9. Vertigo

2019 October 25
Friday

“Best behaviour, ladies,” Indira says to the assembled Sisters in the ground floor kitchen, a mix of second-years, third-years, and sponsors. “We’re going to have a guest.”

Hasan, Indira’s childhood-friend-turned-boyfriend, has been imminent for over a week, constantly delayed by work, but, as Dira told Christine in a glowing voice this morning, he went to his boss and demanded a four-day weekend so he could visit his girlfriend, meet her friends, and see the sights in sunny Almsworth.

“Yes,” Paige says, elbowing Christine suggestively, “I’m sure we’re going to see so much of Hasan.” They’ve snagged two chairs at the kitchen table, not ordinarily a precious commodity, but in short supply this afternoon, as various second years mill about, preparing dishes, talking quietly to each other, and snatching the occasional shy glance at the third years. Christine, watching them, wonders what they think of her: do they see another woman? Or are they still fighting the programme, still viewing themselves and everyone around them as men too weak to stop themselves from being permanently altered?

Not particularly helpful thoughts. Christine does her best to ignore them. “What do you mean?”

“You know how she feels about him,” Paige whispers, and adds, to Christine’s raised eyebrows, an almost-too-quiet-to-hear impression of squeaking bedsprings. Christine, lightly and with love, hits her.

“Now,” Indira’s saying, ignoring Paige’s commentary, “you should all have had the standard visitor protocol explained to you. Yes?” Christine nods, to prompt the second-year girls, and after a few seconds most of them start nodding, too. “Good. The only slight wrinkle is that Hasan believes Christine and I are transgender women. So if he says something to one of the two of us that suggests he ‘knows’ anything, I can promise you, that’s all he knows. So don’t panic. That’s Christine there, by the way.” She points. Six second-years stare.

“Hi,” Christine says, waving with crooked fingers and wishing she’d worn a hoodie over her dress so she could cover her face and conceal her blush. She shuffles closer to Paige and whispers, “Hide me.” Paige, amused, just pokes her with her elbow again.

One of the second years waves back.

“Is he right?” another second-year girl says.

“Right about what?” Indira says.

“That you’re a trans woman?”

Indira smiles. “That’s closest to how I view myself, yes. It’s also how I’ve chosen to present myself to the outside world.”

“Wow,” the girl whispers.

“What about you?” the girl who waved says to Christine.

“Oh, uh, no comment,” Christine says.

“Christine is still in her third year here,” Indira says, “and has not yet been required to define her NPH; that’s her New Personal History, if your sponsors haven’t covered that yet.” Her frown at the confused faces in front of her suggests they should have. “So don’t hassle her about it. But she’s met Hasan before, and introduced herself to him as trans, so for tonight, and whenever Hasan is around, she’s a trans girl and so am I. He shouldn’t cause you much trouble, anyway; Aunt Bea and your sponsors will be available to help you, and for the most part you will be separated from him. Hasan will be with me, and my group. Paige, don’t complain.”

“I wasn’t going to!” Paige says, with an edge of sulk to her voice.

Paige collects fringe gender theories like Aunt Bea collects amusing coffee mugs, and the presence of an uncomplicatedly cis man inside the hallowed walls of Dorley will put a fairly large and unaccustomed restriction on her mealtime topic selection. Christine knows for a fact that she’s spent whole hours this week listening to a podcast by a guy who claims there is only one gender, that it is the gender of angels, and that men and women are merely aspects of it — because Paige came to her one morning to enthuse about its finer details while Christine was attempting to replicate a particularly annoying makeup look; a captive audience — and she also knows Paige has been waiting to talk about it with Abby, who is out of all of them the most ready to discuss gender apocrypha but who has been away all week at her ‘real’ job. Having to leave it until after Aunt Bea’s big birthday dinner, when they’ll all be too tired and sleepy properly to concentrate on its fascinating intricacies, will be torture for her.

Paige’s sponsor, Francesca, has told her off several times for cultivating so many unorthodox interests, to which Paige generally responds that the purpose of Dorley is simply to create women, not boring women. And besides, of the two of them, who has thirty thousand Instagram followers and who has sixteen?

There’s a reason they don’t socialise together.

“Think of it as good practise for being cisgender,” Indira says, and Paige sticks out her tongue in response.

Paige explained to Christine a while back that she’s stuck with her identity as a cis woman, that she ended up railroaded into it before she had a chance to think properly about the choice. When Christine asked why, Paige replied, “Marketability.” Her Instagram, and the contacts she’s made through it, are her ticket to a future in which she will, one day, she hopes, be able to do whatever she wants; too important to risk. Later that night, however, a drunk and talkative Paige cornered her, looked deeply and unsteadily into her eyes, and explained that her cisgender façade runs only as deep as it needs to, and that once she finds a partner she can trust with her life and her secrets she will reveal herself absolutely and completely to them. “Assuming they don’t know everything about me already,” she added with the intense seriousness of the very drunk, just before a distraught look plastered itself to her face and she rushed off towards the nearest bathroom. A concerned Christine followed her and spent the next half-hour holding Paige’s hair out of the toilet.

One of the second years puts up her hand.

“Yes,” Dira says, “Faye, is it?”

The girl called Faye takes a moment to reply. “Oh. Yes. Um. Who is this man, please? Has he come to evaluate us?”

“No,” Dira says, laughing. “He’s my boyfriend.”

Faye and the other second years take an understandable handful of seconds to process this. Christine hasn’t been keeping the closest eye on their development, but as far as she knows they all completed the move up from the basement to the first floor dorm rooms shortly before the start of the semester, and thus the slowest of them will have spent less than two months above ground. They’ll still be coming to terms with their new identities, might still even be mourning their old ones. They may well be capable of understanding that the third-year women looking up at them from the kitchen table with amused smiles (Paige) and worried frowns (Christine) are merely versions of them who have had longer to explore their womanhood, but the extra leap to the realisation that a woman who has gone through the very same programme is comfortable enough with herself to have a boyfriend from out in the real world is clearly one most of them are having trouble making.

“You should see them together,” Christine says, to fill the silence and let the girls off the hook. “They’re adorable.”

“Thank you!” Indira beams at her.

“You won’t have to talk to him,” Paige says, with a meaningful glance at Dira, “if you don’t want to. He’s just here to see his girlfriend and eat a nice meal. And then you won’t see hide nor hair of him for the rest of the weekend.”

“How come?” Faye, official spokeswoman for her group, asks. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she adds. She seems to have a bit of reflexive politeness going on; Christine wonders who her sponsor is.

“He’s her boyfriend,” Christine explains, hoping she doesn’t have to go into any more detail.

Realisation — and fascination, in at least two cases — dawns. “You’re allowed that?” one of the girls says. Christine’s pretty sure she hears another one whisper, awed, “Sex?”

“Of course we’re allowed!” Dira says.

“Indira graduated years ago,” says one of the sponsors Christine doesn’t know very well. “When you graduate, you will regain all the freedoms you had before, including the freedom to associate intimately with outsiders.”

“And you will be in a position to use your freedoms responsibly, unlike before,” Indira says, unwilling to be out-sponsored.

“And you’re really like us?” another second-year girl asks. “You really used to be a—?”

“Yes.”

“Gosh,” she says, and sounds both so innocent and so awed Christine can’t stop a snort from escaping.

“I’m sorry,” she says, controlling her laughter. “It’s just, I remember being you. Everything’s new and strange and, just when you’re starting to get some kind of a handle on everything, my lovely Sister here—” Christine directs a meaningful thumb at Indira, “—goes and drops a bomb like that on you. It’s a lot to take in.”

Indira blows Christine a kiss, which Christine fends off, and the chatter in the room moves on. Most of the second-year girls return to the dishes they’ve been nursing, but one of them steps closer.

“It gets easier, right?” Faye asks, and Christine finds in her voice memories of waking every morning in her new bedroom, looking out at the world through real windows, and wondering how she was going to learn to face the world as a woman when, after a year underground, even the idea of going outside was extraordinary.

“It does,” Christine says, putting all her conviction into it. “I promise.” She smiles, half to reassure the girl, and half because she can’t help thinking of Stef, a little over a week ago, asking if he really can be a girl. Different journeys, same destination.

“You’re Christine, right?” Faye says. Christine nods. “Do you… like your name?”

“I do. She gave it to me—” she gestures at Dira again, “—and it didn’t take me long to get used to it. A new name means no baggage, you know? It helps with sorting out who you’re going to be from now on. It helps you move on. Of course, it helps if you want to move on.”

Faye nods slowly. “I do,” she says. “I do want to.”

“Good,” Christine says, and then, to cement in the girl’s mind that they’re the same, that everything will be okay if she just keeps going, she adds, “So did I.”

“You’re very pretty,” Faye says, smiling shyly and curling a stray strand of hair around her finger.

“So are you,” Christine says. “You’re beautiful, actually.” Because she is: her jaw is still a little swollen from recent-ish facial surgery and her hair is still growing out, but she has the kind of girl-next-door beauty Christine has, on occasion, been told she possesses herself.

The girl’s smile broadens and she takes another half-step towards Christine before freezing in place, perhaps feeling like she nearly crossed a boundary. Christine stands, closes the distance between them, takes one of Faye’s hands and uses it to pull her into a quick, tight hug, trying to express with her body the things it might still be too early to say to Faye and her peers out loud: It’s okay to express your emotions. It’s okay that you stopped fighting this. You’re strong, not weak. Brave, not cowardly. You have a future. And it’s okay to be happy when someone calls you beautiful.

“You’re going to be okay,” she whispers to the girl instead, pulling back to look right in her shining eyes before releasing her.

 

* * *

 

“God, I hate this show.”

“Why are you back for it every day, then? I have a distinct memory of you practically skipping over here not twenty minutes ago.”

“What else am I going to do down here? Besides, you were already here, so my choice was either come over here and gradually expire from boredom in front of the telly or stay out there and die very, very quickly when one of the wandering dickheads decides it’s time for a spot of kicking practise.”

“You could just lock yourself in your room and wank. I thought that was your thing.”

“Didn’t I tell you about the friction sores? I’m sure I told you about the friction sores.”

“It’s possible I’ve forgotten, deliberately.”

“Well, okay, when a boy and his cock love each other very much—”

“Stefan, will you please shut your boyfriend up?”

“Aaron. Be quiet and watch your favourite show.”

“God. Fine. Whatever. I can’t wait to see if the guy will like the jacket.”

The two sofas by the TV in the common room have acquired a small pile of bean bag chairs and some large and only moderately uncomfortable cushions, fetched from the storeroom by Maria after Aaron refused to spend any more time in the vicinity of Declan unless his sponsor makes him take a shower, which neither her powers of persuasion nor her taser have proved adequate for. The bean bag chairs, he argued, would allow him and Stefan to position themselves far away from Declan’s odour wherever it may appear, and Maria eventually relented, returning from a side room with enough squashy living room furniture to furnish an Ikea, much of which has ended up spread around the common room and inhabited by Declan and his fellow unfortunates but some of which remains localised by the TV. He asked for a can of air freshener, as well, which Maria refused him. “Probably because it’s highly weaponisable,” Aaron said at the time, and described, largely with mime, the process of fatally decontaminating Declan with cans wedged into all of his orifices in such a ridiculous manner that Stefan, despite himself, laughed.

There are times, when Aaron goes whole hours without saying anything more than mildly objectionable, when Stefan has to remind himself that he knows exactly what the little shit did, because God help him if Aaron isn’t growing on him.

“Of course he’ll like the jacket,” Will says tiredly. “They always like the jacket. They don’t know how to dress themselves; they’ll like anything that doesn’t make them look stupid. It’s the same every time. Why do we watch this again?”

“Because we don’t control the TV,” Adam says mildly.

Stefan doesn’t know exactly how the four of them became a unit oppositional to the others, but after the run-ins some of them have had with Declan, Raph and Ollie over the past week, he’s grateful. Very nearly grateful, anyway. By unspoken agreement they pee, wash and shower in pairs: usually Stefan and Aaron, Will and Adam. It took a couple of days for the group properly to coalesce, but after Ollie had another go at getting his sponsor’s taser off her and got thrown in the cells, after Raph threatened Aaron in the bathroom because he claimed Aaron looked at his dick, and after Declan threw a plastic dinner plate at Adam’s head and bruised him quite badly, it was difficult not to acknowledge that there is strength in numbers, especially if those numbers comprise the most calm and least murderously unpredictable people in the basement.

Martin, the drunk driver, has been almost entirely absent, holed up in his room, indulging in his own self-pity. Stefan would have been surprised at his sponsor letting him skip the socialisation element of his rehabilitation, but on the few times he’s observed them together it’s been obvious that Ella, Martin’s sponsor, despises him. Probably hoping he washes out, whatever that entails; even now, with his two informants upstairs, Stefan doesn’t know. Everyone claims ignorance.

“What do you think I’d have to do to get Maria to give me control over the TV for one day?” Aaron says. Stefan, lying upside down with his head resting on a bean bag chair and his legs dangling over the backboard of the sofa, can feel the vibrations of Aaron’s voice in his ribcage: Aaron’s lying lengthways, with his feet tucked under Stefan’s back. The boy’s toes get cold, apparently.

“Reform,” Stefan says. “Pledge never to send another dick pic or harass another woman as long as you live.”

Aaron laughs. “I don’t think she’d believe me. And I still don’t get how you guessed that I did that.”

“You just look the type. Something about you just says: I send unsolicited photographs of my penis to random women.”

“He’s right,” Will says. “You really do look the type.”

Stefan bites the inside of his cheek for a moment. That pronoun is getting harder to deal with. But he’s talked it over with both Christine and Abby, trying out alternatives like they/them and zie/hir and even, at Christine’s insistence, consenting to be she/her for a night, but there’s nothing that doesn’t make him feel like an imposter.

He’s a he until he’s not, he told Christine, which seemed to piss her off enough that it was days before she contacted him again.

“Eat me, William,” Aaron says, showing him a finger.

“Shut up, Aaron.”

“I’m so glad we’re all getting along,” Stefan says, and Aaron turns the finger on him instead. “Now will you shush and watch the show? I’m invested.”

“How can you even see like that?” Aaron says. “You’re, like, upside down.”

“He can see fine like that,” Adam says before Stefan can say anything. “I used to watch videos that way all the time back home.”

“And where is home, Adam?” Aaron says, folding his arms.

“Just home.”

The three of them — well, mainly Aaron and Will — have been trying to nail down Adam’s origins all week, but they haven’t managed to gather anything more than Aaron told Stef on his first day: Adam was raised in a church that may or may not be a literal cult, and it’s called the New Church. Stefan asked Christine to look into it but she didn’t even bother Googling: “Do you know how many religious institutions are called ‘The New Church of Something Something’?” His childhood was clearly very sheltered and religious, religious enough to inculcate in him the belief that the ‘sins of the flesh’ originate in demonic temptation, but he’s already retreated from the slightly more antagonistic attitude he put on in Stefan’s first few days at Dorley, preferring to keep himself mostly to himself, although his near-whispered arguments with Will have, on occasion, expanded to include the others. A few days ago, unable to contain his curiosity, Stefan tested him, claiming as part of a story he was telling about his youth to have kissed a boy once, after school, but instead of the condemnation — or possibly the exorcism — he expected, Adam merely asked, quietly, neutrally, if he enjoyed it.

At least Will is simple. He’s a walking Reddit post who went home for the holidays after his first year at Saints, found out by accident that his younger brother had come out, got drunk, and hit him. Simple, but not actually pleasant. Tabby, his sponsor, thinks he’s an idiot and delights in antagonising him. She’s been pressing him about his brother: yesterday, in front of the four of them, she told Will he’d been declared officially missing, and that his brother had been seen to breathe a sigh of relief. Will didn’t take it well, and that night Stefan was subjected to another hours-long session of yelling from the room next door, which didn’t interrupt his movies but did give him a few extra things to write in the notes he keeps on his fellow prisoners.

The TV show wraps up, and Aaron takes it as his cue to roll off the sofa. “I need a piss and a shower,” he announces, and grabs at Stefan’s arm. “Come on, stop sitting like a weirdo and come with.”

They collect their washing kits, towels and dressing gowns from their respective rooms and meet up in the shower annexe, where Aaron startles Stefan by facing him and disrobing, underwear and all.

“Uh,” Stefan says.

“Look at me,” Aaron says.

“Why?”

“I want you to be honest: is the Goserelin having an effect on me?”

“What kind of an effect do you think it’s having?”

Aaron taps Stefan lightly on the cheek, to get him to stop looking away, and cups a hand against his chest, just under where a breast would be, if he had any. “Am I growing tits?”

“What? Why would you possibly think that?”

“Will said it lowers testosterone,” Aaron says. “So, am I growing tits?”

“Aaron,” Stefan says, “the implant’s not going to make you grow breasts. It’s just to, you know, calm you down.”

He doesn’t actually know for certain whether blocking testosterone results in breast development; whenever he tried to research methods of HRT he barely got beyond first principles before it seemed better for his immediate mental health to continue to deny everything. But it doesn’t seem likely.

It’s probably better for the Sisters if Aaron is redirected from worrying about breast growth, but Stefan deliberately doesn’t care about that. He’s not here to help them. He’ll stay silent if that’s what it takes to get what he needs — and in this, Stefan has decided, he is quite profoundly selfish, which is a character flaw he’s decided to face up to as and when he can also face up to his face — but fuck participating in the deception.

“On Fight Club,” Aaron insists, “the guy lost his balls, and grew tits.”

Stefan turns away from Aaron, his nonexistent breasts, and his naked body, and throws his robe and towel over the rail beside one of the shower heads. “I haven’t seen it,” he says. “But it’s a movie, right? Not known for being a hundred percent medically accurate.”

“But—”

“Will said his dad was on the stuff. Didn’t say anything about growing breasts, and that seems like the kind of thing Will would mention.”

“Listen—”

“Stop showing me your cock and have a shower.”

“I’m not—”

“I can hear it slapping around between your legs. Shower. Now.”

Whatever else Aaron says, Stefan ignores it. He stares at the reassuringly plain tiled wall while he undresses. It’s not pleasant to think about Aaron being changed against his will, even though he’s done awful things and, up until now, escaped the consequences. And if he’s to take Christine at her word, for all that she sounds occasionally a little too much like she’s in a secular cult of her own, the Cult of Dorley, then people like Aaron, unchecked, have a tendency to escalate. Maybe it is better to catch them early?

Stupid to think about. Stupid to dwell on. Who cares if this is a good place or not? Who cares if there’s another way to reform these men? All that matters is that Stefan, who hasn’t harassed anyone or hit anyone or manipulated anyone or run anyone over, gets what he needs. Screw these guys. Best to believe Christine: they deserve this, and they will, ultimately, be helped by it.

Unless they wash out.

He rinses out the shampoo, holding his head under the water for longer than strictly necessary, luxuriating in the heat, and thus completely misses Declan entering the shower annexe. He finally realises something’s happening when Aaron hits the floor by his feet.

“What the fuck?” Stefan yells, stepping back.

“Stef-an!” Declan yells. He’s wearing trousers and socks but no top, and thus gives Stefan his first look at Declan’s figure: he’s built like a guy who drinks beer every night but gets a lot of exercise. Literally barrel-shaped. You see a lot of guys like that if you live near a certain kind of pub, which Stefan’s family did while he was growing up; you don’t often see them this young, though. “Nice of you to join us! I was just telling Aa-ron here about my plan.”

“Uh—”

“Don’t ask him about his fucking plan,” Aaron mutters, scrambling to his feet and nearly slipping on the wet floor. He grabs Stefan’s upper arm to stay upright, and his dick slaps unwelcome against Stefan’s thigh. The combined weight of the two of them makes Stefan unsteady, and for a moment the tiled floor wobbles in front of him. “And, yeah, welcome back. You were seriously zoned out.”

“What’s going on?” Stefan hisses. Declan’s walking away from them both, towards the other end of the shower annexe, and he sticks his hand under Aaron’s still-running shower, washing dark liquid off his knuckles. Stefan makes the connection, takes Aaron’s jaw in his hand and turns it around, inspecting him: blood on his temple, a trickle out of his nostril. “Jesus, Aaron, did he hit you?”

“God,” Aaron says, “you really were in another world. Yes, he fucking hit me!”

“Aww,” Declan’s saying, as he makes an obscene gesture, “look at you two. You’re so cute! Do you sleep together, too?”

Stefan, sure now that Aaron is steady enough on his feet that he won’t fall down, carefully removes Aaron’s hands from his upper arm and steps back, away from the running water. “What are you on about, Declan?”

“Sitting together,” Declan says. “Showering together. Only one thing left.”

“Declan, you imbecile,” Stefan says, hoping to draw out this conversational break in the confrontation long enough for Pippa or Maria or someone to see them on camera, “this is a comm-un-al show-er.” He spaces out the syllables the way Declan does when he says someone’s name. “We have no choice but to shower together. It’s just like after PE at school. You remember school?”

“Fuck you, you patronising prick.”

“You’re antagonising him!” Aaron whispers.

“What’s your plan, mate?” Stefan says, ignoring Aaron, who closes his eyes in frustration, but it’s either keep Declan talking or deal with whatever happens when he stops. Where are you, Pippa?

“Oll-ie keeps going for the girls,” Declan says. “Stupid. Instantly piled on. Instantly taken out. But if he went for you, instead, the girls’ favourite little pet, and got a hand round your throat, they’d have to let him out.”

“Me?” Stefan says. “Why me?”

“Everyone else,” Declan says, “even the little wanker—” he gestures at a defiant Aaron, who is holding onto a pipe to stay upright, “—has been zapped. You? Never seen it. They protect you. You’re their watcher, or something. You work for them.”

“They haven’t tased me, and that makes you think I work for them? I just haven’t done anything to make them have to! There’s no point trying to fight them: they have weapons, Declan, and locks on all the doors. There’s concrete walls and no windows. It’s a prison. You don’t escape a prison with a ‘clever plan’. They’re built so you can’t.”

“That is exactly what their little bitch would say.”

“Nothing’s going to happen here, Declan,” Stefan says, taking another step away from the shower, towards the entrance to the annexe. “Just calm down and we can all walk away from this.”

“Fuck you,” Declan says, and rushes artlessly forward. Stefan tries to step out of the way, isn’t quite fast enough, and could have been badly hurt if Aaron hadn’t collided with Declan from the side. They struggle to stay upright: Stefan staggers back into the wall by the entrance, Aaron drops onto one knee and starts massaging the shoulder that made contact, and Declan slams into the side wall. It looks like he’s going to get his balance back first, but before he can do anything, Monica, his sponsor, steps into the annexe.

“Okay, Declan,” she says, sounding very tired. “Stop fucking around.”

“Can’t shoot your taser in here, Mon-i-ca,” Declan taunts.

“Hence this,” she says, unclipping her baton from her belt. “You two: scram,” she says to Stefan and Aaron.

“You sure?” Stefan says. “You going to be okay with him on your own?”

“I’m not going to be alone in a few seconds—” her eyes flicker down, and she smirks, “—so if you don’t want any other women seeing your junk I suggest you robe up and leave.”

“Right,” Stefan says, and pulls his robe over his shoulders. Aaron’s is lying on the other side of the bathroom in the middle of a large puddle of water, so Stefan throws him his towel. Aaron’s still tying it closed when Pippa and Maria follow Monica into the annexe.

“I didn’t start it, Maria,” Aaron says.

“I know,” Maria says, as Stefan catches Pippa’s eye and shrugs. “Go to your rooms and get dressed.”

“Have fun with Declan,” Aaron says, and Stefan puts a hand on each of his bare shoulders and pushes him out of the annexe.

“Three strikes, Declan,” Monica says, “and—” The closing bathroom door cuts her off. Stefan doesn’t want to speculate on what’s going to happen to Declan; he just wants to get to his bed before his knees succumb to the weakness he’s starting to feel work its way down his body as his adrenaline drains.

Unexpectedly, Aaron follows him into his room.

“Aaron,” Stefan says, sitting down heavily on his bed, “why are you in my room? Correction: why are you in my room, naked?”

“I’m not naked! I’m wearing a towel. And, don’t worry, I’m not all lewd under here; my dick is securely tucked back. It’s actually hiding. Trauma reaction.”

“What? To Declan?”

“Yes, to Declan! Don’t make him sound so trivial. Remember, he was the one who tried to fillet himself? Maybe if you’d seen it you wouldn’t be so fucking blasé about him.”

“I’m not blasé,” Stefan says, leaning forward and fishing a pair of trousers and a hoodie out of his wardrobe and passing them to Aaron. “Look,” he says, holding out his free arm, which shakes. “I was just trying to keep him talking until help arrived, or at the very least get farther away from him to increase the chances of him slipping and braining himself on the tile before he got to us.”

“Don’t say that,” Aaron says, dropping the towel on the floor, “he tripped me, remember. While you were off in your mind palace, or whatever. That could have been me, braining myself on the tile.”

Aaron doesn’t turn around to get dressed, so Stefan, judging himself steady enough to stand, picks out fresh clothes and faces the wall while he pulls them on, trying to make himself believe that just because he’s now seen Aaron’s penis twice, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s going to be a third time. A delusion, obviously; Aaron’s genital obsession borders on the pathological. No wonder he took all those pictures.

“Look on the bright side,” Stefan says, flopping back onto the bed. “If you die down here, no more women will have to be subjected to your… amateur photography.”

Aaron joins him on the bed, perching on the end nearest the door. “My what?”

“Your dick pics, Aaron.”

“Oh.” He laughs, still apparently unrepentant. “Those.”

“For fuck’s sake, Aaron,” Stefan says, sitting forward and grabbing the box of tissues from the bedside table, “you’re still bleeding.”

“Uh, what? Where?”

“Sit still,” Stefan commands, and when Aaron complies he dabs at the cut near Aaron’s eyebrow, cleaning the wound as much as he can with the wadded tissue. He takes another one out of the box, spits on it, and works on cleaning the blood off Aaron’s cheek and upper lip.

“This is weird,” Aaron says, watching Stefan with careful eyes.

“Grow up,” Stefan mutters, wetting another tissue, “and stay still.” Aaron fidgets, so Stefan stills him with a hand on his shoulder. Has he never been taken care of like this before? He’s acting like—

“Ahem.”

Stefan doesn’t jump, but Aaron does, and it smudges some of the remaining blood in a line along his jaw. Under Pippa’s gaze, Stefan licks his thumb and wipes it off. She doesn’t bother hiding her amusement.

“Hey, Pippa,” Stefan says, “can you look at this cut? I don’t think it needs stitches, but I’m no expert.”

She rolls her eyes, yanks Aaron’s head roughly to the side and peers at his wound. “He’ll be fine.” She releases him and steps backward, flexing the hand that touched him. “Since you’re both here, I can save Maria a job: you’re all going to have medical examinations tomorrow, so be ready and don’t muck around.”

“That sounds ominous,” Aaron says, raising a hand to dab at his wound and flinching when Stefan slaps it away.

“Don’t mess with it!” Stefan whispers.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Pippa says, before Aaron can complain. “You’ll have a physical exam, there’ll be some questions to answer, and we’ll be taking some blood — so drink the bottle of water that will be in your dumbwaiter in the morning. You’ll also need to provide a sperm sample, so, Aaron, it would be best if you managed to leave your penis alone for tonight.”

“No promises,” Aaron says. “What’s the blood test for?”

Pippa recites, rote: “We’ll be checking your general health and ensuring your Goserelin implants aren’t causing you any problems.”

“Yeah, what’s with that, anyway?” Aaron says. “Maria says it’s to help keep us calm.”

“It is,” Pippa says.

“Yeah, well, it’s not working on fucking Declan, is it? It’s not the first time he’s come at one of us.”

“Monica will deal with Declan. Now go away. I need to talk to Stefan.”

Aaron stands up, a little unsteadily, and steps around Pippa. “Don’t hurt him too badly,” he says, before winking at Stefan — an utterly baffling gesture — and departing. Pippa shuts the door with the back of her foot and leans against it.

“Jesus Christ,” Stefan mutters, throwing the dirty tissues into the bin and lying back on the bed, trying to force the tension out of his shoulders. When it’s just him and Pippa in the room, he feels safe: the worst she’s ever done is yell at him — and, yes, trigger a very bad dysphoric episode, but she didn’t know that was what she was doing — whereas the men, even Aaron, still have him on edge. Declan, today: a reminder of what most of them are capable of.

“What’s your deal, Stefan?” Pippa says.

“I have a deal?” Stefan props himself up on his shoulders and looks at her.

“Playing mother hen with the boy flasher there.”

“Oh, right.” He drops back down again, and starts stretching his fingers and toes. “I think I’ve adopted him.”

“You’ve adopted him.”

“Like a puppy. One of those ones that hasn’t yet worked out nibbling on the other dogs is bad.”

“You let him in your room.”

Stefan shrugs. “I didn’t mean to. I left the door open in case you needed a word after all that—” he waves an arm in the direction of the bathroom, “—was taken care of, and he just followed me in. And then he was bleeding, so I cleaned it up. Is there any reason we don’t have first-aid kits in these rooms?”

“Yes. Look, you know he’s dangerous.”

“To women.” It hurts to say. “Not to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s a sexual harasser, right? He’s not sexually interested in me, so—”

“It’s not about that, Stefan,” Pippa says, briefly closing her eyes. “It’s about power, it’s about the thrill. The target often doesn’t even matter. And it escalates: just taking pictures of his baby peen isn’t going to satisfy him forever.”

“I get that,” Stefan says patiently. “I know he’s a piece of shit. And I know he needs to change, and you hope — somehow — to change him down here. But he isn’t harassing me, and he literally doesn’t have a way to send me pictures here. I’m safe with him, I think.”

“Stefan,” Pippa says, perching on the chair by the computer and addressing him like an unruly child in his first regrettable detention, “we watch him on the cameras. He’s flashed you multiple times.”

“That’s just—” Stefan says, and then he starts replaying recent events, and realises he really can’t deny it. Even as a grudging veteran of the changing rooms at school, Stefan rarely had guys disrobe quite so blatantly in front of him. Sure, he got glimpses, everyone did, but that was it. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “I see what you mean. How many times?”

“Half a dozen, that we’ve seen. And that’s if you don’t count just getting undressed in the shower without turning away.”

“Oh. See, I was counting that,” Stefan says. Pippa smirks, and he adds, “Why does he do it?”

“Who the hell knows?” Pippa says, and breathes out heavily through her nose. “These guys, they’re just… unamendable, at least for now.”

“Yeah,” Stefan agrees, without thinking, “for now.”

Pippa nods, and then glares at him. “You know that’s you, too, right? You’re here for the exact same reason.”

“What?” Stefan says, caught off guard by the change in Pippa’s mood. “Flashing?”

“You’re dangerous,” she says.

“Oh. Yeah. Right. I’m dangerous.” Stefan digs his head a little deeper into the bed covers. “It’s too easy to forget that, when you’re talking to me like a normal person.”

“You don’t like the reminder?” Pippa sneers.

“Not really.”

 

* * *

 

It’s Aunt Bea’s birthday and, true to her habits, she has the second years making a huge celebratory meal. Also true to her habits, there’s a point to it: to assess how well the girls are settling into their new identities. Because it’s one thing to sit quietly in your room, with a friend or with a sponsor, and be comfortable; quite another to participate in a stressful and often confusing multi-person, multi-hour endeavour — like, say, preparing a four-course meal for your notoriously critical schoolmarm-cum-kidnapper — without reverting to old, toxic patterns of behaviour.

And it is hot in the kitchen. Four ovens, small windows (with bars on, artfully hidden from the outside with vines so none of the cis girls on the top floors notice anything unusual), and a dozen bodies milling around will do that. Christine, ducking back into the kitchen long enough to manoeuvre around a panicking second-year, steal a Pepsi Max from the fridge, and wink at Faye on her way out, is sweating by the time she makes it back to the relative serenity of the dining hall; she can’t imagine how badly the cooks are overheating. Except, obviously, she can. She’s done this already.

In the dining hall — the opulent opposite to the functional kitchen — various Dorley women gather in loose groups, awaiting the arrival of Aunt Bea. Abby, Vicky and Paige have claimed a small table in a quiet corner and Christine joins them, dropping into a chair next to Abby and cracking open her Pepsi.

“Jesus, it’s hot in there,” she says.

“Right?” Vicky says. “Remember when that was us?”

“I remember my soufflé collapsed.”

“No, no,” Paige says, “it was my soufflé that collapsed. You did the casserole that was cold in the middle and crunchy at the edge.”

“You’re right,” Christine says, and takes a large swig. “As usual.” She wonders how Aunt Bea feels about having her birthday spoiled every year by a gaggle of newly-in-knickers second-adolescent early-twentysomethings whose ability to cook an edible dish was not on the list of criteria for kidnapping. At least one of this lot can bake a credible cake. “When’re Dira and Hasan getting here?”

“Any minute,” Abby says, looking up from her laptop. Christine cranes her neck to look at the screen: Dorley admin stuff. Nothing she hasn’t seen before, on her occasional trawls through the secure files. “But it’s been ‘any minute’ for about the last twenty.”

“There was a derailment,” Paige says, tapping on her phone. “Not a bad one. It means minor delays, though.”

“Remember, Tina, you’re a trans girl tonight,” Vicky says, reaching around Abby to poke Christine in the shoulder.

“I know,” Christine says. “We had this conversation already.”

“Actually, why are you trans to Dira’s family but cis to my girlfriend?”

“Poor planning.”

“Really?”

“Exceptionally poor planning,” Abby says, peering through her glasses at the laptop screen and not looking up. Christine ignores her and drains her Pepsi.

A sudden crash from the kitchen forces a surprised belch out of her, and as she sits forward to listen to the commotion one of the second-year girls bursts through the double doors, runs through the dining room and out into the corridor on the other side. “Wait,” Christine says, “was that Faye?”

Before anyone can answer, Nell, Faye’s sponsor, follows her halfway through the dining room before stopping, throwing up her hands and turning around. “I have had it with that girl tonight!” Nell shouts.

At their table, Paige clenches her fists and looks away, and her reaction pushes Christine to her feet in less than a second; if there’s one thing no-one at Dorley needs, it’s an authority figure in a rage. Nell’s started walking in tight circles in the middle of the dining hall, working herself up as she goes, so it’s easy for Christine to plant herself in Nell’s path, stopping her short without having actively to grab her attention.

“What? Yes?” Nell snaps. “Christine, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Christine says. Back in the corner, she sees Vicky hugging Paige, who has sunk into her chair and is looking everywhere but at anyone. “I can go talk to Faye.”

“How would that help?”

Christine shrugs, affecting uncertainty. “I think she would benefit from talking to someone closer to her own age. And we already talked a little, earlier.”

“I remember. You think one hug is enough to build a rapport?”

“I’m an outside voice. A new face.” Out of the corner of her eye, Christine sees Pippa exiting the kitchen, taking in the scene in the middle of the room and walking over to where Abby and Vicky are still comforting Paige.

“You’re still in the programme, aren’t you? You’re not qualified for this; what will your sponsor say?” Nell makes a show of looking around. “Is she even here?”

“It’s fine, Nell!” Abby yells, closing her laptop and taking off her glasses, the better to glare. “Untwist your undies and let Chrissy talk to the girl!”

“I still don’t see what good it will do,” Nell says.

“I was her, only a year ago,” Christine says, choosing not to be visibly annoyed by Nell’s attitude. She is not this woman’s inferior just because she isn’t technically free yet. “I think I can relate to her on a level you, perhaps, can’t.”

“You won’t—”

“Nell,” Abby says, in her sternest voice.

“Fine,” Nell says, stepping aside. “She’s all yours. Knock yourself out on her thick fucking head.”

“I will,” Christine says, “just as soon as I check on my friend.”

Paige looks up as Christine approaches, and nods: she’s okay. Vicky’s holding her hand and gently stroking her upper arm, and Abby’s been having a whispered conversation with Pippa.

“Hi, Christine,” Pippa says, “I think this was partly my fault.”

“She’s having problems with Stef…an,” Abby says, just about managing to add the extra syllable to Stef’s name in time.

“I’m not having problems,” Pippa says. “That’s the flipping point. He’s so… I want to say docile, but that’s not it. He’s nothing but friendly to me, and now that he’s spending time with some of the other boys down there, he’s started, well, needling them.”

“Needling them how?” Christine says, looking behind her at Nell, who has declined to resume pacing in favour of glowering at her.

“He’s worked out what Aaron did to get here. Most of it, anyway. And he keeps bringing it up. Just throwing it in Aaron’s face all the time, like he’s trying to get it to sink in that what he did was wrong.”

“So? That’s good, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know! And he’s too damn kind. I walked in on him patching Aaron up after the little sod got in a fight! And you know how long it normally takes them to get to that level of empathy. Not to mention the physical intimacy involved!” She kicks lightly at a table leg. “I feel like I don’t understand him at all. And I need to, so when the treatments start — and they start soon — I have an idea how to coerce him, how to control him. I’m flying flipping blind, Christine!”

“You still have the sister thing,” Christine says. “You threaten to tell his sister he’s dead, like we said. Pretty potent means of control. Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go talk to Faye before her bitch of a sponsor gets impatient and goes after her. Pip, why not ask Abby to go down and talk to your boy? She’s got the sponsor experience, and she’s a blank slate as far as this intake is concerned. She’ll be a good second pair of eyes. Maybe she can see something in him.”

“That’s an excellent idea!” Abby says, beaming, radiating such absolute certainty that Pippa starts nodding before Abby even finishes speaking.

“We’re good?” Christine says. “Good. And don’t tell Nell I said she’s a bitch.” And she flees, following Faye into the rats’ nest of corridors that form the back half of the ground floor.

 

* * *

 

What is Pippa’s deal, anyway? He’d love to turn her question back on her, find out why she seems almost offended at his refusal to be confrontational, but he’s not sure the answer is worth pursuing: if the clues he’s picked up about the coming year are anything to go by, then every woman who’s been through Dorley has a period of pretty serious and sustained trauma in her recent past, and risking triggering Pippa just to satisfy his own curiosity would be cruel; it might also get him tased. And, as Declan pointed out, Stefan’s on a good run of not getting tased.

Hell, maybe if he does something provocative enough to get her to zap him, it might relieve her of some of her obvious tension.

The sound of the biometric lock startles him out of his thoughts, and he has time to wonder whether Pippa really has come back down to give him a quick tase just for the fun of it when an entirely unfamiliar face appears around the half-open door.

“Hi! Can I come in?”

No, not unfamiliar. It’s Abby, recognisable from the photobooth pictures with Melissa, but, Stefan realises as she enters in response to his confused nod — less than a fortnight in a basement and already he’s completely unused to the idea of someone asking for permission to enter his room — dressed somewhat differently. Instead of the casual clothes, bare face and tied-back hair from the picture, she’s wearing a loose dress in black and white with a repeating monochrome dandelion pattern that inverts at her waist as it crosses the matching belt. Her skin glistens and glitters around her eyes and her hair hangs in tight curls around her face, brushing her bare shoulders as she walks.

Stefan takes a breath and forgets to let it out for a few moments.

“Hi,” he says eventually, winded, as she closes the door behind her and settles carefully on the chair by the computer.

“Hi, Stef,” she says, and reminds him what a genuine, warm smile looks like.

On the bed, Stefan retreats behind his knees, wrapping his arms around his shins. Once again, faced with beauty, Stefan feels exceptionally ugly. “You look… seriously good,” he says, and is pleased to manage the entire sentence without the thick feeling in the back of his throat impeding him too much.

She smiles at him again, and he swallows.

“Before we say anything else,” she says, pulling a remote just like Pippa’s out of her purse, “let’s get some privacy.” With some ceremony she taps two buttons on the remote, and the red light strip on the wall goes green.

“I, um, didn’t know it could do that.”

“No cameras,” she says, “and no microphones. Real privacy.”

A ball of tension Stefan’s been carrying for over a week escapes him in a laugh, and he buries his head in his knees to stop it. “Sorry. That’s just a weird concept right now.”

“I know,” Abby says. “I remember.” He stares at her for a moment, making room in his head, as he has for Christine, Pippa, Maria and the others, that this relaxed, stunning woman was once imprisoned down here. The concept is yet to get any more believable. “It was a bit different, though, in my day. The beds were against the other wall, and we didn’t have a PC, just one of those wifi video player things. They were so awful.”

“When were you down here?”

“Ten years ago, I think?” she says, uncertain, looking up at the ceiling, as if something there might jog her memory. “Yes. Ten years. We’d redecorated by the time Melissa came through.”

“It’s completely mad, you know,” Stefan says. “You and Christine are both so normal, and yet you both talk casually about the time you spent down here, in this bloody dungeon.”

“Christine not always so casually, I imagine,” Abby says, frowning and crinkling one side of her mouth.

“Yeah. That’s true.”

“It’s fresher for her. And, Stef, I want to say, now that I finally have the chance to tell you in person: thank you for not revealing our secret. You could have broken us.”

Her fingers sit curled in her lap, the nails painted to match her dress, and he clenches his own until the knuckles crack. “Sometimes I still think I should have,” he says. “This place isn’t exactly ethical, is it?”

“No, but—” Abby starts.

“—It works,” Stefan interrupts. “Sorry, but I know.” His throat swells and his voice shakes but he continues, monotone, “I’ve heard it from Christine. And from you. Dorley works. Everyone gets better. It’s worth it in the end. Every fucking girl I meet down here is stunningly beautiful and fully invested in the betterment of mankind and thinks torture is completely and totally justified.”

“Are you okay, Stef?”

“Fuck, don’t…”

“Stef?”

“Please don’t call me that,” Stefan whispers, unable to look at her any more. He’s finally been able to put a name to the weight that’s been pressing down on him since she came into his room, and it’s the same thing that’s been assaulting him unpredictably but ever more frequently since he came to Dorley: dysphoria. He feels like his skin might boil away in shame and disgust.

Abby stands, or he thinks she does; he’s not looking. She makes noises consistent with standing, at any rate: the silken whisper of expensive clothes, worn well. Makes it worse.

“What should I call you?” she says.

“Nothing.”

“But—”

He has to make her understand so he glares up at her and sees only kindness and concern returned; undeserved but offered, anyway. His anger and his shame fail him, are burned away from him, and he bites his lip until blood comes. When she reaches for him, to comfort him, to help him, she breaks something inside him, and for the first time in a very long time, Stefan cries.

Impossible to say where he goes, but sometimes being looked upon kindly is the worst thing anyone can do to him.

The first thing he feels when he starts to come back is her arm around his shoulders. She’s resting her chin on the top of his head and gently stroking the back of his hand, and when she feels him move she releases her grip on him, but he doesn’t, just yet, want her to let go, so he pushes back against her, asking silently for just a few more minutes of real, human contact.

She keeps hold of him as he blows his nose, cleans his face, checks to make sure he hasn’t dirtied her dress — no; he pulled himself up so tight that he cried almost entirely into the fabric of his trousers and the sleeves of his hoodie — and, eventually, not wanting to impose, shrugs his shoulders and moves away, releasing her.

“Sorry,” he says, backing up against the headboard.

Abby returns to the chair by the computer. “It’s quite all right.”

“I think, maybe, I needed that.”

“I could tell.”

“It’s been a while.”

“You poor thing.”

“And you can call me Stef. I was just being— It’s fine. Really.”

“Okay, Stef. Thank you. Are you ready to tell me what hurt you so much?”

He forces a smile. “You. You’re beautiful. All the women here are, but since Christine they’ve all been… neutral towards me, at best. Which makes it a little easier to deal with, being around them when I have to be like this. But—” he holds up a hand when she opens her mouth, “—don’t apologise. It’s just my idiot brain doing cartwheels and landing on its arse.”

She nods. “I feel like I should know just what to say, here,” she says, “but I don’t. You don’t respond like anyone we’ve ever had come through here. For all my experience, I’m at a loss.”

Stefan laughs. “I’m kind of pleased to be an enigma.”

“Well, you’re definitely confounding Pippa.”

“Oh?”

“She’s why I’m here, actually. She doesn’t know how to control you. Came upstairs complaining about how lost at sea she is. Christine suggested I offer Pippa a second pair of eyes and I jumped at the chance. I wanted to check in on you in person. See how the subject of our little conspiracy is doing.”

“I think we’ve answered that,” Stefan says. “Not great. How is Christine, anyway? We don’t talk as much as I thought we would.”

“She’s been busy. Aunt Bea noticed she’s been slacking on some aspects of her development. So she’s been working hard on that.”

“Huh. I thought she was basically done with this place.”

“There are a few hoops she has to jump through before she can graduate. Most of them she’s been dealing with fine on her own. She’s very independent, but in a good way. Indira has the easiest sponsorship since, well, me.”

“Melissa didn’t give you trouble?”

“Almost none. When she came here, she was falling and she knew it. She just didn’t know how to stop. So I… caught her, and the rest is history. She was never aggressive with me. Mostly just confused.”

He wishes he had a copy of the photobooth pictures, or any other picture of Melissa, but he can still remember her face, and he finds it difficult to superimpose his memory of Mark on the person who came to Dorley, years ago. Better to think of her happy, anyway; graduated from this place, off in the world somewhere, living life.

Abby, wanting to talk about Melissa as much as he does, fills in the story behind the photobooth pictures; it’s amusingly, delightfully mundane. Stefan follows up with some stories from his childhood, from back when Melissa was still around, and after a while they settle into an easy back and forth. He hadn’t realised how much he missed having a normal conversation with a normal person. And Abby, like Christine, is shockingly normal, once you allow for the fact that their calibration for normal is balanced at least partly around their obvious belief in Dorley Hall, and everything that goes on here.

They agree on the story Abby will take back to Pippa: that Stef is compliant and helpful because he wants to be treated well, because whatever his own personal history he still finds the ‘other’ boys distasteful, and because he’s worried that if he isn’t, Pippa will follow through on her threat and tell his sister he’s dead. It’s little more than a restatement of information Pippa already has, but coming directly from Abby instead of via supposition, guesswork and Pippa’s own limited experience. “It’ll be enough,” Abby says, confidently, patting Stefan’s hand.

He asks her about the impending medical examination, and she fills in a few vital details: it’s to establish a baseline for their upcoming estradiol injections; it’s to make sure the Goserelin hasn’t had any unexpected side-effects; and it’s to provide sperm, for freezing.

“We want you to be able to have a child, in the future, if you want one,” Abby says, and Stefan shakes his head at the sheer absurdity of it: it really is possible to believe that Dorley wants nothing but the best for its residents, as long as you squint your eyes enough that the full year of torture and the nonconsensual surgery and the complete isolation from your old life and all the other violations and indignities fade out of focus.

She excuses herself not long after — it’s Aunt Bea’s birthday dinner, apparently, and she can’t miss it — but hugs him again before she leaves, and it’s all he can do to maintain his composure.

“You’re very sweet, Stef,” she says. “Melissa was exactly right about you.”

“Thank you,” Stefan says.

“Oh, and one more thing before I go,” she says, holding up the remote. “You’re going to be so pretty.” And she grins and reactivates the surveillance before he can respond with the disbelief such a ridiculous statement clearly deserves.

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t take Christine long to find her: people don’t normally come back here unless they’re heading down to the basement or getting something out of long-term storage, and very few people are audibly crying when they do so. Also, most of the doors are kept locked.

There’s a small conservatory at the back of Dorley’s ground floor. It’s poorly positioned and poorly insulated, having no view to speak of and no time of year in which it is actually pleasant to inhabit, so it’s become a storage room for old furniture, old books, old appliances, and anything else rarely or never used.

Faye, tear- and mascara-stained, sits cross-legged on a dust sheet that covers what probably was once a valuable chaise lounge before it was skeletonised by moths. She’s kicked off her shoes — heels far too high for her height, at least when it comes to preparing food comfortably on the kitchen surfaces, and the sort of thing only the stupid or the terminally glamorous would choose to wear while preparing a meal — and she’s holding her ankles tight enough in each hand that the skin has whitened.

“Hi,” Christine says quietly, because Faye hasn’t noticed her yet and she doesn’t want to scare her.

“Hey,” Faye says, and follows up with a revoltingly liquid sniff before continuing, “unless you brought Nell, in which case, uh…”

“No Nell. Just me. Can I sit down?”

“Sure.”

Christine sits on the other end of the chaise lounge, leaving a whole person’s-worth of space between them. She has no idea how comfortable Faye is with her body yet, this afternoon’s brief hug notwithstanding; any physical contact has to come from her.

“Did Nell pick those shoes out?” Christine says, pointing a toe at the ridiculous pumps.

“Yeah.”

“Bad choice,” Christine says, forcing a smile out of the girl. After a few more seconds of silence, she asks, “What happened?”

Faye’s grip on her ankles tightens. “I was stirring the batter, like Bex said to do—”

“She’s another girl in your group?”

“Yeah,” Faye says. “She’s my… friend.” Christine nods, encouraging her to continue. “I was stirring it, and then someone, someone I don’t even know, came charging into the kitchen, and she was angry, and it made me nervous, and you know how there’s just no space in that kitchen, and I think I took a bad step on those stupid heels because the next thing I know there’s a broken bowl on the floor and batter on Bex’s skirt and Nell is yelling at me and I couldn’t take it any more! She’s been such a— such a—”

“Bitch?”

“Yes! Like she still thinks of me as her enemy. And I’m not. I swear I’m not. Not any more.”

“You used to be?”

“Yeah. I hated her so much.” Faye sniffs. “But I guess I was kind of everyone’s enemy. I was just so angry, you know? All the time.”

Christine nods. “I was like that, too.”

“You?” Faye says, as if Christine said she used to be bright green.

“Me. I… did things, to end up here. Same as everyone.”

“Wow. I can barely even believe you’re like me.”

“Someone else said that to me, recently,” Christine says, smiling. “I’m getting better at believing it. I used to think I was… stained. That no matter how much I changed, there’d still be bits of the guy I used to be, riddled through me. But I changed even more than I ever expected, and the guy, he’s just… gone. I think you’ve changed, too, am I right?”

“I have,” Faye says, nodding. “I’m not like that any more. I just want to get on with people. I… I like it when I get on with people, you know? It makes me feel normal. But she… she won’t let me be normal. She shouts at me and sometimes I can deal with it but sometimes it’s like she flips a switch and wrecks everything. Like, the world gets louder and sharper, but everything’s also faded and further away. Like I’m on top of a high wire looking down and the ground is swinging back and forth underneath me. So I panic. And when I panic…” She looks away, grasps her ankles even tighter. “And I’ve asked her to stop, to just say what she wants from me, but she’s all, what do you know?”

“Faye?”

“Yes?”

“Let go of your ankles, please.”

“I mustn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I do, I feel like I’ll lose control again.”

Christine says, “Again?”

Faye sighs deeply, wetly, moves the mucus around her sinuses. When she speaks, she interrupts herself with sniffs, trying to clear her nose and restore her normal speech. She’s got that one-month-of-voice-training timbre, and Christine knows that at this stage it’s difficult to keep hold of the voice you want when your breathing is misbehaving. She’s still trying for it, though, hasn’t reverted to her old voice. An excellent sign. “You know those videos where the cat has its back arched up, and it’s hissing and padding around all over the place, and then suddenly and completely predictably it just leaps forward and goes for someone? That was me. That was how I felt. That was what Bex said about me.” Faye blushes for a second, and Christine bites her lip to control a wistful smile. “I was angry, and I’d try to hit people,” Faye says. “And every bit of progress I ever made got wiped out whenever something new happened. I’d go right back to being him. When they started the shots, I snapped. When my breasts started to come in, I snapped. When they took my— you know, after the orchi, I snapped. Every time. But Nell calmed me down, every time.”

“How did she do it?” Christine asks, leaning forward.

“By being the biggest bitch I ever met,” Faye says, smiling. “She’d yell at me and slap me and push me down. She’d put me in those cuffs. She’d tell me that if I didn’t learn to control myself and stop snapping over every little thing—” she pauses to laugh again, but it’s a laugh that scratches her lungs, “—that I’d wash out. And it worked, I guess. I went months. And then, one day, a few months ago, all my old anger came back, and Nell wouldn’t stop coming at me, you know, and before I knew it, I hit her. In the stomach, not anywhere dangerous; I had some control. She still put me back in the cell for a week.”

“Jesus,” Christine mutters.

“I know. I was so ashamed. I still feel like such a fucking… I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel like.”

“I don’t mean you,” Christine says, “although, yeah, kind of extreme behaviour. But you really think you’ve got it under control now?”

“Most of the time,” Faye says, nodding.

“I mean, she’s clearly setting you off. Making you regress, whenever she’s like this, because you’ve changed, but she hasn’t. And maybe you haven’t changed as much as you could have by now because she’s being stubborn. Your sponsor is supposed to modify their approach to you as you move through the programme. By this point it’s not meant to be such an oppositional relationship.”

“You mean, she’s still treating me like I’m in the first year?”

“Exactly.”

Faye turns the thought over. Flexes her fingers against her ankles; they’re probably getting tired by now. “Okay,” she says slowly, “but if that’s true, what can I do about it?”

“I can ask Abby to talk to her. She won’t listen to me — I’m still in the programme — but Abby’s quite senior.”

“Will she do it? She doesn’t even know me.”

“She knows me. And she’s one of my best friends.”

“You’re friends with a sponsor?”

Christine grins. “Abby’s not a sponsor, not any more. But I’m friends with Indira, too, and she is my sponsor. I know she’s, like, officially my Sister, but she’s also my sister. Her and Abby and Vicky and Paige. We’re a family. Formed right here, under this roof, in this weird fucking house.” Christine pauses for laughter, and gets it after a moment from a bemused Faye. “It doesn’t have to be the way it is between you and Nell.”

“That’s a nice thought,” Faye says.

“So,” Christine says, “the question is, if I talk to Abby, and Abby talks to Nell, and Nell lays off, maybe treats you more like a girl and less like an unexploded bomb, what will you do?”

“Stay calm?”

“Attagirl,” Christine says, smiling. “Shake on it?”

She shuffles closer on the chaise lounge and holds out her hand. Faye will have to release one of her hands in order to shake, and Christine wants her to do it soon, ideally before the pressure that’s built up inside the poor girl causes some kind of nuclear event. She does so, stretching out each finger as she lets go, loosening her elbows and shoulders and rolling her neck. Eventually they meet, shaking hands, and it becomes a hug, tight and warm, and as Christine shuffles backwards, releasing her, Faye leans upwards, towards Christine’s mouth.

“No,” Christine says, gently pushing Faye away. “That’s not what I’m here for.”

The girl, previously lost in the moment, returns to herself instantly, eyes widening. “Fuck!” she says, and shrinks away, steps off her seat to stand in the middle of the room, bisected by moonlight, clasping her hands in front of her. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Faye, it’s okay.”

“It’s just, with the other girls… God, you think I’m weird, don’t you? A pervert. A fucking rapist or something.”

“No!” Christine says. “No.” She claps her hands together, hoping the sharp sound will break into what looks like the beginning of the sort of spiral she’d hoped to arrest or avoid. The way Faye jumps suggests she’s at least partially successful. “Absolutely not.”

“I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

“You didn’t,” Christine says, smiling gently.

“I tried! And, um, with the other girls, I’ve done more than that.”

“Did they agree?”

“Yes!”

“Then that’s okay.”

“Is it? We’re— we’re men!”

“Are you?”

“I mean,” Faye says, on less certain ground, “we used to be.”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes!”

“Whatever you are, whatever you used to be, looking for pleasure with someone is never wrong. As long as it’s consensual.”

“Fuck,” Faye says. “No. God. That’s not— I didn’t mean it like that. Shit, I sound so homophobic now. I didn’t—”

“What did you mean?”

“Can I have a second?”

Christine smiles. “Take your time.”

She nods, and walks around the room a little, clenching and unclenching her fists. A minute or so later, she stops, sits back down on the end of the chaise lounge, a chaste distance from Christine, and says, “I was a straight guy. Completely ordinary that way. Not in a lot of other ways, but I was straight. And when I look at you, or my— my Sisters, I see women. And even though I know, it’s like I don’t know. Or I can forget. You know?”

“I know,” Christine says. “I was the same.”

“You were?”

“While I was still getting used to this—” Christine indicates herself, “—getting used to me, this new body, this new identity, in my head I thought, I can be with the other girls and just not acknowledge who I’ve become. They’re women and I’m… me. And there was another girl who, for a while, thought the same way. I’m not telling you who,” Christine adds, grinning, remembering. “And it helped. It was a route to figuring out who I am now. One of many. And pleasure’s never a bad thing, if you both ask for it.”

“You, uh, don’t do that any more?”

“No. I and my… partner, we didn’t need the escape any more. Because that’s what we were doing: escaping from ourselves. And when we both became new people, new women, suddenly we had nothing and no-one to run from any more.” Christine leans her chin on her palm, following her old self through memories. “If my first year here, down there, was about letting go of my old self, of eventually accepting that, by the rules of this place, I needed to become a woman in order to truly kill him off, then my second year was finding out who she is, and becoming her. You know? Learning to live as her instead of in her.” She laughs. “You get the body before you get the soul.”

“I don’t feel like a girl yet,” Faye says, half to herself. “Bex says she does, but I don’t know if she’s serious or just trying to convince herself.”

“Do you still feel like a man? I know you called yourself one, before; do you feel it? Or is it just habit?”

Faye crosses her legs again, leans back against the dust sheet. “I would have said yes a month ago. Maybe two months. But now… it’s weird. In some ways, I don’t feel any different. But, at the same time, I really don’t feel like a man any more. And it’s not from looking like this. I don’t think so, anyway. A guy at my school was trans, and he always said that even though he had to see a girl when he looked in the mirror, he knew who he really was. I’m kind of jealous of that certainty now.”

“Were you friends with him?”

“No. I was a bastard to him.” Faye laughs. “A bitch, now, I guess. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve been emptied out. I’m no-one.”

“You won’t always be.”

“Is that really possible? Can you really… become this? Not just accept it?”

Christine shrugs. “You can embrace it. It’s a choice, like everything here. And, sure, like everything here, the alternative choices are not enjoyable ones. But it’s a choice, nonetheless. What do you think, Faye? How are you going to choose?”

“I don’t know. I think… this? Being a girl? Like, even if I never feel it, there’s…” She scratches her chin, covering her hesitation. “There’s ways to live like this even if I never get there. I’ve been talking with Bex and we have some ideas. About the future. What we want to do.”

“Oh?” Christine says, radiating interest. Involve her in her own future, and she’s halfway there.

“Well, I’m good at, um, art, and she’s good with numbers, and Bella, Bex’s sponsor, she says we don’t have to do the same degrees we were doing before, so I’m going to do graphic design and she’s going to do accounting and we’re going to go into business together.”

“That’s great!” Christine says warmly, not having to fake her enthusiasm. It’s a good plan; better than hers, anyway.

“It’s just,” Faye says, deflating a little, “I don’t know. It all seems so… unfair?”

“I know, sweetie,” Christine says. “And it kind of is. We didn’t bring this on ourselves, after all. This was, clearly, something that was done to us. But I was a bad person. And so were you, if you’re honest with yourself.” Faye nods. “And that was unfair, too, on everyone around us.”

“Was this really the only way?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I definitely needed a hell of a kick to get out of all my bad habits, and there’s almost no bigger kick than this. And it’s worked. For me, for my Sisters, for my friends. I’m a better person now.” Say it again like you mean it, Christine. “And I’ll always be a better person.”

Faye, biting the end of a finger, nods again, and then blinks, reanimates fully. Gently she pats her face, feeling her damp cheek with the back of her hand. “Fuck!” she says. “I’ve ruined my makeup. I don’t care what Abby says to her, Nell will kill me for this.”

“Actually,” Christine says, “she doesn’t have to.” She pulls her phone out of her shoulder bag, drops into the group chat and types out a quick message. The reply comes back instantly, and she grins. “Why don’t you come upstairs, to my room, and Paige will get you all fixed up? You’ll be even more beautiful than before. You can really show off in front of Bex.”

Christine watches a blush bloom on Faye’s cheeks, and the girl knows it, because she tries to hide behind her hand. Busted, girly, Christine thinks.

“But, wait,” Faye says, frowning, “I’m not allowed upstairs.”

“I’m saying you are,” Christine says. “Just for tonight. And it’s my room, so what I say goes.”

“I’ll have to go past Nell, anyway,” Faye says glumly, “and she’ll see.”

“No,” Christine says, “you won’t.”

She stands and holds out her hand and Faye, confused, takes it, and follows her out of the conservatory and into the corridor. They stop together in front of a locked door and Christine holds up her phone again, brings up her private app, scrolls through until she finds the lock for the stairs that lead straight up to the second-floor storerooms, and taps. In front of a wide-eyed Faye, the lock rolls over.

Christine raises a finger to her lips. “Ssshhhh,” she says.