But I’m here, and I’m still here, and the walls are fucking closing in, and when they finally snap shut— Fuck. I don’t know what I’m saying. Might be going a little cuckoo in here, you know?”

Steph shuffles forward and reaches for Bethany’s hand. She has to extract it from somewhere in the depths of her, but she does so. She does so and she fucking well holds it.

“You’re more than just my girlfriend,” Steph says. “And when all this shit isn’t going on, I think you know it.”

“I tried to dress up for you,” Bethany says, with a half-smile. “I tried to dress up for you. Wanted to look nice for you. Shit, Steph; I want to do things for me. But right now it’s like I’m, I don’t know, survival needs only. I have a concrete hole to live in and I have food and stuff, but I don’t have… me.”

“You will.”

“You’ll learn to,” Maria adds. “This is just a step. An important step. One you’re going to get through.”

“I just…” Bethany mumbles. “I never know what to do. It’s like— You ever make decision trees at school? I don’t know, probably not; seems like make-work for aristo boys with underutilised brains. But we did. And unless I’m with Steph or Maria, it feels like I’m always… missing the top of the decision tree. You know? Like, I know what’s in the last box, the box where I’m like a happy, smiling girl having fun with her friends, but I don’t know how to get there. Just a blank piece of paper with an impossible goal on it.”

Raph, who is sitting with Jane amid a pile of bean bag chairs, struggles to sit forward. “That’s because everything that used to be simple is complicated now,” he says.

“Got that right,” Leigh murmurs.

“No, I mean it,” Raph says. “You used to be a man, Bethany, like— uh, like me, I guess.” Ollie laughs again. “Shut up, Ollie. This’ll be you in a month. Look.” He’s addressing Bethany directly, but he occasionally turns his head to include the rest of the room. “I’ve been thinking about this. Beth’s been talking and I’ve been thinking, and— Okay, so, being a man is simple, right? There’s one rule: don’t be a poof. We all know that, yeah? Steph most of all, probably, because she had to fake it, but that’s just how it works. And it’s easy, because everyone knows what a poof is, don’t we? A fairy. A fag. A—”

“Stop saying slurs and make your point, Raph,” Jane says, nudging him.

“Oh. Yeah. Soz. Getting a bit too into it. But look, we all know what a— a gay guy is like, yeah? And I don’t mean the kind of gay guy we might know; I mean the gay guy we all trained ourselves not to be. We know how he walks, how he talks, how he sits. We know the kinds of things he likes. And we know that he’s not really a guy, not the way we are. Were. Whatever. He’s like a girl. Or worse, because girls have, you know, redeeming qualities, and the guy we’re so afraid of? He’s got none. No good for anything. And we hate him, because he could be a guy, right? If he was strong, like us, he could be a guy.”

“Where are you going with this?” Leigh asks.

“Sorry,” Raph says, glaring at him, “is this Phoenix Wright? Are you yelling ‘Objection!’? I’m just talking! Jesus. Look,” he continues, and he’s staring at his hands now, following them as he gesticulates, supporting his points, “we’ve got this guy we’re all trying not to be. And we think he’s weak and stupid and womanly and gay, but not in a gay way, in a poofter way — sorry, Jane, but it’s true. So everything we do is evaluated against that guy. It’s the one rule: don’t be him. And because we all know how that guy behaves, it’s easy.” He drops his hands into his lap, squeezes them between his legs. “But we’re here now. We’ve gotten rid of the rule. Took some of us a while—” he looks from Ollie to Leigh, “—but we got there, or we’re getting there, or we’re working on it, or some shit; I don’t know. I hung onto it for too fucking long, I know that much. It’s an easy stick to beat other men with. Point is: the rule’s gone. The guidebook on how to be? It’s torn up. And now you—” he nods at Bethany, “—have got to figure out the new rules. Only you’re working from first principles. All we really know is that women aren’t like us, aren’t like we used to be; they don’t have that guy they’re always trying not to be. At least, I don’t think so. So it’s complicated.”

“Uh,” Bethany says, “sure? I suppose?”

“Okay, example, right? What about, like, when someone’s crying? For guys, it’s easy: if it’s a girl, you can be like, ‘How can I fix this?’ or you just ignore her, because it’s girl stuff and you don’t need to get involved; if it’s another guy, you say, ‘What a bitch; you don’t need her.’ Right? What does a girl do?”

“I think you’ll find,” Jane says, smiling at him, “that we do whatever feels right.”

“But how do you figure that out? How do you know what feels right?” It’s Raph asking the question, but Bethany’s listening out for the answer, too.

“You’ll know.”

“You’ve got a voice,” Pippa says, very suddenly, speaking up for the first time in a while, and speaking too loud. Too loud even for her, because she looks around like she’s embarrassed, and continues more quietly, “You’ve always had a voice inside you. And you drowned it out. Like Raph said. It was more important to be the right kind of man. And especially for someone like you, Bethany.”

“Me?” Bethany says warily.

“Small. Not physically strong. Didn’t fit in.”

“Yeah, okay, thanks—”

“You’ve got two choices, there. You either get tough anyway, and you push it way too hard, and you hand out a few bloody noses because you’re fed up of being the boy everyone picks on, or you find another way out. You make people laugh. You learn to run, or you find places to hide. But Raph’s right: you make sure you never become that guy, or the people who hurt you will definitely hurt you more. You were probably drowning out your real voice even more than the tough guys.”

“What ‘real voice’?” Bethany says.

“You,” Pippa says. “You know what you want. You know who you are. You do, I promise. You’ve just become so used to blocking it out, to making yourself someone else, that you’ve forgotten it’s there. It’s why you’re stuck at the top of your decision tree, I suppose; step one is, ‘What feels right to do right now?’ and you’ve made sure never to ask yourself that, ever.” She’s blushing now, looking down. “It took me a long time to learn to listen to myself. Sometimes I think I’m still not there. Still evaluating my every movement against this… invisible eye that will punish me if I do things wrong. I’m still teaching myself to stop worrying about all that stuff.” She looks up again. “You’ve got a reflex that stops you before you do anything. It makes you question what you’re about to do or to say. You built that reflex because it helped you survive. And now you know you don’t need it, but it’s still there.”

“It’ll fade,” Jane says. “It will. None of us—” she nods at Pippa, but seems to mean all the sponsors present, “—ever found being a man came all that naturally. And moving past it was, eventually, a relief. You stop constantly asking yourself, ‘Wait, if I give a shit, is that gay?’ And this really was all of us. All my intake, anyway; it’s the kind of shit you talk about in your third year, when you’re getting ready to graduate and you’re letting it all out.”

“Also,” Harmony says, “when you’re really stoned.”

“Exactly,” Jane says, pointing at her. “We got blazed out of our brains and spilled all the bullshit we’d been thinking about for three years, and we ended up laughing so fucking hard… We were all so similar. We were all terrified, all the time, of being the wrong kind of guy, and we worked too hard at it, and we policed the other guys… We were the toxic masculinity recruitment and enforcement squad. Because that’s the thing: there are guys who don’t seem to have to try, and they’re the ones we were all trying to be like; and then there are the guys you’re not supposed to be, and they were the ones we were always afraid we’d be seen as if we said the wrong thing.”

“S’what I said,” Raph says.

“And you’re right. One time, at school, I had a massive zit on my chin. Ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. My girlfriend — short-lived — put concealer on it at lunch, but by fifth period, I’d rubbed it off on my shirt, and I was still scared some other boy would see it and pound me into the ground over it. And, probably, some of the boys there would have.”

“Well, yeah. It’s what I would have done. It’s in the rules.”

“And now you need to forget the rules. And the trick isn’t to learn new ones, to spend the rest of your life in the same anxious puddle of bullshit as your first couple of decades; the trick is to realise that the rules are crap. And, like Pippa said, to learn to listen to what you want, not what you’ve trained yourself to think you need.”

“But there are still girl rules, right?” Ollie says.

“Oh, tonnes. But they’re… very different. And you can break them if you want.”

“We’ll teach you,” Harmony says. “Not this year, but we’ll teach you. It’s advanced class stuff. Gotta pull all the crap outta your brains first before we put the good stuff in.” Ollie frowns at her. “Ask your beloved Frankie! She’s seen how this works. And it really works. Even back then, under Dorothy, it worked sometimes, without them even—”

“Harmony,” Maria warns.

“Shit. Sorry.”

“Of course,” Jane says, “that’s only half the story. The other thing is just as important, and it’s a realisation we all come to, eventually.”

“Oh?” Raph asks. “What other thing?”

“Men are fucking stupid.”

Raph laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, we are.”

“Uh-uh,” Jane says, wagging a finger in his face. “I don’t want you to be self-deprecating about this. This is something else. This is about putting words to something you already know, and it’s about embracing it, reinforcing it. ‘Men are fucking stupid,’ sure, but try saying it like you’re not one of them any more. Try saying it like you’re better than them. Like you’re not so thick as to get caught out by the bullshit they let themselves do to each other.”

“Men are fucking stupid?” Raph tries.

“Again. Remember: men are stupid. But you know better now. You’re not going to be that thick again. There’s a battle of the sexes, and you just joined the winning team. And now you see them for what they are, these scared little children, with children’s worries and a child’s understanding of the world. ‘Oh no!’” she adds in a comically deep voice. “‘Someone might think I’m not enough of a man!’ Men are fucking stupid. Say it again.”

“Men,” Raph says, and he does so with a sneer, but also with pinking cheeks, “are so fucking stupid. I mean, why do they even care if some other guy thinks they’re gay? Is he going to try anything? Fuck no. Because men are fucking cowards, too. And the ones that aren’t, they’ll go for you for something you never even thought of, they’ll decide the way you hold a pint is gay, or the way you— the way you fucking parallel park. So, no, I don’t give a shit what they think, and I don’t give a shit about them, either. Because men are fucking stupid.”

“Attagirl,” Jane says, which makes Raph flinch. “No, seriously. Hold onto that thought. Keep it with you. Maybe write a diary entry about it. I want you to feel superior to them. I want you to feel contemptuous of them. Raph, I want you to be a smug fucking bitch. You know why?”

“Because men are fucking stupid.”

“And you’re not stupid any more.”

 

* * *

 

He’s desperate to help her. Ever since the news came in, the update that no-one will tell him about, the other sponsors have seemed delicate, have cried, have needed help to get through the day — and Adam’s been pleased to see the others providing that help, because that’s the way the world ought to work; share the load — but Edy’s been different. Edy’s had difficulty standing upright; Edy’s not been able to stop crying for more than a few minutes at a time; Edy was barely able to get through the snacks they sent down. It was as if, once her initial burst of crisis-management energy dissipated, she had nothing left except raw nerves.

Adam’s so, so worried about her. And now, in his room, with the heavy door closed and red-light locked, with no-one else around to inhibit him or to make her leave him, he can finally, properly help her.

She’s sitting on the end of his tidy bed, her feet flat on the floor, her knees together and her hands clasped between her thighs. She isn’t moving, and though she isn’t crying, her cheeks are still wet, her eyes are still red, and Adam thinks that if she moves even the slightest bit, she will lose control and begin once again to weep.

And he’s been sitting on the chair with the castors, but he cannot help from there, so, under the pretext of collecting from the dumbwaiter and bringing to her the bottled water someone sent down almost half an hour ago, Adam sits next to her. Thighs touching. Sinfully close, were it not for the things he is certain he knows about her. And Adam, of late, is certain about little.

He was almost offended when he first understood how Dorley Hall works. Bad men get made into women, and they get their evil cured in the process. It seemed simplistic, even to him, and whatever he’s done, whatever he’s said, whichever of Father’s words he has let spill out of him in service of the Voice — whatever lies he has been made to tell — he has never considered himself to be a bad man. But as he understood the nuance of it, as Edy told him about the second years, about their paths to secular salvation in the eyes of Aunt Bea, he realised he had it wrong.

Bad men? Yes and no.

Destructive men? Most definitely. And Adam has been forced to understand that his path was a most destructive one. He was to succeed Father — guaranteed by his early mastery of the Tongue, his early channelling of The Voice — and in that role he would surely have performed as Father himself has. All fruits of the farm — of the nation — would find their way to him; the disfavoured cousins would go hungry; and the Word would continue to be spread among the unenlightened. Before he left, there was talk of more radical action, talk of a search among their ranks for a martyr, talk of fire and brimstone and the kind of education only the blood of the cross can provide. Before he left, he dismissed his mum’s concerns about it; Father knows all.

But Father knows nothing, and in his ignorance, he wages war upon the innocent.

All that was to be his. Adam was to be the new Father. And when he finally realised, here in his small, concrete room, that the fate that Edy and the programme here at Dorley Hall has in store for him will render that role inaccessible to him, he found his first peace in a long time.

Peace which gave way, quite quickly, to rage. And rage which dissipated, equally quickly, when he understood just how profoundly Edy needs him.

Mum used to say she wanted to save just one person. She wanted it to be Adam, but Adam resisted.

He’ll be like her. He’ll save someone, and she’ll be proud of him when she sees him again. When he saves her, too.

“Adam…” Edy whispers. “I’m so sorry.” Her voice sounds as if she is forcing it through sandpaper.

He unscrews the water bottle and holds it to her mouth. After a moment — and a glance at him — she parts her lips, tips back her head, and accepts a small sip of water. It feels strangely like a baptism.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” he says.

“Oh, Adam,” she says. She takes the bottle from him, swigs hard from it, and then recaps it and throws it on the bed. Then she wraps an arm around his shoulders and holds him, delicately but firmly.

He’s always thought of her that way. She’s very beautiful. Very strong. Very fragile. And always very familiar. As if she was always there, throughout his life, but stepped out of the shadows only recently. Like a guardian angel.

“You don’t need to be sorry,” he repeats.

“I do,” she says softly. Her voice has its fondness back now, the lilt with which she has always addressed him. “I have kept things from you, and I have told myself that it is for your benefit that I have done so. But I’ve been scared. Goodness, Adam, I was going to have Steph and Leigh talk to you on my behalf; isn’t that cowardly?”

“Leigh?”

“Never mind. Adam, you deserve to know why I’m so upset.” She shifts on the mattress, crosses her legs at the ankles, leans into him. Adam, for his part, leans back. Whatever it is she needs to tell him, he wants to know. Nothing could hurt him more than the dissolution of his faith, and the understanding that his beloved Father is, and always has been, a charlatan, or a fool at best. “The programme at Dorley Hall,” she says. “You know what it does. You’re a part of it. But you don’t know everything.” She takes a deep breath. Smooths down her clothes, frowning, paying attention to them. “It’s existed for roughly fifteen years, and I was one of its first subjects. My name was… I’ll get to what my name was, Adam. Before Aunt Bea, before Maria, Dorley Hall was run by a different group of people. A woman who called herself ‘Grandmother’ was in charge, and she did not share our beliefs. When she made a woman from a man, she did so for the basest of reasons, and when that woman was complete, Grandmother would sell her. Sell her into the most foul depravity imaginable. She was cruel, Adam, and she delighted in it.”

She invites Adam into a world of horrors. Tells him everything, though she keeps the details light, for which he is grateful. She tells him about Declan and Diana, about Vincent and Valérie. And she tells him about the girls who were delivered to Stenordale Manor who never returned.

He can’t help thinking of Father. Adam was never kidnapped, and neither were the other boys he knew there, but there was, similarly, no escape. Their very minds were shaped by someone who had a use for them.

Is that love? Of a sort?

“I told you, Adam,” Edy says. “I was there at the start. When I saw Maria through those bars… Goodness. I was her first. And the others, the other girls who were trying their best, muddling through with that first intake, they were all survivors of Grandmother. And they were so wounded, Adam.” She sniffs again. He passes her a tissue. “The old woman and her wicked associates tried their best to break them, and praise God, they were not broken, but, Adam, my sweet, brave Adam… they were so hurt. And when I saw those bodies, those bones, all I could think of was that that was almost Maria. It was almost Barbara. It was almost Trish and— and Beatrice, too. It was almost her. And I remember Maria looking at me through those bars, and I remember her face… and I can’t stop thinking about how close she came to never being there at all. To never being mine at all. I’m stuck wandering, stuck convincing myself that I’m doing the right thing, and she’s… gone.”

That’s all Edy can manage for now. She bends over, pulling her arm away from Adam so she can cover her face, and all he can do is hold her.

 

* * *

 

They had packet sandwiches off paper plates with cans of fizzy drink and bags of prawn cocktail crisps. A little picnic in the common room, because none of them want to go back to their rooms. And now Steph’s lying back, covered in one of the light duvets someone fetched from somewhere, with Bethany in her arm and Pippa lying next to them. Maria’s sitting on a somewhat reconstituted couch, tapping away on her phone but keeping close enough to Bethany that she doesn’t get restless.

That was some confession Bethany made earlier, and Steph wants to discuss it, if only so she can provide whatever reassurances the anxious hamster wheel that is Bethany’s brain will require — there is a bright, vibrant woman inside that head of hers, and the sponsors were right: she needs only to learn to listen to her — but Bethany was one of the first to fall asleep, so it’ll have to wait until morning.

Most of the others are asleep now, too. Every time they got away from talking about the bodies, from talking about the grotesque practices of the old man who lived at the manor, from talking about what that meant for Valérie and Diana, they circled back to it all with an inevitability that bordered on fatalistic, and that’s a tiring emotional high to keep going for so many hours. They were all exhausted.

Steph, for her part, can’t stay focused, and she doesn’t think she’ll be sleeping for a while, either. Because ever since she thought about Petra, she can’t get her out of her head.

Petra doesn’t know she has a sister. She’s been getting these artful fictions in the mail, these stories that Steph dreams up with Pippa, and while maybe it’s nice that she gets to imagine her brother having slightly unrealistically perfect adventures in far-off countries — Steph and Pippa are careful never to mention how ‘Stefan’ is paying for his excursion — it’s all building up to something that Steph will never live up to. Stefan’s never coming back from his trip abroad, and Stephanie, the girl who’s replaced him, is not only a liar, she’s a stranger.

If only she hadn’t come to Dorley Hall. If only she hadn’t made herself custodian of the secrets of almost a hundred people. If only she hadn’t made herself a liar for life.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Pippa says.

Rolling over just in time to spot Pippa closing the lockdown notice on her phone, Steph says, “So’re you.”

“Yeah,” Pippa sighs quietly. “Guilty.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

“I think I’m the same as everyone else. So many dead, you know?”

“Yeah,” Steph says warily.

“Something else on your mind?”

Propping herself up on her elbow so she can see Pippa properly in the lowered lights, Steph says, “I don’t know how I’m going to face my family. That’s… That’s everything on my mind right now. Which is selfish and stupid and—”

Pippa lays a hand on Steph’s forearm. “Normal,” she says.

“I should be grieving,” Steph says, frowning.

“You never knew those girls,” Pippa says. “And neither did I, so it’s all kind of abstract for me. Once I got over the shock, it was like my brain just started looking for other stuff to connect them to. So I ended up thinking about my family, too.”

“See? That’s why I’m selfish. I’m going to see mine again, and you’re…” Steph stops herself from finishing a profoundly impolitic sentence by virtue of biting herself on the inside of her cheek.

“Not,” Pippa finishes. “I’m not. You don’t need to not say it, Steph. It’s something I’ve been dealing with for a long time. Something I’m going to keep dealing with for a while longer, I think. But it’s not raw, not like it used to be. They just… come back sometimes. And speak to me. At times like these, when everything’s topsy-turvy. At least, in my head, I get to tell my dad how much I miss him. And Sarah…” Smiling, Pippa holds up her wrist, the one with the bracelet that she always wears, and tugs on it with her little finger. “I get to tell her off. I get to find the magic words that will make her leave that— that bastard, make her listen to me.” She shrugs, a movement which, given her position, takes her whole upper body with it. “But the problem with that, Steph, is that it changes my life. Completely. If Sarah leaves Pete, then my Dad doesn’t go to jail, then I stand a better chance of sorting my life out, then Eleanor doesn’t pick me up and I don’t become Pippa and I don’t meet you.”

“You don’t think that would be better?” Steph says. “Because I keep thinking about what if I hadn’t been such a coward, what if I’d come out to my family and transitioned on my own, what if—”

“And then,” Pippa interrupts, “you wouldn’t have met Bethany. You wouldn’t have met Christine. You wouldn’t have been reunited with Melissa. And we wouldn’t have met, and I don’t know about you, but I, for one, can’t imagine my life without you in it. Not any more.” She reaches out for Steph’s hand, and Steph lifts herself off her elbow and lies back down on her side so she can take it.

“I can’t be worth it, can I? I’m just… I don’t know. I don’t think I’m that great. I don’t think it would be so bad if I was… elsewhere. Somewhere I could be actually helpful.”

“You’re helpful here, Steph. Look, neither of us can know what our lives would be if we’d done the ‘right’ thing. All we can know is what we have right now, and what we’d lose if we could somehow turn back the clock. And, personally, I know that. So, mostly, I don’t think about it. I only indulge—” she makes a show of glancing around the common room, “—at times of great stress. The rest of the time, I’ve decided to be content. And I’m working on happy.”

Steph nods. She wouldn’t have met Bethany. She wouldn’t have met Pippa or Christine or Indira or any of the others. She wouldn’t have seen Melissa again, probably ever! She’d have had that sad little encounter at the big Tesco, and for the rest of her life, she would have wondered.

Lying to Petra is still such a high price for all that, though. And it’s miserable to have so many people be so important to her, and to have to hide them from her only blood sister.

Her little Petra.

Shit.

Pippa’s right. You can’t go back. And if you could, you’d lose everything.

Make that a part of your thinking, Steph.

Easy to look back and critique her own rash decisions. But if she hadn’t gone looking for the hall, or if she hadn’t stopped Christine from getting her out, would she even be alive today? Things have been too comfortable for too long; she’s forgotten how close to the edge she was.

And that makes her laugh. Because she’s on a makeshift mattress in a concrete basement, surrounded by people who were kidnapped for, largely, crimes of misogyny. ‘Comfortable’ is relative. But, yes, it’s still better than her shitty student room and her shitty supermarket job and her shitty empty bank account. And the way, oh yeah, she’d made no progress whatsoever on her transition back then, and she was probably never going to.

Fuck, she was still telling herself she might not even be a girl.

Don’t ever go back, Steph. There are demons there.

“I’m really stupid, Pip,” she says.

“Yeah,” Pippa says. “I could practically see that thought as it passed through you.” She lets go of Steph’s hand and places a finger on Steph’s heart, mostly avoiding the sensitive breast buds, though Steph winces anyway. “It started here, and it moved very slowly—” she runs her finger the length of Steph’s chest and neck, “—all the way up here.” She taps Steph on the temple.

“I’m really stupid, and you’re actually pretty wise.”

Another tap. “I’m supposed to be wise. I’m your sponsor. We’re specially taught and everything. I am absolutely not winging it.”

Because Steph bloody well wants to, she grabs Pippa’s hand, where it’s still idling by Steph’s head, and brings it around to her mouth. She kisses it, smiles, and returns Pippa’s hand to her, feeling suddenly and inappropriately content.

She’ll explain it to Petra. Somehow. She’ll find a way.

“Thanks, Pip.”

“Now go to sleep,” Pippa whispers. “Big day tomorrow.”

“Oh?” Steph says, getting comfortable again, laying her head in the crook of her elbow to push up her pillow a little. “What happens tomorrow?”

“Aunt Bea tells us how long we have to be in lockdown for. We get follow-ups on the police investigation, the sponsors get… constant briefings, probably. And then we come back down here and give you the CliffsNotes. You know, work stuff. Disaster management. Someone will probably debut a terrible new mug to relieve the tension. I was, um, thinking about making some myself, actually.”

“Really? I thought you hated the mugs.”

Pippa shrugs. “Like everything here, they sort of grow on you. These will be my first; I plan to sneak them into the rotation and wait for someone to notice. I’m still working on my ideas, though.”

“Oh? Tell me!”

“I was thinking… This Machine Pills Sapphics, or maybe No Feminisation Without Representation.”

“Does that first one even make sense?”

“Kinda? Like I said, I’m working on it.”

 

* * *

 

There’s an innocence to Adam that’s always been there. Even back when they brought him in, when he was still — only slightly awkwardly — declaiming the will of the Voice, of his father, of the whole damn stupid thing, there was an innocence to him. Edy thinks he could probably have kept going until the exact point Father made him do something truly awful, and then there would have been two paths available to him: he could have given in and become Father, imitated him in spirit as well as in word and deed, become inhabited by him; or he would have been broken by it.

Edy will never not be glad she found a third path for him — even if she had to rather force him onto it — though she will also never not be a little sorry that the best parts of him cannot be preserved as-is. But they just don’t have a mechanism for that, and Edy has neither the funding nor the facilities to operate what Maria has occasionally wryly termed a ‘gender-secular’ deprogramming facility. No, she’s got to be evangelical about womanhood as the solution to the unfortunate state of manhood.

Adam doesn’t seem to mind, though. He minds it less than she did, back in the day. Most of the other boys have pushed back far harder.

Well, they are related. It makes sense, sort of.

And it’s time he knew it.

“Adam,” she says, pulling his attention back to her. They’ve been lying lengthways on his bed together, gently snoozing, ever since she cried herself out; ever since he poured two whole bottles of water into her, and they shared a little treat together: Edy got one of the girls upstairs to promise to keep her mouth shut, and to send down some chocolate ice cream. An emergency, she’d said. Add it to the pile, the girl upstairs said, though she sent the ice cream anyway.

“Yes?” Adam replies sleepily.

Edy shuffles up in bed, pushes up the pillows a little. “I need to tell you something. I think you’ve probably guessed that I lived on the farm. That I come from there. From… where you come from.”

He nods slowly. “You know everything about it. Everything about me.”

“Do you remember… Seth?”

Now he sits up with her, pulling himself up until their faces are close enough that she can taste the chocolate on his breath. “Seth?” he says, frowning.

“You would have been young,” Edy says. “Four, five, I think? Four. And I was just one of many. But I bounced you on my knee, Adam. I was getting ready to go out into the world, and there you were, young and innocent and playing with your toys, and…” She sniffs, unwilling to start crying again, because this time, if she loses control, she will never stop. “You were just a baby. Just a little boy. You had these tiny little hands…”

“I’m sorry,” Adam says earnestly, “but I don’t think I remember a Seth.”

“You would have had no reason to. I was just… one of them. One of Father’s boys. There were… a few of us.” Edy shuffles into the corner, where the bed meets the wall, feeling unaccountably awkward. She’s long known that her dad isn’t her dad, and that all the adults on the farm were well aware of that fact. She hasn’t even been back to the damn place since she left it fifteen years ago, but the shame of it still bites sometimes. “Adam,” she says, “I have to tell you something… about Father.”

And what is left of Adam’s world, the last of him, falls cleanly and inevitably away.

 

* * *

 

Frankie’s been dispatched to her room, and she went without comment, doubtless noting Béatrice’s dark mood and Valérie’s disconnection. Perhaps Valérie ought to feel bad about that, and perhaps she will, when she one day regains the ability properly to feel sympathetic towards the old hag, but for right now, she is glad to see the back of her. Valérie could never see her again and be happy.

Her girls. The ones she tried to help and the ones she tried to distance herself from. None of it mattered in the end. All of them ended up in the ground. And now, here they all are, all of them being extracted, piece by piece, bone by bone, to be laid out on cold tables in a fluorescent-lit room somewhere. To be examined, pored over, to have their lives picked apart as filthily as their bodies.

The best case is that they’ll find nothing. That they’ll connect a handful of her girls to the men they were when they went missing, and they’ll conclude that the monster Crispin Smyth-Farrow was some kind of gay serial killer, and that will be the story that is ultimately released to the press. Béatrice remarked that she thinks the newspapers and the police would prefer a gay serial killer to a stalker and murderer of trans women; there are more thinkpieces in it, more ways to drum up sympathy for the kind of queer person the British public, in their indolent, repulsive, arrogant ignorance, can bring itself almost to tolerate.

Awful to think that the deaths of her girls and the way they are presented to the world could spin on something as random as a medical examiner identifying a surviving facial surgery bone carving, or on some quirk of evidence no-one has yet thought to look for or to hide, or on whichever story can be spun most conveniently to match the mood of the day.

Valérie needs to get out of this feculent country.

A shame that she cannot.

Now that she’s back at the hall, she’s not to leave. She’s housebound, just like Frankie and the second years, and restricted from accessing the ground floor, lest the fucking flics show their faces unexpectedly and start asking the nice young ladies for their identification. Someone at Peckinville is probably running up emergency identities for the lot of them, right now.

She hopes they hurry. Because she needs to get out of the hall. Get away from all these beautiful young women whose futures have not been confiscated. She needs to fucking leave.

She told Béatrice she didn’t want to sleep with her in the flat tonight. That she’ll instead take her own room on the second floor, amid the least raucous of the hall’s population. And Béatrice took the news with a nod and shut her door without a word, a move which both insulted Valérie and inflamed her temper, because, God damn it all, she wanted to do it. So she hit Béatrice’s door with her full fist and forearm, and stamped her way up the stairs to her little room on second.

Cold. Lonely. And empty but for a little-used bed, a half-empty wardrobe, and her little tray with the stubs of the candles, a memorial that sits by the window, forever in the light.

Twenty candles. Nineteen for her girls; one for Callum.

Growling, wanting suddenly to take a match to them all and see them once again ablaze, wanting to return to Stenordale with rags and alcohol and set alight the ruins, wanting to run from England as fast as she can and look back from the ferry to watch this whole evil, pathetic little country burn behind her, Val kicks at the tray, knocking it from its perch, scattering the dead candles across the floor and covering the carpet with brittle shards of melted white wax, like so many finger bones reaching uselessly up from the dirt.