14. The Sense God Gave Her

2019 November 9
Saturday

Declan gets tased. Stefan doesn’t. He wonders, as Declan’s face spasms, as his legs fall out from under him, as he crashes to the floor by Stefan’s feet, momentum carrying him far past the point of bodily sensibility, if he owes such favouritism to Pippa and perhaps Christine, or if the sponsors heard what Declan was saying and decided that, of the two of them, Declan is by far the most objectionable. Stefan, following the quartet of women who are carrying the unconscious man back to the cells, can’t get it out of his head: the fucker revelled in the power he had over that woman, and not just his physical power, either; she kept coming back to him, again and again, caught in a cycle of moving out when he abused her and moving back in when he put on sufficient charm, when he persuaded her that, this time, he’d changed.

Repulsive.

Stefan’s never wanted so much to hurt someone. It’s not a pleasant feeling.

He doesn’t even look up as Maria places him in a cell. It takes him several minutes, minutes he spends getting his heartbeat under control, breathing slowly until his pulse stops thumping against his temples, gripping the edge of the awful little cot so tight he thinks his fingers might bruise, to realise she left the door open.

Pippa’s there. Watching him. For how long?

“You okay?” she says, and her tone suggests she’s asked him once already. She’s flushed all the way up to her bleached hair, like she’s just run a marathon. Or like she’s been crying. Her voice has that delicate lilt some people get when they’re trying not to strain it after pushing it too hard; Stefan wonders if that still applies for someone who’s had as much voice training as Pippa’s obviously had. Maybe it goes double.

He remembers hearing shouting, now that he thinks about it. Down the corridor; not directed at him.

“I’m okay,” he says. He lets go of the edge of the cot, flexes his fingers. Winces as the pain from the base of his right hand reminds him of his mistake. “I think I almost broke my thumb,” he adds, sheepishly holding it aloft.

“Did you hit him with your thumb inside your fist?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s not how you throw a punch.”

“First time.”

Pippa holds out a hand; her left, to take his, to pull him up off the cot without hurting him more than his inexperience already has. He accepts it, and wobbles a little as he finds his feet again. Never had an adrenaline rush like that; never had a comedown like this.

“Come on,” Pippa says, tugging on his wrist. “Let’s get you back to your room.”

“No punishment?”

She yanks on him again, so he follows. “Not from me. He deserved that and ten times more.”

He looks to the right as they walk down the main corridor. In the common room — locked; red LEDs on the doors — Aaron, loitering, obviously trying to find out what’s happening so he can relay it back to the rest of them, grins and gives him a thumbs up, pressing his hand against the glass. Stefan reaches out and touches the glass as he passes, returns Aaron’s smile.

You okay? Aaron mouths, comically over-enunciating.

Stefan nods. He doesn’t know if he is or not, but there’s no sense in having Aaron worry. At least Declan’s back in a cell. No more danger.

Aaron mouths something else, but it’s too complex a sentence and Stefan is no lip-reader, so he just shrugs, points to Pippa, still dragging on his other arm, and leaves the boy to it. They can catch up later.

In his room, he collapses onto the bed, having staggered the last couple of steps as the last of his energy drained. One punch took a lot more out of him than he expected! Pippa closes the door behind them, pulls up the chair and drops onto it, slumping forward immediately, elbows on her knees, hands supporting her chin.

“What a day,” she says.

“Are you okay?” Stefan asks. She’s still red, although it’s faded a bit. She’s so pale that even the slightest hint of colour dominates her face.

“I’m supposed to be. I’m your sponsor. Your authority figure.”

“Pippa—”

“Yes. I know. It just… We ran the video for him. In the cell. Playing what he said, before you hit him. Over and over again. And I had to listen to it. Over and over again. Brought back a lot of memories, you know? Bad ones.”

Stefan shoves himself up painfully. Now the adrenaline’s spent he feels sore and over-worked, a machine without oil. It’s worth the effort, though, to move closer to Pippa, to hold out his left hand, the way she did in the cell, to offer something for her to take, if she wants to.

“You can talk about it,” he says, “if it would help.”

Pippa sniffs grotesquely and reaches out to grip his fingers. She hooks hers into his, not so much holding hands but creating and reinforcing the bridge between them, the one they’ve both slowly built over the past two weeks.

“I have a cousin,” she says. She’s quiet, steady, talking almost to herself. “Three years older than me. We were always close; she made this, actually. It’s one of a pair.” She reaches over with a finger and spins her bracelet around the wrist locked in Stefan’s grip. “She always took care of me. Even when things got bad, she’d be there for me, to calm me down, to talk me through it. But it all ended when she met a man a bit too much like Declan.”

She pauses for a while. Chews on her lip, flexes the fingers connected to Stefan, testing their link. He waits. She doesn’t need his contributions, just, perhaps, his presence.

“Some men have a way of making themselves a woman’s whole world. And some women are vulnerable to it. My cousin, Sarah, she was definitely vulnerable to it. He was her first, and he used that to control her, to make her think that if he left she’d never find someone else. He hit her, and she didn’t leave. Wouldn’t leave.” She shifts on the chair, moving her weight around, looking for comfort, finding none. “He took her away from us a little at a time. Away from me. First, I got to see her only at the weekends. Then, once a month, maybe. And when I did see her, she was different. Reduced. Less and less and less of her every time. And she would have… bruises.”

“I’m so sorry, Pip,” Stefan whispers, and she tightens her fingers in his.

“It was all so stupidly predictable,” she says. “We all saw him coming. Even me. He got angry at the slightest thing. A horrifying mirror, actually, for me, although I didn’t truly realise that until much later. But we all tried to tell her: me, my dad, her mum, we all tried. And Sarah, she’d say, ‘It’s only when he’s had too much to drink,’ or, ‘He’s trying to change for me,’ or, ‘You don’t understand him, but I do, because I love him.’” Pippa clenches her fingers. Stefan feels her nails dig into the skin. Welcomes them. “One day,” she continues, “she texted me. Said she was going to leave. But she didn’t. It took us almost a week to find out why. Dad found out, in the end. Her boyfriend, he raped her. He found her trying to leave. Trapped her. Hurt her. And when my dad beat him into the hospital, Sarah took his side. Testified against my dad. Prison for six months.” She rubs at her eyes with her free hand. Her ever-present eye makeup is a wreck. “All for a monster who took advantage of her kindness and her naivete and her terror of being alone. A monster who hurt her and hurt her and hurt her, because he never cared enough to stop. A monster we all saw coming.”

“Is she okay now?” Stefan asks.

She sniffs again. “I don’t know!” she says. Too loud. Too raw. “She moved away with him. Left me all alone. Left me with no-one. Left me to find out I was seventeen and had no real friends. You know how lonely you get when someone you’re that close to just leaves? You find out that you don’t know how to function without them. You don’t know how to talk to people. You barely know how to live. And if you’re like me, and you get angry a lot, without her there, it gets out…” She shakes her head, terminating the memories. “So I came here. Started fresh. And now I sponsor. Terribly, apparently.”

“You’re doing great. Really.”

She looks at him, smiles. “I still don’t know what you did to end up here, Stef,” she says, freezing his heart for a moment before she continues, “but it doesn’t matter. I know you’re not like him. At this point, I think that’s all I need to know.”

She keeps smiling at him, looking for someone in him that he hopes he can be for her, and he leans forward, using their entwined fingers to pull her closer, slowly, making a request out of it, one she answers by matching him, stepping off the chair and onto the mattress next to him. As they embrace, as he holds her, as she leans on his shoulder and cries gently, he thinks he can see her whole life:

A troubled girl, closer with her cousin than anyone else, left suddenly alone. She seeks a new start, leaves home for Saints, and loses control of the anger her cousin helped her manage. She takes out her misery on someone or something she shouldn’t, and gets picked up by Dorley. And wears around her wrist every day her remembrance of her cousin, her grief.

Stefan grieves, too, for the person she might have been, had she been given the chance to heal without being taken and changed against her will.

Pippa pulls away, borrows a tissue, dabs at her eyes and grimaces at the dark makeup left behind, and Stefan has to make himself remember that his imagined younger Pippa is not, in fact, a girl. Because she wasn’t always like this: that younger, broken, angry Pippa was a boy, a boy whose name he’ll never know, and whose path to redemption was decided for him by someone else. Baffling, still, because she seems so complete. But fragile, today. The cracks showing on traumas that, whatever else happened to her here, never quite healed.

Fuck Declan for triggering her memories. When he washes out, which he probably will, Stefan hopes it fucking hurts.

“Stef?” Pippa says.

“Oh,” he says, “sorry. Got caught up in my head for a second there.”

“I know.” She taps him on the forehead with her free hand. “I know exactly what that looks like on you. If you’re back in the land of the living…?” She pauses and he nods. “I asked if it’s okay if I stay here a little while.”

“Sure,” he says, and they separate. Pippa finishes wiping her face, using some of his moisturiser as makeshift makeup remover. Stefan distributes pillows around so they can sit in their usual position, propped up against the wall, facing the computer. “What was that movie you were talking about?”

“Legally Blonde?” Pippa says. Without her makeup she looks strangely young; that might be why she wears it so heavily.

“That’s the one.”

“It’s a classic.”

“So, show me!”

She finds energy for the first time since she came in, and grabs his phone off the bedside table before swinging back onto the mattress next to him. She sits closer than usual, shifting her pillow along, and scrolls through the movie list on the phone. When she starts the movie she folds her arms around her belly but her elbow touches Stefan’s, and he makes sure to maintain the contact.

The movie is ridiculous and fun, and laughing together helps them both.

About an hour in she pauses it, in need of a toilet break. She locks down all the other doors so she can use the basement bathroom without one of the boys walking in on her.

“Come with me?” she says.

“Are you sure?”

“I feel kind of antsy being down here alone. Even with all the doors locked.”

“I know the feeling.”

She takes his hand and leads him out of his room and down the corridor. Stefan has the strangest feeling that he’s being conspired with, like they’re two kids sneaking down to steal cookies from the kitchen in a vintage newspaper comic strip.

In the bathroom, he leans against the wall that backs onto the shower annexe while she closes herself in a cubicle and sits down.

“Thanks for this, Stef,” she says, echoing a little.

“No problem.”

“I feel stupid for letting him get to me like that. Declan, I mean.”

“I get it,” Stefan says. “I mean, not in the same way. But he set something off in me. Like I said, I’ve never hit anyone before.”

She laughs. “You are the least toxic person we’ve ever had down here, I swear.”

“Hey,” he says, “what’s going to happen to Declan?”

“I actually don’t know. At the very least he’ll be kept in the cell for the time being. He’s been nothing but trouble since he got here, and your safety will be valued considerably higher than his freedom.” She coughs delicately. “His relative freedom, anyway.”

“That’s a relief. We were making these ridiculous plans to stay together all the time, in case he followed up on his threats. We’d even piss as a group! I wasn’t looking forward to getting up every forty-five minutes so Will can drain the snake. For such a big boy he really has a small bladder.”

Pippa flushes the toilet. “When did you make this plan?” she asks, emerging from the stall a minute or so later.

“Earlier on, in my room, after Declan made his entrance. We all crammed in there like sardines, to strategise. And, uh, get yelled at by Aaron, actually.”

“Who did? Will?”

“Me. Apparently I’ve been pushing him too hard about his dick pics.”

Pippa doesn’t say anything else until she’s finished washing and drying her hands. “Listen, Stef,” she says, playing with her bracelet again, “can we finish the movie another time? I need to, um, check in with Maria and Aunt Bea. Get the whole post-debacle debrief.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.”

She steps forward, takes his hand again. “Thanks again, Stef, for helping me. I really needed it. And, yes, I know, I should have been helping you, but—”

“No problem,” he repeats with a smile, and squeezes her hand.

She returns both gestures, then turns and skips out of the bathroom, in an obvious hurry.

Back in his room, Stefan closes down the movie player, puts on some quiet music, and lies down, closing his eyes and letting his mind go blank.

He’s okay. Pippa’s okay. Declan’s in the cell again. It’s all over; normality, or what passes for normality down here, can return at its own pace.

 

* * *

 

It takes three cups of tea; Christine goes with Paige to make the second and third, unable to stomach the thought of leaving her side, and stands on the other side of the second-floor kitchen, looking out at the woods while the kettle boils. The November cold has set in, and the trees are brittle. By the third cup, they’re standing closer together.

There’s a lot of ground to cover. A lot of explaining to do. Paige wouldn’t initially move from her position by the door, a place from which she could bolt if she needed to, and cradled that first mug of tea as if it was her only source of heat. Eventually, as Christine’s story continued, Paige consented to move to the sofa, to sit next to her.

For a moment, Christine remembers Paige before she was Paige: scared, angry, far too thin, and ready to batter down any obstacle in front of her, no matter the consequences.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she whispers. Paige takes both hands in hers, shows her a smile that might shatter, and that’s all the reply Christine needs. She cries. Falls into Paige, forces her to catch her. She knows it’s her fault, that it’s Paige who deserves comfort, but the weight of her mistakes has fallen on her and it’s impossible not to collapse under it.

In Paige’s arms, she shakes.

After a while, fingers tangle in her hair, and Paige begins carefully and slowly to run her hands from Christine’s temple to the back of her neck, smoothing out the locks, with every stroke thawing the fear that’s kept Christine frozen in place. Eventually her tears dry, but when Paige hooks her fingers back around her neck so she can draw Christine back, meet her eyes, and kiss her forehead once, twice, Christine weeps anew.

She hasn’t lost her.

“Paige?” she says, her voice unsteady and wet.

“Christine,” Paige says, “it’s okay.”

“It is?”

“I won’t say I’m not hurt. But if there’s one thing I don’t ever want, it’s to lose you again.”

Christine squeaks Paige’s name and dives back into her. She makes the only promise she can under the circumstances: she’ll never again be so stupid, and Paige will never lose her again.

Their third mugs are still warm by the time they retreat from their embrace, and Paige takes a heavy drink from hers, deliberately puncturing the gravity of the moment with appalling slurping sounds and making Christine laugh.

“God,” Christine says, “I feel like this is my first chance in a month to catch my breath. Between Stef, Aunt Bea, makeup practise, schoolwork, shopping, clubbing… it’s been non-stop. And that’s not an excuse for not telling you,” she adds quickly. “It’s just—”

“I know. Don’t forget how well I know you.” Paige grins, her slightly elongated canines cheekily resting on her lower lip. “You don’t plan; you react. And with Abby barely around, you’ve been reacting on your own, every time.” She tucks a finger under Christine’s chin. “But you’re not on your own any more. No more rash decisions, okay?”

“Okay,” Christine says, feeling the pressure of Paige’s finger against her jaw.

“And no more lies.”

“No more lies.”

Paige nods, sets down her empty mug, and draws Christine into her, wrapping long, lithe arms around her shoulders. “I love you, Christine,” Paige says, and Christine has a moment to realise that this is the first time either of them has said it this way before she answers in kind, instinctively, finding it obvious, putting all her apologies and all her love into every little prayer she whispers into Paige’s hair.

Eventually Paige releases the tension in her arms, prompting Christine to draw away, each of them stealing kisses before they fall out of reach, collapsing into the cushions on opposite ends of the sofa, tired. Still holding hands.

They sit together for a while, reconnecting, Christine mostly staying quiet, not wanting to intrude on Paige’s thoughts: she’ll be sifting through the emotions raised in her today for a while yet. Paige isn’t good with feeling abandoned or isolated, not after her parents, not after a week locked in her room. Not after Christine, last year, left her for stupid reasons. Another wound on a girl more delicate than she makes herself seem.

So she lets her set the pace, gives her the time she needs, and holds in the voice that scolds her over and over for hurting Paige again. For almost ruining the best thing ever to happen to her, again. She’s almost succumbed to her exhaustion and fallen asleep when Paige stirs.

“Just when I think this place can’t get any weirder…”

Christine takes the cue. “Rule one: this place will always get weirder. That’s why I don’t bother adjusting to new normals any more.”

“Wise.” Paige sits forward. “Show me.”

“Hmm?”

“I want to see what you can do! Show me how you break into our systems. The cameras and everything.”

“Oh,” Christine says, “yeah. Definitely.”

She sets the laptop up on top of the bean bag chair, drags it in front of the sofa so they can both see the screen without contorting themselves, and walks Paige through the software she cobbled together. As she goes through the basement cameras she drops in on Stef, who looks to be napping and thus taking Declan’s return with more aplomb than Christine expected.

“I can’t believe we finally hooked a girl,” Paige says, peering at Stef. “At least, someone who knows she’s a girl already,” she adds, grinning, “and not just a painfully obvious uncracked egg like Vicky. A real-life, self-aware trans girl! What’s she going to think of us when she moves upstairs?”

“Actually,” Christine says with a shrug, “she’s already told me.” She preens. “I’m ‘surprisingly normal’.”

“She must not know you that well, then.” Paige leans over, kisses Christine delicately on the temple. “You’re the furthest thing from normal. That’s your appeal.”

“I have an appeal?”

“Don’t push it,” Paige says, nudging Christine with her elbow. “You’re cute, but you’re not that cute.”

Christine pushes it. “I’m not cute?”

Paige giggles, pulls her in, kisses her again. “Fine. You’re adorable.”

Christine nuzzles her back, then remembers: “Oh, it’s he, by the way. For Stef. She prefers he, for now. Just in case you ever meet her. Him! Fuck.”

“That’s weird.”

“Right?”

“Shoe’s on the other foot at last,” Paige says. “Remember all your pronoun confusion, back then? This is the universe getting you back for all those times you forgot, and misgendered Vicky.”

Christine snorts. “At least she stopped kicking me. I was worried I’d have a permanent limp before we even got out of the basement.”

“I asked her to.”

“Oh?”

“I knew you weren’t being malicious. Just slow.”

“Thanks, Paige.”

On the screen, Stef sleeps. It’s good to see him calm and untroubled, even if he has to be unconscious.

“I’m glad we’re getting to do this,” Paige says. “We should help more trans people.”

“Preaching to the choir,” Christine says, taking control again and flipping through the rest of the basement cameras, trying to get up to speed. Wait, that’s weird… “Huh. Declan’s back in a cell. He was out, right? Monica made a big fuss, Pippa panicked. He was definitely out.”

Paige hovers her fingers over the trackpad. “Mind if I—?” Christine nods and gets out of the way, and Paige starts flipping through cameras with far more expertise than someone who’s been exposed for only a few minutes to Christine’s janky, home-built software should be able to manage. “Where’s Pip…?” Paige mutters to herself, and goes through the cameras on the above-ground floors until she finds her.

Pippa’s in the office, which is, apart from her, as empty as Christine would expect on a random Saturday afternoon. She’s cross-legged on the floor next to an open filing cabinet, referencing something on her phone against a file she has open on her knees, running a finger down the printed text and whispering to herself, too quiet for the microphone to pick up.

“That’s not good,” Christine says, fighting against sudden shortness of breath for the third time today. The archives contain the original, largely non-redacted records on all Dorley graduates: the information considered important to have on file somewhere, but best not left lying around on an easily accessible server. Aunt Bea decided long ago, when she started using the girls as sponsors, that she didn’t want them able to look up each other’s pre-Dorley histories on their laptops every time one of them irritated another at the breakfast table. There’s nothing in there on Stef, or any of the boys, that Pippa doesn’t already have access to on a phone or laptop, from the comfort of her own bed. Which means she’s looking for information on a graduate.

She’s got to be looking into Melissa. Stef must have slipped up somehow, revealed too much information on one of their cosy movie nights.

Shit!

“Is there a way to zoom in?” Paige says, looking over the controls.

“It’s an optical zoom,” Christine explains, balling a hand into a fist, “and an old camera. She’d hear the motor and know someone’s watching her.”

“Maybe we should— wait,” Paige interrupts herself. “She’s getting up.”

They watch on the screen as Pippa lays out a few sheets of paper from the file, takes pictures with her phone, puts everything back in its proper place, and marches out of the room. Paige follows Pippa around the building with the cameras and Christine leans against her, borrowing some of her body heat and forcing breath into her lungs, one heave at a time.

Why can’t things be normal for just one day?

 

* * *

 

Pippa wakes him from a dreamless sleep by sitting down heavily on the end of his bed and startling him back to consciousness. She throws her phone, unlocked and showing a paused video file, onto the mattress next to him. He blinks a few times, wishing for coffee or possibly something to hide behind — Pippa’s face is rock-still, and he’s seen her kick walls and hit tables when she gets like this — until he starts getting his focus back.

“Who are you really, Stefan?” she says, and he shakes his head, pretending not to understand the question, buying himself a little more time. He picks up the phone, squints at the screen, and drops it back onto the bed as he pushes up on his elbows, discards the sheets, and disentangles himself, ready to run, should he need to.

The question of where enters his head, but he ignores it. One problem at a time.

“You said you made a plan with the other boys,” Pippa says, “and I might not be much of a sponsor but if four of you are doing things like meeting in a bedroom and making plans, then it felt like something someone might need to know about, and I figured it was better that I looked into it first rather than have someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t care about you stumble over the footage in the archive review, because if you say something you shouldn’t and it’s something I can protect you from, then that’s something I want to do. So I looked. And I heard that.”

She nods at the phone. Stefan looks at it properly for the first time: the video is frozen on a top-down view of his room, earlier that day, with him, Aaron, Will and Adam packed in. He’s paused in the act of saying something, as difficult to look at as ever.

He decides to look at Aaron, instead. Fear clogs his throat: what could any of them have possibly said to upset Pippa so?

She reaches out and taps the screen.

“—the emotion we call friendship is queer or something. I’ve not been as close to anyone since Russ or Melissa.”

“Oh, shit, are we finally getting your tragic backstory?”

“No. Not—”

Another couple of taps to rewind the footage and show it again. Three times, before she scoops up her phone and drops it into her bag.

“Russ and Melissa,” she says. “Russ and Melissa, Stef!”

“I know!” he says, making sure his arms are free in front of him, in case he needs to defend himself. Her shoulders are rising and falling too fast as she takes short, quick breaths. “I heard!”

“You have thirty seconds to tell me how you know Melissa,” Pippa says, “or I’m taking this straight to Aunt Bea.” She’s speaking levelly but every so often her control wobbles and a word hisses out through clenched teeth. He’s never seen her like this.

He swings his legs out of bed, rests his hands in his lap. “I followed her here,” he says, telling as little of the truth as he thinks he can get away with; it’s not just his future on the line but Christine’s, too. “To Saint Almsworth, not to Dorley. If… if you know we’re connected, then you know we were close. She disappeared when I was young, and I never believed she was dead, the way everyone else did. I was convinced if I came here, if I attended Saints, I might be able to find out what happened to her. But I never did, and I— I got depressed, started behaving badly—”

“Stef,” Pippa says, looking right through him; hearing him but not seeing him, “stop lying.”

“I’m not—!”

Pippa punches the mattress, making Stefan jump. “Her name wasn’t always Melissa and you fucking know it!” She whips her head around. “I know you knew her before she was Melissa, from her file. Your name shows up in there as much as her own brother’s. But she — he — vanished from your life. So. How. Do. You. Know. Her?” She emphasises the pronoun by slapping the mattress again.

He works his mouth uselessly, silently, swallowing down the rushing in his ears. That was probably the worst mistake he could have made. He’s too damn used to thinking of Melissa as Melissa! A favourite phrase of his mother’s drops into his head: Engage brain before opening mouth. And of his father’s: Stupid boy!

“I know,” he says, editing his story again. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I got used to thinking of her that way. Years ago, I saw her, out near the supermarket. She recognised me and I recognised her. She dropped her debit card, and I picked it up, saw her name. I was never completely sure she was the same person as Mark, but it was better than believing he was dead.”

“What are you saying?” Pippa says, her eyes focusing on him again at last.

“Abby said some of the people who live upstairs have been treated here. Not here here, not the girls, anyway, but she was in the programme, and that’s when I finally put it together, that Melissa really was Mark, and she had a difficult transition, and came here for treatment, and—”

“Shut! Up!” Pippa yells, throwing her bag across the room, switching so quickly from stillness to violence that Stefan hiccups in surprise. She stands, fists clenched by her sides, quivering with rage, a wire of uncoiled energy with nowhere to strike. “You keep lying! I can see it in your eyes! You’re panicking, trying to find a version of the story that will make me go away! Jesus, Stef!” She kicks out at the chair, knocks it over, starts pacing in the tiny area of floor between the door and the bed. “I thought we were close, Stef! I thought we were friends!”

It comes out before he can stop it. “Then why do you keep lying to me about the injections?” he shouts.

Pippa freezes. Stefan, too.

Stupid boy.

“What do you mean?” Pippa says, quietly, slowly. Almost inaudibly.

Stefan reaches up with a stiff hand and presses hard on his chest, massaging movement back into his body. It’s obvious there’s no point in continuing the charade any longer: she has more than enough information, one way or another, to get to the truth, or something close to it, with or without him. And if he tells her now, himself, in his own words, he has at least a chance at regaining some of her trust.

“I know about the estradiol, Pippa,” he says.

She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move.

“It’s in what you say— what you’ve been told to say is a vitamin injection. Once a week. It works with the implant in the stomach, which you’ll move us off before too long.”

“What else do you know?” she whispers.

“I know how you move us off the implant.”

Pippa, a marionette with her strings cut, almost falls as she staggers towards the bed. Stefan intercepts her, helps her sit, piles cushions behind her, gently lowers her until her head and neck are supported.

“You know everything?” she whispers.

“More or less.”

“And when you say you know what comes after the implant, you mean the orchi.” It’s not a question.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know how I was going to deal with that,” Pippa says, glassy-eyed. “I didn’t know how I was going to send you into that room, knowing what’s going to happen to you.”

Stefan takes a risk: he holds her hand. She grips it like a life preserver.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“It’s not okay. It’s barbaric.”

“You survived it.”

She sits halfway up, stares at him, and then her energy leaves her and she falls again. “Jesus,” she says. “You really do know everything.”

“Look,” he says, “Pippa, you don’t have to worry about that, for me.” He finds himself smiling. It’s different, coming out to her; he’s had weeks to think about it, weeks to be certain that, finally, he knows himself. And Pippa’s not a near-stranger like Christine was, in those early days. She’s his friend. “The truth is, I really did seek this place out because of what happened to my childhood best friend. She became Melissa; I wanted that for myself, too. I needed it. I’m transgender, Pippa. I’m a girl. Or I should be.”

It’s like she forgets how to breathe for a moment. She can’t take her eyes off him, and stills completely, her only movement in her knuckles as her grip on the sheets tightens. “This isn’t a joke, is it?” she whispers.

“No.”

Laughter bursts out of her like a firecracker, and she rolls over, wraps herself suddenly around him, encloses him with her whole body. All her energy now directed into holding him tight, the way Abby did. The way no-one else really has for a long time. “Stef!” she says, pulling away, cheeks flushed, hysterical. “You’re a girl! My goodness, Stef. Wow. God. Stef. What the hell? You’re a— you’re a flipping girl.”

“Yep,” he says, shrugging.

“You could have told me.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“No,” she says, “it’s okay. I understand why you didn’t.” She rolls onto her back again and empties her lungs with a long, coarse, descending whistle. “Wait; you didn’t tell anyone about this place, did you?”

“No. No-one.”

“Good. Because that was a scary thought.” She chews on her lip for a second. “I had sudden visions of police showing up, all of us being dragged away in cuffs…”

“I wouldn’t do that to you. Even if I, uh, don’t exactly agree with what happens here.”

“It’s worth it in the end.”

“So I keep hearing.”

“I still don’t understand, though,” Pippa says slowly, cracking her knuckles and resting her hands on her stomach, looking for a moment like a corpse prepared for a funeral; she’s still too pale. “How did you find out about this place? I mean, I guess you staged that thing outside, with the girl screaming, and you passing out in the flower bed, but who was she? Stef, if you have an accomplice, we need to know, before—”

He’s saved from having to think of a new lie, a new way to keep Christine out of it, by the whistling of the speaker set into the strip above the door.

“What—?” Pippa has time to say.

Christine’s voice, a whisper loud enough to fill the room, says, “Pippa, it was me.”

 

* * *

 

Christine hasn’t been back up to the roof since the night she met Naila and Ren — who are now staples of Vicky and Lorna’s social group and joining the clamour for Christine one day to play Bloodborne, if only because Naila thinks Eileen the Crow is hot — and it was much warmer then. She shivers inside her jacket and wishes for the wisdom of Paige, who pulled on a calf-length woolly cardigan and a blazer and still looks amazing; Christine, in her huge, puffy coat, looks like an M&M’s mascot, and is still cold.

She did little talking in the end. Her intervention gave Stef permission to tell the whole of the truth, and so he did, in detail, holding Pippa’s hand and laughing with her about some of the sillier parts; skipping over the bits where Pippa was personally unpleasant to him. When he was done, Pippa thanked him, nodded up at the camera, and left. They tracked her through the building on the cameras and when it became clear she was headed for the roof, they followed, at speed.

Pippa’s not leaning dramatically over the railing, as Christine feared. She’s not even near the edge; a week ago the fifth floor had a party up here and left behind a tarp spread over the central gravel garden and an assortment of old couches. Pippa’s pulled the clear plastic off one of them and she’s idly playing with a loose thread on its arm, staring at nothing in particular.

Paige gives Christine’s hand a final squeeze before they uncouple, and gives Pippa the spare coat she brought. Wordlessly Pippa accepts it, struggles into it without getting up, and slumps back into the cushions. Paige sits next to her; Christine, not wanting to crowd her, sits cross-legged on the couch opposite, not bothering to remove the plastic cover. The roof is both empty and lacks microphones, so they have more privacy here than almost anywhere else in the Hall.

“Hi,” Christine says.

Pippa turns red eyes on her. “You know,” she says, “I’m almost too relieved about Stef to be angry at you. Almost.” She laughs, hoarse. “She’s not going to be mutilated. She’s going to be saved. And,” she adds, rolling her eyes, “yes, I know, that’s the point — all of us were saved — but she wants it. She needs it. This might—” she coughs, her voice straining against a dry throat, “—actually be a good year for me. I get to do something unequivocally good, not just good-with-an-asterisk, like I expected.”

“Good-with-an-asterisk is still good,” Paige says.

“Pretty flipping big asterisk, though,” Pippa says.

“True.”

“Pippa—” Christine starts.

“No. I still want to say my bit. You lied to me, Christine. All that stuff with the letters, the manipulation, the whole, ‘Oh, I just had a great idea about how to deal with Stef!’ thing… And that’s not even why I’m angry at you, really. You made me think I was your friend, Christine.”

“You are my friend!”

“Maybe that’s how it turned out. Maybe that’s how it will turn out, again. But give me some time, okay?”

Christine nods. “Okay.”

“I get it, though,” Pippa says. “Stef is… I don’t know. She makes me want to help her. Always did, ever since I stopped screwing my eyes shut to yell at her, trying my hardest not to see what was really there. So I understand why you did what you did. But just… time.”

“Time. Of course.” A much more generous reaction than Christine deserves, probably.

Paige says, “Stef likes to be called he.”

“I know,” Pippa says. “I’m not doing that. I haven’t told her that, yet, but it’s my price: no self-pitying denial of your own gender, or I’ll get really annoying.” She smiles, rubs at the corner of her mouth where the skin on her lip has split. “Without the guilt, without worrying I’m going to hurt her in a way she can’t handle, I’m free! She has no idea what she’s unleashed.”

“A force of pure meddling,” Paige says.

“When we’re alone together, she’s going to be a she, and I’m going to make sure she knows it.”

“That’s probably exactly what Stef needs,” Christine says.

“Damn right. And at least it all makes sense now,” Pippa adds, rolling her head around in the couch cushion and messing up her hair. “Even the way she’s been bugging Aaron about his crap.”

“I think Stef’s trying to beat us to it,” Christine says. “Win a moral victory. Reform Aaron before we can turn him into a girl.”

“No. I mean, that might be a tiny part of it, but I’ve seen them together. In person, not just over the cameras. She likes him. And she can’t stand having a friend with such a glaring moral blind spot. So she’s been working on him, bit by bit. There might even have been a bit of a breakthrough, earlier today.”

“Wow. Go Stef.”

“We need a plan,” Paige says, leaning forward on her knees and interposing herself between Christine and Pippa. “There are four of us who know now, including Abby, and we need to decide how to move forward.”

“Uh,” Christine says, nodding towards the door down to the dorms, behind Paige and Pippa, “that might be a moot point.” It’s just swung open and spat out Maria, who frowns and hugs her belly as the cold air hits her.

“Girls,” Maria says as she approaches, and Pippa and Paige twist in their seats to look at her, “can you give me a few moments alone with Christine, please?”

 

* * *

 

Stefan’s put some quiet music on — another of Pippa’s playlists — and is tapping at his phone, starting and restarting another diary entry to send up to Christine. He wonders how she’s doing, now that her part in all this has been laid completely bare to Pippa, warts and all, rather than the edited, sanitised form they supplied to Abby. Pippa, for all that she was happy not to have to lie to him any more, seemed pretty angry with her.

He shrugs. Nothing he can do about it, except perhaps to ask Pippa to give Christine a chance. She didn’t ask for him to come barrelling into her life, and he’s demanded an awful lot of her.

The music is suddenly obliterated by the noise of the lock cycling, and Stefan wastes a whole second panicking. Quickly he pauses the song and throws his phone under the pillow while he wonders who it could be. Even Maria knocks before she comes in these days; perhaps it’s Monica or one of Adam or Will’s sponsors?

No. It’s much worse.

Beatrice, custodian of Dorley Hall and the woman with, ultimately, the power of life and death over him and almost everyone else he knows, enters with grace and poise, taking up position between the door and the bed, arms folded over her chest. Blocking the exit. She lets the silence roll out until it threatens to suffocate him and then says, with a pleasant but deliberately neutral tone, “Hello again, Stefan. Or would you, perhaps, prefer Stefanie?”

Yeah. Okay. Now it’s over. Her voice reminds him of Pippa’s, when she’s angry. It’s too level. Too controlled.

“Just Stef is fine,” he says, struggling to speak through a throat suddenly thickened by fear.

Beatrice hooks the chair with a foot and drags it over, sits daintily on it, still positioned such that Stefan, should he wish to leave, would have to go straight through her, would not be able to open the door without first moving her. “Well then! Stef.” She says his preferred name in the manner of a waiter suggesting the best and most expensive item on the menu. “I’ve had the most intriguing evening. Maria came to me with a problem: we’ve been used.” She smiles. “What do you think we should do about that?”

His breath freezes in his throat, and when he tries to speak he manages only a strangled, undignified noise.

“A short while ago, Pippa — wonderful girl; very loyal — left your room and headed straight to the roof. Didn’t even stop at her room to pick up a coat, and it is such a cold evening. Unusual behaviour, to say the least. So, naturally, she looked into it, first by searching through the camera footage and then by discussing it with her directly, and do you know what we discovered? One might term it a conspiracy! Between you and Christine. To hide from—”

“Please,” Stefan says, forcing the words out, “this isn’t Christine’s fault. I forced this on her. Don’t punish her.”

“Relax, child. Christine may well have been running around right under my nose for the past month, lying and scheming and making an enormous mess that she will, I guarantee, be required to clean up, but she appears to have acted entirely out of compassion and concern. She protected this house, she protected this programme; she even tried to protect you from yourself. Her most major mistake was that she didn’t come to me immediately, but I can understand that. I am, I’m told, rather intimidating sometimes. Frankly, I’m quite proud of her. So don’t worry about Christine.” She smiles her quick, predatory smile again. “Worry about yourself.”

He coughs when he tries to speak, and Beatrice rolls her eyes.

“For goodness’ sake,” she mutters, and pulls a bottle of water out of her bag, throwing it onto the mattress next to Stefan. “I’m not that scary. Drink. I haven’t come here to punish you, either.” She rolls her eyes at his confusion. “Yes, yes, I’m upset with you, Stef, obviously. But we can help each other, as long as you abide by the new rules. Drink!”

Stefan obeys, almost unable to feel the lukewarm water in his throat. What new rules?

“Now,” Beatrice says, settling back on the chair, making herself look somehow comfortable and relaxed on the horrible, rattly thing, “before we get to the point, you need to understand something of how the programme works.” She pauses for a reaction; Stefan nods. “It works because we, all of us, believe in it. We get up every morning and we go to bed every night secure in the knowledge that the suffering we inflict is temporary, that it is all for a purpose; that, ultimately, we are helping those we appear, superficially, to be hurting. If we didn’t believe in the work, we could not continue. Nevertheless, it is work, and it is difficult, especially for thoughtful young women like Pippa, who do not relish the hardships we must visit on the young people in our care. I understand you are au fait with our methods? Then you are aware that, not long in the future, you and the boys will undergo orchiectomies? Good. I would like you to imagine how Pippa, sweet, kind Pippa, would feel, escorting you into that room, knowing — or believing she knows — that you are ignorant of what is to come.”

“I didn’t—”

“I am not finished!” She’s suddenly a teacher, scolding a disruptive child, and Stefan instinctively retreats farther into the pillows stacked up at the end of the bed. “Every hour she has spent in your company has been coloured by the knowledge that she has had to lie to you, to maintain your ignorance, so that your reform can proceed in the manner that it should! And that means sleepless nights! Stressful days! Endless worry about how you will respond to the treatments! It is a considerable burden, and she took it up for you! You understand this, yes? Then how dare you inflict that suffering upon her for no purpose!”

“I didn’t want to!” Stefan yells, finding the tiniest crack between sentences. “And I was trying to be her friend!”

“For your own sake! You offloaded all the responsibility for your life, your transition, onto her, and you didn’t even marshal the grace or the sense God gave you to tell her the truth.” She leans forward, glares at him. “That is supremely selfish.”

Screw it. “I’m selfish?” Stefan says, gathering himself, pushing up out of the pillows. “I’m selfish? You’re sitting on the mother lode of boutique transition services and you’re hoarding them for your awful little pet project! Do you know how many trans women would kill for this? How many have died for the lack of it?”

“Yes!” she yells, and pauses, finger raised, reconsidering, the anger vanishing from her face. “Yes,” she repeats, and sits delicately back on the chair. “Of course I do, Stef. I’m… sorry for shouting.”

“Um,” Stefan says, unable to keep up with Beatrice’s rapidly switching mood, “what’s happening here?”

“I’m sure we do look selfish, to you,” Beatrice says, sounding almost wistful. “But there are reasons. I expected you to have intuited them,” she adds, with a little of her former sharpness. “Dorley Hall has a history, and an awful lot of graduates. For the most part, they’ve melted seamlessly back into the world from which they were taken, but they all share a common point of origin: this house. Our shared vulnerable point. And while I would deeply love to provide our care to those who would request it as well as require it, I inherited a responsibility when I took over this house, a responsibility to everyone who passes through our doors, to protect their new lives and keep their old secrets. And it is an unfortunate reality of transgender medical care in this country that any facility which falls outside the jurisdiction of the NHS comes under sustained and hostile investigation.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Ask Pippa to look it up for you. Or do it yourself, when we remove the restrictions on your computer. We can give you lists of names: providers of private transgender medical care who have been hounded. It is an inevitability, for those who would follow that calling. If one of the cockroaches who scurry around the centralised mental health system doesn’t report you, then one of the professional busybodies who comprise most of our national press will run a piece on you for pennies, and before you know it, you’re under investigation. I’ve seen it happen every time—” she slaps her fist onto her open palm to emphasise each word, “—a new practice starts. Five years, they last. Ten, if they’re extraordinarily clever or taking advantage of some loophole. And we can’t withstand that kind of scrutiny. Every one of us would be exposed. Many would go to prison.”

“I don’t understand how you’re even still here,” Stefan says, “if you’re so vulnerable.”

“Because we are a family, Stef. We take care of each other. We are reliant upon each other, even those of us who leave and never return. We provide stipends, references, documentation. A complete new life, but one that has its foundations here, at Dorley Hall. If the Hall falls, everyone falls with it. We are, I admit, a house of cards, but thus far we are a resilient one.”

Of course. It makes a kind of sense: an interdependent group, all complicit. And all made to start their lives again from scratch, at Dorley, to find new family and friends here and only here; if you get it into your head to turn on the others, who do you have left?

Forced feminisation on the honour system.

Stefan’s still certain they could find ways to treat trans people at Dorley without risking the safety of the existing graduates, if they applied some of the effort and enthusiasm to the idea that they currently reserve solely for growing breasts on unwilling men, but Beatrice is clearly unreceptive. She’s had years — decades — to stew in her own bullshit; the chances of him arguing her around are slim.

But it’s slowly sinking that he’s not actually doomed. She talked about ‘new rules’ he’ll have to follow, and this conversation has gone on far longer than it would have if she planned simply to wash him out. The realisation is almost calming. And it means he’ll have time to work on her. To work on the others. Make some suggestions, here and there. Improve things, maybe.

There’s something he has to know, though: “Why? Why do this to men in the first place?”

She smiles. “I admit, it’s unorthodox. And the series of events by which we came to it, even more so. But it works. You’ve met countless examples of that. And it’s necessary.”

“No,” he says, “I don’t accept that. Look at Pippa, right? She was just this lonely kid, struggling with loss and grief and immense family turmoil, but she makes one mistake and she gets kidnapped, gets slung down here. I can’t bring myself to believe she deserved it.”

“You know her so well, after a month?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t even know what she did.”

“It doesn’t matter. You never gave her a chance to change!”

“This was her chance. And she took it. Struggled with it, yes, for a while—” a smile flickers across her face, and Stefan almost doesn’t want to think about what she might be remembering, “—but she prevailed.”

“But—”

“Christine,” Beatrice says, counting on her fingers. “Abigail. Monica. Edy. Tabby. Every other sponsor you’ve met down here. All of them, at one time, were like Adam, William, or your Aaron. Some of them were even like Oliver or Raphael or Martin. All of them, reformed. All of them, happy.”

“They couldn’t have been happy as men?”

“I don’t see how that matters.”

Stefan laughs, bitter. “I think it matters a lot!”

“You think William’s happiness mattered, when he found out his younger brother was gay, and beat him? When subsequently he took out his guilt on other students? You want to send him back out there, to spiral, to hurt people, to find his happiness on the bodies of those weaker than him?”

“But—”

“Or what about your Aaron? Did his happiness matter, when he inflicted himself on women who barely even knew him?”

“He does regret that,” Stefan protests.

“Right now, he regrets it, but purely because you require it of him, and you are his only friend, and he’s stuck down here with you. Do you think your… tinkering will last, out there?”

“It might.”

Beatrice laughs. She extracts another water bottle from her bag and takes a long drink from it, makes a show of looking around the room. “It won’t,” she says. “Are you familiar with Charlotte Church?”

“No. One of yours?”

“Not one of ours, no. She is a singer, one from, I now realise, considerably before your time. Goodness, but you all get younger every year.” She sighs, and blows a strand of hair out of her face. “Charlotte Church was — is — a Christian singer. She became famous in the nineties for her angelic voice and sweet manner. Famous enough that it was, for a time, quite difficult to relax in front of the television on a Sunday evening without encountering mention of her.” Beatrice grins. “That’s something we used to do, by the way: switch on the television and watch whatever was put in front of us. I know that’s hard for someone your age to understand.”

“Yeah, actually.”

“Charlotte Church was eleven when she made her debut,” Beatrice continues, “and she became a constant presence in the media. A mascot for chaste, Christian — and very, very white — innocence. And then, four years later, when she was just fifteen, our largest national newspaper published a huge photograph of her, taken from an angle that emphasised her chest, above the headline, ‘She’s a big girl now’.”

“That’s… disgusting.”

“Precisely! Here was a girl, fifteen years old, known to us all since she was eleven, and the publishers of our largest newspaper were so eager to post pictures of her developing bosom that they were unable to make themselves wait until she was an adult. That is the environment in which we all have to live, Stef; the sea in which we all swim.”

Driftwood, Stefan remembers. Driftwood in the ocean. “What are you getting at?”

“In this country we prioritise — celebrate — the objectification of women while simultaneously condemning and even legally punishing women who have the nerve to take their lives or their sexuality into their own hands. Women speak out about the abuse they’ve received and are pilloried on television. Sex workers are forced to operate at great personal risk to themselves while the men and women who run our media salivate over children. At every level the message is the same: women’s bodies are not women’s property. How do you expect a young man who has become like the men we induct into our programme to reform in the outside world, when it is run by and for those exactly like him? Men like your Aaron infest our culture, and at every level they grant permission to themselves and those who follow in their footsteps to be as repulsive as they please. It’s easy to be an abusive man in Great Britain, Stef. Horrifyingly easy. And it escalates with privilege. I believe Aaron himself sidestepped responsibility for his repeated exposures, did he not? Excused consequences on account of being wealthy, white, and male?”

Stefan nods. He’s been searching for a counter-argument, but all he has is torture is wrong, actually. Nothing in his education prepared him to have to support that statement, and in the face of the reminder that Will beat up his younger brother — and others besides, it sounds like — he’s less sure than ever that he even wants to any more.

“Imagine returning Aaron, as he is now, to the world,” Beatrice says. “Can you really guarantee that he wouldn’t backslide? Renege on his meagre progress? In a country that elevates behaviour like his, excuses it, rewards it?”

“Okay,” Stefan says, “maybe not. But not all men are like that—” He groans as Beatrice interrupts him; did he really just pull a not all men?

“And that would be a good point if we had all men in our basement, Stef. We do not. We are selective.” She leans forward, smiling gently, adopting the air of a concerned guidance counsellor. “Stef, if I may be blunt — and everyone around me is, constantly, so I believe I shall indulge — you are a woman. You have always been a woman, whatever your external appearance might suggest. You have, therefore, experienced masculinity, and particularly the kind of grasping, possessive, abusive masculinity that we as a society have decided is appropriate to teach our young men, as nothing but a curse, correct? An unpleasant and often entirely irrational system of behaviour to which you have been expected to conform, and uphold in others.”

“Um,” Stefan says, trying to control his reaction to being called a woman, to having his womanhood recognised so casually, acknowledged so completely. “Yes, I suppose.”

“Would you agree that your compliance with masculinity has been, shall we say, coerced? Not something you would have chosen for yourself?”

Stefan nods, and carefully avoids getting lost in memories.

“Then I suspect you will find it hard to believe how… seductive it can be,” Beatrice says. “Imagine that you are a boy. Masculinity, as expressed by the patriarchy, all the way from the repulsive man who currently occupies the office of the prime minister down to your peers at school, your family, and the men you see on the television, tells you what you are. It dictates your behaviour, lays out the rules around which you must structure your life. But in return it offers power. Power over other men, should you make yourself strong enough; power over women, almost by default. ‘You are strong,’ it whispers to you, as you grow taller than the girls at your school. ‘You are powerful,’ it tells you, as you get into your first fight. ‘You deserve her,’ it insists, as you look at a pretty woman at a bar or in the street. And, to those who will listen, it says, ‘Even if she refuses you, she is nonetheless yours. Take her!’” Stefan jumps a little when she raises her voice. “‘Take her and do with her what you will, for it is your right.’

“Most men, of course, are not so ruled by their desires that they will act on every impulse. And many men are capable of ignoring those messages entirely, filtering them, discovering a healthy masculinity inside the radioactive dust that infests our social atmosphere. But, as you have seen, there are men who are overwhelmed by these messages. Who are shaped by them so completely that there is practically nothing else left inside them. They are… broken people. Excellent vessels for the — oh, what did that absurd scientist with the honey fixation call it? — the meme of masculinity. The infectious idea that burrows into the brain and takes over.

“The problem for these men is that masculinity — toxic masculinity, if you will; violent, virulent masculinity — is a seductive lover but an abusive husband. Once you are in its grip, you can never be strong enough, never exercise enough power, never hurt enough people. You find yourself trapped between two destinies.

“Some of these broken men, they despise themselves. They victimise others because they are too weak not to, and they loathe their weakness. Many of them manage to put up a front — brusqueness; belligerence; humour — but the self-hatred eats away at them, and eventually they will be destroyed by it, consumed by the parasite.

“Others become nothing but the violence. They have contempt for their victims, and admire only strength and cruelty. They are, essentially, monsters.

“The one who hates himself, who lives with the weakness and the guilt and the shame, even if he takes them out on others, he can be fixed, but only if he is willing properly to purge his masculinity. To confront his abuser. Extract his parasite. The monsters, however, are irredeemable, and must be dealt with accordingly.” She rests her chin on her hand, drums her fingers against her lips. “The programme, in its early stage, is designed to tell us who among the boys we have taken in is a monster, and who is a victim. Who is lost, and who can be saved. And also, to a lesser extent, who is malleable enough to accept the transformation, and who is not. A difficult task, at the best of times.”

“And one that I’m currently… complicating,” Stefan says.

Beatrice laughs. “Your amateur meddling thus far has had little to no effect. But you can, I believe, be of use to us in the coming months.”

Stefan coughs. “Of use to you?”

“Yes. And please don’t let my pleasant manner deceive you into thinking you have room to decline. As I said: you used us. You used Pippa, particularly; made her into an accomplice in your torture. Made her hurt you. Made her stand there and watch as the nurse assaulted you. A very difficult weight to hang around the neck of someone as kind as she. That kind of carelessness comes with a price, Stef. You owe us. You owe Pippa. You owe me.”

Lanced with guilt, Stefan nods.

“It won’t be a difficult job,” Beatrice assures him, returning to her earlier bright tones. “Mostly you’ll carry on as you are now. And except as much as is required to keep up appearances, you’ll be exempted from anything unrelated to your biomedical transition, which we will, of course, continue to provide for you, as we would have had your deception remained undiscovered.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome. But there will be times that are particularly difficult for the boys. The true onset of their second puberties, for example, and our surgical interventions.”

“You mean, the castration.”

“The orchiectomy, yes. And it is in those times that a positive example can work wonders. Someone who takes to the changes with, if not pleasure, then without the sense of apocalyptic doom that invades even those who are ultimately saved by our methods. Someone who can talk them through their feelings, help them to grow comfortable with their changing bodies. You’ll be our Judas goat.”

“‘Judas goat’?”

“It’s an archaic term. Put simply, it is an animal, kept in comfort, trained to lead the other animals, with a minimum of panic, into the slaughterhouse.”

“That’s… startlingly appropriate, actually,” Stefan says, prompting a rather less appropriate laugh from Beatrice.

“You are inside the boys’ trust,” she says, still smiling. “They view you as one of them, and as such they will accept reassurances from you that would sound empty and self-serving from the rest of us. I also suspect it’s nothing you weren’t planning to do already. Your empathy for these boys is commendable; I doubt you would be able to witness your Aaron, for example, in distress without attempting to help him.”

“This is a lot to ask,” Stefan says. “Staying quiet is one thing, but helping you mutilate these people…?”

“My dear Stef,” Beatrice says, “I am not asking.” She spreads out her hands. “These are the new rules. If you comply, you will live in comfort, your transition will be paid for, and you will exit this house with the same rights and privileges afforded to all our young women. If you do not comply, you will leave this place in the same manner as young Declan.”

“Declan’s washing out?”

“Yes. He is a rapist. An unrepentant and persistent one. By his own testimony he has damned himself. But that’s beside the point: this is not a negotiation. You have no hand to play. Do you know how many boys have passed through this basement? Would you care to venture a guess at how many of them have never been seen again, in any form? Your disappearance, should it be required, would not present any difficulties at all. I don’t like to waste people, Stef, but I do require your compliance. You have, ultimately, the same choice all our girls have to make, at one time or another: to accept my methods, or reject them.”

Stefan forces a few breaths. Buries shaking hands in the folds of the duvet to keep from giving himself away. “That’s no choice at all.”

“Exactly,” Beatrice says. “And relax! You’re getting everything you wanted. So, Stef Riley, do we have your cooperation?”

Stefan, out of options and quite possibly out of his mind, shrugs. “I suppose we do.”

There. Now he’s complicit. Just like Christine.

“Magnificent.” Beatrice brushes some imaginary crumbs off her skirt. “I’m looking forward to seeing how you turn out; you have such pretty features buried under there. And your progress through the programme and your influence on the boys will make for an interesting case study! Oh, and don’t worry about the nurse. I’m grateful that you helped bring her to my attention. She won’t be bothering anyone again, thanks to you.”

“Um, what? What did you do to her?”

Beatrice contorts her mouth, like a smile. “I had her removed.”

The implication is clear. Stefan bites the inside of his cheek for a second, and nods. Complicit in that, too.

“Now, if that is all,” Beatrice says, “you have a new future to prepare for and I have other tasks to accomplish tonight.”

“Oh, yes, fine,” Stefan says, hesitant, still imagining a dozen possible final fates for the nurse. “Um,” he adds, sheepishly feeling like he should say something more, “thank you for the opportunity.”

Beatrice stands, smooths out her clothes, and steps over to the bed. She holds out a hand and smiles a bland, corporate smile.

“Welcome to the team.”