37. Snuff

1962 May 18
Friday

Her breath is the first thing she becomes aware of. Her throat, raw with the effort of taking in air again. Her chest, heaving as she fills her lungs over and over in desperate gasps. It hurts, too, a peculiar empty pain that came on gradually as she ran out of air, and escalated, started to bite at her every limb as she struggled to rip his hands from her throat. Is it possible to bleed inside your windpipe, inside your lungs? She doesn’t know. She has no way to find out.

A concern for later.

“Dots? Are you okay? Are you okay, Dots?”

Yes. Yes, she’s okay, because the boy is dead. She made sure of it before she stepped away. No need to be thorough about it; the blade was inside his throat. Justice for the hands around her neck. No-one can live through that.

Stupid boy used his hands when there were weapons around.

Her senses start to bleed in. She can hear Esther pestering her. She can see colour again, see the stained walls and the wooden benches and the discarded kitchen knife; she can see the boy’s unmoving body, grotesquely discarded on top of his victim. She can feel her fingers ache, feel his viscera up to her elbows.

She should have done this sooner. As soon as they made the first film. Long before he got his hands on any of them. What further use could he have been, anyway? Stupid. This is what happens when you give in, when you start to indulge yourself.

You can’t change the world so fundamentally for very long. Sooner or later, the natural order will reassert itself.

Hands around her neck.

The first violence in Dorothy’s life was at the hands of men. First from her uncle, though it was opportunistic and furtive, restricted to lonely moments and quiet corners, and when she told her mother she suggested she get away, get a job. Told her to go to the rich family out in the sticks; they’re looking for a new girl, she heard, and they don’t check for age. Go, make me proud, and send back some money.

And then there were the men of the manor. They took her for granted, not just in the way all men do, but in the way rich men treat women in their employ. A slap; a fondle; a drunken grope in the laundry room. She didn’t know to call it violence, not then. It was the way things were; the way they had always been.

Men taking their due.

Ten years of it. More, most likely; she struggles to remember the exact year she came to the manor. She didn’t write things down back then. Didn’t start doing so until a couple of years in, when a new girl started sharing her room and showed her the diary she kept. The girl didn’t last but the habits she instilled in Dorothy did, and she remembered every day in her little book, stuffed inside the unused fireplace in the shared room, hidden from the masters of the manor.

Men taking their due.

The oldest girl said to stop worrying about it, to stop talking about it, to stop riling up the other girls. Said she was lucky to have a job at all. Said if she wanted to guard her body so much, she could go back where she came from. Said that when your labour is purchased, your consent is, too. Said you’re probably leading them on, anyway.

So Dorothy put rat poison in the gravy.

It was a big event. Centre of the local social scene. Lots of families from the surrounding counties. Shame she got only a couple of the wives, one of the teens, and an elderly man whose heart was probably mere years from giving out. The boy, the one she wanted, the means by which she sought to really hurt that bastard Hugo Mount, he lived. Unconscious but breathing.

So she improvised, and in the chaos of recriminations and paranoia and some rather over-performed weeping, she took him. Constance and Esther helped her get one of his cousins, too, and before anyone stopped blaming their political enemies and thought to look for the scullery girls and the kitchen maid, they’d stolen the boys away. Esther knew how to drive and Constance kept the boys under with ether and Dorothy had the map. The route to a remote and dilapidated building, closest to the city of Almsworth and a small associated college but not actually all that close to anywhere in particular and, crucially, unused since the turn of the century. Property of some related but uninterested family. ‘Extensive weathering’, the report on its condition said, alongside an estimate for its renovation that represented more money than even Hugo Mount could likely stump up. For an unmoneyed relative, it was probably not worth the cost of demolition.

Perfect for their needs.

Dorley Hall. Dorothy’s stolen report said it used to be an asylum, and between them they knew enough to understand exactly what that meant, so they weren’t surprised to discover holding cells in the basement. They stashed the boys in the only two cells that still closed, and as Mount’s boy woke up and started thrashing at the chains around his wrists, screaming threats and entreaties, and kicking at walls which had once imprisoned particularly recalcitrant women, Dorothy had to appreciate the irony of it.

Girls were sent here to be made docile.

Constance operated the 8mm movie camera and Dorothy kept him ethered and Esther, who grew up on a farm, took Wallace Mount’s testicles from him.

And now Constance is dead by Wallace’s delicate hand. Just as he is dead by Dorothy’s.

She accepts Esther’s support, massages her neck where the boy had his hands around her, and slowly makes her way out of the basement, to wash up, to change clothes, and to make a start on cleaning up this whole bloody mess.

 

2020 January 5
Sunday

Christine needs to stop volunteering for things. If she’d just learn to keep her mouth shut, she and Paige could’ve spent this chilly Sunday morning in bed. But no, they have to be up and about on their last Sunday morning before classes kick off again, and even though it’s not long until eleven, it still feels obscenely early to be sat at the table in the second-floor kitchen, surrounded by almost her entire intake, throwing coffee down her throat.

Time is relative, she supposes. As is the chore list.

Not that fetching Abby back to the Hall is a chore. More of a calling. A pilgrimage. Or, most accurately, just another task she can’t let fall into someone else’s hands because she knows she can do it better.

If Abigail Meyer has to be brought back, it has to be Christine who does it.

“We’re going to have a September wedding,” Yasmin’s saying, over her cup of coffee and slice of buttered toast. With the new year, and with the end of the programme approaching, talk has turned to the future. “Or October, maybe. When the summer’s over and the weather’s just starting to turn.”

“She thinks autumn is romantic.”

Julia’s leaning against the wall by the window, inhaling her third cup of tea since Christine and Paige came in, and she’s doing her best. Christine’s been seeing more of her recently, in fits and starts, and it’d be more heartening if Julia weren’t often so obviously waiting to leave whichever room or situation she finds herself in. But she’s here now, hanging out with the rest of them — including an extremely sleep-deprived and possibly hungover Jodie, who is face-down on the table and who has not touched her coffee — and she’s making the effort she promised to make.

At least they’re both still committed to the night out Christine’s got hazily pencilled in for Friday or Saturday night. Christine wants to see Julia dance.

“Autumn is romantic,” Paige says, flicking idly at a strand of hair. She looks wonderful, as usual, despite having rolled out of the very same bed as Christine. They both took five minutes to wash and moisturise and run brushes through their hair; Paige is thus fresh and shining, and Christine left a blob of moisturiser on her nose. Yasmin, uncharacteristically playful, wiped it off with her little finger as soon as they both sat down.

Christine’s also getting a zit.

“Yeah,” Yasmin says. “The leaves turning. The rainy sunsets. The wind.”

“She insists it’s all very lovely,” Julia says. “All the dead trees and such.”

Yasmin covers her mouth to laugh. Julia’s from London, and claims never to have left until she was scooped up by Dorley. She likes to play up her total ignorance of life in the countryside, despite various of her intake, Yasmin included, repeatedly pointing to the woods outside the back windows.

“So,” Paige says, “this autumn, then?”

“Next year,” Yasmin says. “We move out, get a mortgage, make sure we can function independently in the outside world—” Julia snorts, “—and then we get married. We need to be engaged first, anyway.”

“That’s cute,” Jodie says, into the table.

“You’re invited to our engagement party, when it happens. Vicky, too, if she wants to come.”

“Yas,” Christine says, “when Vicky gets the invitation, cover your ears.” Next to her, Paige deadpan mimes someone caught in a thrall of exaggeratedly girly excitement.

Yasmin points at Christine with her coffee mug. Whether she chose it for the joke or for the cute cartoon illustrations or just because it was already on the draining rack from the other night is anyone’s guess. On the side, it says, Home is where THE HEART IS. The medical waste bin is where THE TESTICLES ARE.

“What about you two?” Yasmin asks, holding out a hand, fingers splayed, ring finger extended. “Any plans?”

“You mean, are we going to get married?” Christine says. “Well, yes.”

“Any thoughts on where? Jools and I, we’re—”

“We’re getting married in the sun,” Paige says. “On a hill. Somewhere nice. There’ll be an arch with flowers, white seats for the guests, and a pair of golden retrievers to bring us the rings. Unless any of you want to come. Then you can have the dogs’ jobs.”

“Done,” Jodie says. “I could absolutely do a dog’s job.”

“Right now?” Julia says, patting Jodie on her prone shoulder. “Are you sure?”

“Christine, is that what you want, too?” Yasmin asks. “Or are you being bridezilla’d?”

“No, I’m in,” Christine says. “We may have spent a few nights talking about it,” she adds, leaning her head on Paige’s shoulder.

“No church wedding, then?” Julia says. “If you’re on a hill, and all.”

“No. We’re doing mixed traditions. For Paige, we’ll do the horah. With chairs.” Paige mimes again. Christine kisses her and continues. “For me… We’re still working on it. Not sure how you can work ‘just being sort of wet and ineffectual’ into nuptials.”

“C of E?” Julia asks.

“Yes, but mainly for the holidays. School was sort of nominally Christian, too.”

“You’re all so cute,” Jodie moans.

“You okay, Jode?” Christine asks.

“I want to die.”

“It’s a nice day for it,” Paige says.

“Hey, Jodie,” Julia says, “you want some breakfast? I’m feeling antsy. I need something to do with my hands.”

Without raising her head, Jodie says, “Eggs?”

“We don’t have eggs,” Yasmin says, “but—”

Julia waves her into silence. “It’s okay. I can get eggs. Five minutes, Jodie.”

While Julia nips down to the main kitchen for a carton of eggs, the rest of them talk; quietly, for Jodie’s sake. Yasmin makes another round of drinks, and cheekily replaces Christine’s nice, plain mug with one from what she’s starting to think of as The Terrible Opsec Collection. Christine wants to warn Yasmin that appreciating the funny mugs is step one on the Dorley radicalisation journey, and that if she doesn’t firmly draw back, before she knows what’s happening she’ll be lecturing some poor boy and staying up until six in the morning in the security room, watching eight malcontents try with various degrees of success to hide the fact that they’re masturbating under the duvet.

At least Yasmin and Julia have a solid plan to leave, which is more than Christine does right now. Yasmin might well be destined to become a mug aficionado, but she’ll probably be storing her collection at the other end of the country while Christine’s still stuck here.

She surreptitiously checks the one Yasmin gave her. The illustration is of a woman standing in the foreground, looking into the distance at a pair of snowy and slightly rounded mountains. The caption reads, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Predictably, the word step has been crossed out and replaced by snip. Faced with Yasmin’s obvious amusement, Christine simply refuses to acknowledge it.

“Oh, come on, Christine,” Yasmin says. “It’s funny!”

Christine pastes her most innocent look over her face. “What’s funny?”

They’re still playing chicken over it — though Christine is the only one; even Paige responds to her new mug, which bears the slogan Get ready to be fit! Get ready to be strong! Get ready to be amazing! (Get ready to be slightly more aerodynamic!), with a snort — when Julia returns, bearing eggs and a fresh loaf of bread.

“What are you giggling about?” she says, dropping off her cargo by the sink. Yasmin shrugs, and Julia leans down over her head and kisses her, upside-down. Then she appears to remember that they’re not the only ones in the room, and quickly straightens up, embarrassed.

“You’re still cute,” Jodie says. She’s levered herself upright at this point, the better to absorb coffee, and she smiles sleepily for Julia. “Seriously. I love to see it.” She reaches out a hand for Julia, who takes it, sheepishly hesitant. “And I love to see you around the place again. Makes me happy. Where did this Julia go?”

“Don’t know, really,” Julia says, then squeezes Jodie’s hand and removes herself, returning to the sideboard with a more businesslike air. “Except for the obvious: downstairs for eggs. You want soldiers, Jodie?”

“God. Please.”

Julia turns her back, hides herself from the room. Probably only Christine has the right angle to see her cheeks are bright red. “The Rachel circus has reconvened downstairs, by the way,” she says.

“Oh?” Yasmin says, sharing a smile with Christine. “I wonder how that went.”

“She spent the night with Pippa,” Jodie says, and then has to add, hurriedly, “Not like that! She just… She didn’t want to go home. She’s not exactly fighting with her wife, but she’s got to get up early for work and it was already late and there’ve been tensions over all the secrecy about Dorley, and… What? Donna sends me the updates from the sponsor Consensus channel. Anything juicy, you know?”

Yasmin pats her hand. “Thanks, Jode.”

“Well, now she’s downstairs,” Julia says, racking the toaster, “with Pippa and Shahida and the rest of them. And Aunt Bea’s in the kitchen, wringing her hands. I think there’s going to be a confrontation.”

“Bea’s going to apologise,” Jodie says. She still sounds exhausted, but coffee and conversation has perked her up a little. “She thinks she fumbled the intro.”

“She did,” Paige says. “And then she dropped a very angry woman with incomplete information and a powerful sense of right and wrong into our laps.”

Julia sets down a plate of buttered toast strips in front of Jodie and returns a moment later with two boiled eggs, both in cups. “Maybe Aunt Bea should apologise to you, Paige.”

“Not holding my breath.”

“So,” Jodie says, dipping her toast in an egg, “I know why I’m up today, and I know why Christine and Paige are, so—”

“How do you know that?” Christine asks.

Jodie shrugs. “Donna told me.”

“Of course she did.”

Donna’s not supposed to be in the loop on this, but the sponsors are the biggest gossips around, probably because once you’ve been trusted with the big secrets — basements; boys; castrations; mugs — the smaller ones are fair game.

“That doesn’t help me,” Yasmin says. “Why are you up and about today?”

Fuck it. “We’re off to see Abby,” Christine says. That’s fairly nonspecific, and besides, assuming Abby comes with them, she’ll be there for everyone to see by the end of the day. Hardly a secret.

“Oh, yeah. The thing with her family.”

“Jesus Christ,” Christine groans. “I kept it a secret for over a month!” She nods her head sideways at Paige. “We both did! Donna told her, obviously—” another nod, this time at Jodie, “—but how do you know about Abby’s family?”

Yasmin winces. “Sally.”

Her sponsor. Of course. As far as Christine knows, they haven’t been seeing each other very often, but given how behind everything she seems suddenly to be, it won’t surprise her if it turns out Yasmin and Sally have been having dinner together every evening. Fuck, she’s going to get up on Monday morning and see the two of them in a single get-along shirt, isn’t she?

“I give up,” she says.

“There, there.”

“I still can’t believe Abby did it,” Jodie says, finishing off her coffee between eggs. Her mug bears the strikingly inoffensive slogan, When the going gets tough, the tough get gothic. “Just ran off to find her family.”

Julia nods, frowning, and Yasmin says, “Good for her. Never want to see my lot again, personally, not after everything, but… Good for her.”

“I can’t believe she dragged Christine into it,” Julia says, and Christine offers a smile as thanks for the consideration.

“Oh, I can,” Paige says. “I’ve been trying to call a moratorium on anyone giving her any more jobs, but she keeps finding them, anyway.” She elbows Christine gently. “This is supposed to be your fortnight off, isn’t it?”

“I’ve been negotiating that with Aunt Bea,” Christine says. “Technically, it starts tomorrow. Nothing but classes for two weeks. Today, I’m still on the clock.”

“Maybe…” Julia says, finally sitting down and clutching a fresh mug of tea. “Maybe we can step up a bit. I mean, Yas and me, we don’t really do anything around here, and that’s supposed to be sort of a rejection of the whole thing, in concept, anyway, but… I kind of feel like shit about it all.”

“I told her how much work you’ve been doing,” Yasmin says. “And I agree: we can pitch in more. I don’t mean sponsor, or anything, and I’m not taking on any of your network security jobs — I get enough of that at work — but random crap? Yeah. We can help. I mean, I talked to Bethany. Before she was Bethany, I mean. And that went fine. She was actually sort of sweet. So if you get press-ganged into basement work again—” and Christine has, every so often; Raph knows her name now, “—send me a message. Sally says the boys downstairs are out of the rowdy phase, anyway, that it’s starting to be time to show them…” Yasmin pauses, and takes Julia’s hand before she continues. “It’s time to show them how much better life is on the other side of the fence.”

Julia dabs at her mouth with a tissue, and then kisses Yasmin. Then she hefts her mug — a blank one — and says, “There’s a mug joke in that, I think. ‘Grass is greener’, that kind of thing.”

“‘The bush is fluffier on the other side of the fence,’” Jodie suggests.

“Please stop,” Christine says. “Thank you, though. Both of you. You don’t have to offer, though. Really. I can just—”

“What you can do,” Julia says, smiling through her teeth, “is shut up and take the olive branch.”

“Don’t make her mad,” Yasmin warns.

Christine holds up her hands. “Fine. I give up. Olive branch grasped. You can help. You too, Jodie, if you want.”

Jodie slumps again. “No,” she says, stretching out the vowel, “I super don’t want to. I’m so busy,” she adds, sighing theatrically.

Julia reaches out and massages Jodie gently between the shoulder blades. Jodie presses against Julia’s hands, rolls her shoulders under the contact, and moans happily.

“Come on,” Paige says, standing and collecting the empty mugs from the table to rinse. “We should fetch Maria.”

“Oh,” Julia says as Christine stands and stretches, “we’re coming, too. Not to Abby’s. Just downstairs.”

“We’ve been invited out tonight,” Yasmin says. “A few people from work have organised a charity pool tournament. We want to practise.”

“Hence downstairs,” Julia says.

“We have a pool table?” Christine asks, quickly tallying up all the closed doors she’s never opened. There are a lot.

“What do you think we were doing the entire second year?”

Paige finishes washing the mugs and turns around. “Then why do you need to practise?”

“Uh,” Yasmin says, looking away, “we weren’t playing pool on the pool table. Mostly.”

“It’s quiet and out of the way,” Julia says.

“And sturdy.”

“Huh,” Christine says, to fill the silence. It’s difficult not to picture it.

It’s still uncomfortably cold outside, and when it gets windy — which is, on the mostly flat Saints campus, especially with the buffer of the woods behind the Hall, often — the stairway at the front of the building gets the brunt of it. It’s in the oldest part of the building and is least-well served by radiators, and when the temperature’s low enough, it’s not uncommon to see residents of the third floor and up, who don’t have access to the inner stairwells, rushing up and down in full coats and gloves and earmuffs.

Dorley girls, at least, have other options. They take the central stairs down and emerge straight into the dining hall, where a few groups of people are already congregating. Yasmin and Julia say their goodbyes and slip away into the corridors at the back of the building, presumably to find the pool room and actually use it for its intended purpose for once. Shahida catches Christine’s eye and waves, and—

The crash of crockery from the kitchen isn’t so unusual, but the complete lack of follow-up noise is, especially when it drags on, when no-one is audibly picking up bits of plate or berating whoever was clumsy enough to drop it. Christine rushes to the kitchen and finds it bereft of activity but full of people, all of them completely ignoring the broken mug at Beatrice’s feet and instead staring silently at the three women waiting in the entrance hall, looking in through the windows in the doors.

Christine thinks back to her illicit delves into the network, to the documents she was never supposed to see, and tries to remember if she ought to know who the hell these women are.

 

* * *

 

It takes Edy a moment to put it all together, and it’s a moment longer than Maria, because before she’s even done assembling her thoughts, she’s having to wrap her arms around her lover’s waist and hold her back from doing—

Doing what? It’s a good bet Maria herself doesn’t even know. Running on instinct, probably, and memory, and hatred.

Edy was one of the first to graduate from Bea and Elle’s shiny new programme, and there was a lot more communal sponsoring back then, and a lot less information security, at least as far as the sponsor/sponsee relationship was concerned. She was there while they relived horror stories from only slightly before her time, and she was there to comfort them when the pressure of enacting a sanitised version of — and Edy has to be blunt — their own torture on someone else, someone who was, in Edy’s case, still technically an innocent, became too much. Empathising with her captors, understanding them, coming to terms with living with them as confidante and equal, it was all part of Edy’s process, part of what drew her away from her old identity, her old beliefs. What was done to her new friends, to her new Sisters, was horrific, and the people who did it to them were unequivocally monsters.

And she’s read the files. She keeps up with the surveillance Peckinville sends over. She’s cognisant of all the threats against their little operation, no matter how small, no matter how seemingly ludicrous. To that end, she knows the faces of all the old sponsors, of all Grandmother’s collaborators, and of several otherwise innocuous people known to be linked in some way to Silver River Solutions.

All of which is why Frankie Barton was the last person Edy expected ever to show her face here again.

She came back once before. Few years back. No-one spotted it at the time, not until the routine scrub-through of the video logs, but there she was, big as life, walking up to the kitchen doors, getting buzzed in by Indira, and looking around like she expected apparitions to reach up from the floor and out from the walls and drag her away. Maria made them all watch it, over and over, made them commit that face to memory, so if she ever tried anything again, they’d be ready.

And Frankie has to know that, doesn’t she? She has to know she got clocked for exactly who she is. She has to know that after she walks through those doors, that’s it for her. She’ll never leave.

So why is she here?

When they watched the footage, over and over, one of the other sponsors suggested that, judging by the look on her face, Frankie perhaps felt remorse for her actions. Maria had thrown a plate at the wall.

In Edy’s arms, her love stands limp, no longer struggling. The force which impelled her, pushed her forward, has departed her; without it, she can barely stand. Edy wants to swear, wants to be like Maria was, wants to throw things, because if that old bag has provoked a relapse, if Maria’s recovery is set back by this…

Maria’s been fine for ages. And now look at her!

“I’ve got you, Maria,” Edy whispers.

Around her, no-one moves. Bea’s dropped her mug but remains oblivious to the shards at her feet and the liquid stain on her ankles; Christine and Paige stand behind Steph and Bethany in the doorway, and as she looks, another group of girls — second years — shuffles up behind them; the other sponsors are waiting for someone senior to tell them what to do, and Edy wonders if that ought to be her.

Ah. Correction: almost no-one moves. Tabby’s deftly stepping over the smashed mug and the spilled coffee and heading for the door.

“Tabitha Hazel Forbes,” Maria says, startling Edy such that she almost drops her, “if you let that woman into this room, I won’t be responsible for what I do.”

Tabby pauses long enough to turn around, to take in the sight of her immediate superior in Edy’s arms. She says, “Yes, you will,” and she presses her thumb against the lock.

 

* * *

 

She’s here! The bitch is here!

When Karen Turner returned to Dorley Hall, she came under a contract foolishly offered by one of the other sponsors and automatically secured by Peckinville, and that meant that all the things Maria wanted to do to her, all the wounds she wanted to inflict, every little piece of vengeance Maria wanted to cut out of her… All of it was impossible. The contract forced her to smile through snide remarks and pretend-accidental deadnaming and the outright abuse of the people in Maria’s care. And Karen knew, and she loved knowing, and Maria could almost see right into her mind, see her pleasure, see the joy she took in everything she did to her.

Karen’s dead, and Maria never got her chance. But this is Frankie, and she’s not here under contract and Dorothy’s power base is in disarray and can’t strike back at her and Maria doesn’t have to play nice and doesn’t have to be servile and she’ll never have another opportunity like this and the game is fucking on.

Her temple throbs, directs a shaft of pain directly into her eyes, forcing her to close them, just for a moment, but it’s a helpful, motivating reminder of the pain she tried to forget, of the beatings and the cigarette burns and the razors around her wrist. Edy’s got her arms around her and obviously thinks she’s holding her back and that’s probably for the best, because with the pain comes the dizziness, and with the dizziness comes the focused and building headache, and Maria has only a few minutes of verticality left in her, so if Edy wants to hold her up, fine. Maybe she can get her a knife while she’s at it.

Tabitha’s gone to let in Frankie and her friends, whoever they are. Maria orders her not to, but it doesn’t make a difference; Maria’s not in charge in this room and Beatrice is as still as Maria is seething. Maybe it’s good that Tabitha’s let them in, anyway, because as soon as those doors open they can drag the three of them through and shut them in the Hall forever.

And who are the other two, anyway? At least with the doors open she can see them more clearly, without the daylight on the window panes obscuring their faces. They’re all rather the worse for wear, with sloppily cleaned and still-bloodstained clothing, bruising in almost all the parts she can see, and the skinny one, the young one, has duct tape around her neck and a black eye and a series of shallow cuts on her face, and—

Oh.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Edy’s hold on her increases and Maria feels her weight seem to double. She doesn’t fight it. She allows herself to be supported, but no longer because she expects to carry out some impractical revenge fantasy — Be serious, Maria, for one minute — but because the headache is really pressing on her now, and she needs to think before her faculties entirely depart her.

That’s Trevor Darling, isn’t it? The Peckinville soldier who went missing. The one with the unfortunate name. He’s clearly been worked on, tragically for him, and his obvious discomfort suggests he hasn’t adjusted well. Miracle if he had, really, considering it hasn’t been all that long since he disappeared. And the timing — and the presence of Frankie fucking Barton — suggests he was with Dorothy. He was almost definitely at Stenordale Manor, with Declan, which raises further questions. Was it them who burned it down? (Probably.) And where is Declan, anyway? Did he burn, too? (Probably.)

Frankie; Trevor. Two down. Head swimming, the weight of Edy’s body now almost as oppressive as her own, Maria turns her attention to the third woman.

And feels like an idiot.

It wasn’t Frankie’s arrival that shocked Bea. It wasn’t fucking Frankie who caused her to drop her mug, to freeze in place, to become helpless and confused and so little like the adoptive mother Maria has known for approaching half her life, and she feels stupid for assuming it.

Because the third woman is older, beautiful, and proud in the way only the truly wounded can be.

Valerie Barbier.

Well.

Isn’t that something?

And then Maria has to close her eyes again. It’s all too much; the lights are too bright; there are too many people and all of them are suddenly too loud. Everything is happening all at once, and Maria needs to rest.

 

* * *

 

It’s Val who makes the first move. The first move after the girl up front, anyway, the pretty one — that’s not very specific, Frankie; they’re all pretty — the one who opened the door for them, the one who’s now standing there waiting for them to do whatever the hell they’re going to do with the arch interest of one who really wants to see how this turns out but who has also realised how much paperwork has just been generated for her. But of the three of them, it was always going to be Val.

Fucking Val. The last time she saw this kitchen she was being dragged out of it, bodily yanked away from her only friend and thrown in the back of a van, and yet here she is, taking it all in, calmly, without affect.

Besides, there’s a woman who needs help. A woman in the arms of someone who doesn’t seem entirely up to the task of holding her up. And who would Valérie Barbier be if she wasn’t so fucking practical all the time?

Val rushes forward, past the Black girl who let them in, and helps the dusty blonde one with her cargo, and Frankie suddenly realises with a shock that practically welds her to the floor that the woman in Blondie’s arms is Maria.

Maria Lam!

Karen’s final boy!

Frankie remembers liking him, because he pushed back at Karen. Gave as good as he got, no matter the punishment. Even after Dorothy had his family killed, the boy didn’t back down, didn’t submit the way Dorothy and Karen expected him to. No, he bared his teeth in old Dotty’s face and dared her to kill him right there. And she found and claimed her new identity with a proud disdain Frankie’d last seen on, well, Val.

Christ. She was the one who leaked information to Beatrice Quinn! The one who can fairly take as much credit for the fall of Dorothy’s Dorley as anyone in this room. She certainly risked more than any of them, having to live day after day with Dorothy and Karen, having to absorb their cruelty, having to play along.

She definitely lost more than any of them.

Christ. Fucking Maria. Frankie should have expected to see her right up front; she’s read the files, knows Maria Lam’s been Beatrice’s number two since the start. But she didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to know how she’d feel if she ever saw that face again.

It’s like seeing Val again after thirty years. Worse, maybe.

The last thing Maria did before closing her eyes and succumbing to… to whatever has taken her over right now, was to glare at Frankie, right fucking at her, and who, really, can blame her? If Frankie was in her position, she might have smashed a glass and leapt at her the moment the doors opened.

And then there’s Val. Val, standing there in the fucking sundress she took off of Trev, with her arm linked with Blondie and with Maria carried between them. Val, commanding the attention of practically everyone, including a short, butch girl who ran over to Maria shortly after Val did and who is now hovering uselessly nearby. Val, who less than a day ago was repeatedly punching a professional soldier in the face, who is now collecting herself, deciding what to do next.

If she’s finding this at all taxing, it doesn’t show.

It dawns on Frankie that practically no-one’s said anything. The girl currently giving her the stinkeye said something to the room and Maria snapped something back at her, but since the doors opened, it’s as if the silence is a delicate thing nobody wants to break.

A thought, half-amusing, half-guilty, breaks through into Frankie’s mind: of everyone here, she has the most experience at breaking delicate things.

She’s about to greet everyone, introduce herself and kick off whatever madness follows, when Valérie — naturally — beats her to it, smiling at Beatrice and saying, “Frances said you took the name I suggested.”

“Um,” Beatrice says. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

“I’m glad,” Val says. “It suited you then and it suits you now.”

Beatrice bites her lip.

Stinkeye girl takes it as her cue to get things rolling. She looks past Frankie and Trev into the entryway, presumably to check no-one else is about to roll up and ruin their day even more, and then points at Val.

“Valerie Barbier, right?”

“Valérie,” Val says, correcting her pronunciation without animosity.

Stinkeye nods. “Valérie,” she says, in a perfect imitation. “Got it. I’m Tabitha Forbes.” She turns back to the door. “Frankie Barton and Trevor Darling, yes?”

“Y—yes,” Frankie says.

“Down from Stenordale?” Stinkeye girl — Tabitha Forbes — asks in a conversational tone, as if they’re on their holidays.

“Yeah.”

“Rough trip?”

“You could say that.”

“Is there anything you need? A hot meal? Clean clothes? A shower? Trevor, you have tape wrapped around your neck. I assume you’re going to need that seen to.”

Trev doesn’t answer — he doesn’t even look up — so Frankie replies for him. “Yeah, Trev here got a bit cut up while we were escaping.” She chooses her words carefully, to remind all present and especially those glaring at her that she, Frankie, is as much on the run as Val and Trev. “It didn’t get an artery or anything, but it’s pretty nasty. And Val can sew but we didn’t have anything to sew with, and—” Fuck. She’s rambling. Nerves. “Hence the tape. You got someone for that? A nurse, or someone?”

“We do,” Tabitha says. She takes another step closer, but slowly, with care. Yeah, she’s got to be a sponsor; she’s dealt often enough with the skittish and afraid that she has a whole process for it. “Trevor? Are you okay to come with me?”

Frankie’s honestly impressed the girl recognised Trev so quickly, but then, he was nicked off of Peckinville, wasn’t he? Elle’s lot will have been looking for him for a while.

And just how involved are the Dorley staff with their patron PMC, anyway? Do they get the same kind of packets old Dotty got from Silver River? If they do, they’re probably less shambolic; Frankie doesn’t know loads about the small but unpleasant network of innocently named British and (theoretically) allied security services, but she’s pretty sure Peckinville could swallow Silver River without so much as a burp.

“Yeah,” Trev says quietly, meeting the girl’s eye — meeting anyone’s eye — for the first time, “I can come with you. Um, you said something about clothes? I, uh, I need new clothes. Do you have a tracksuit I could borrow? Or something? Anything, really. And maybe…” He looks down at himself and seems about to say something else, but then shakes his head; Frankie’d bet money he was about to ask for a sports bra, but bottled it. Too many people around for that kind of vulnerability. He’s already doing that breathy whisper he put on back at the service station; he doesn’t know whether to play it as woman or man. Back then, it was about safety. Here, he can’t decide which option will bring him less shame.

Yeah. Frankie’s seen that shit before. When you are brought before someone you used to know, and you have been irrevocably changed, is it better to resist it and appear ludicrous, or accept it and appear weak?

“I think we can manage a tracksuit,” Tabitha says. “Can I touch you, Trevor?”

Hesitantly, Trev nods, and Tabitha takes his hand. Frankie has to step fully inside the kitchen so he can get past, and as he does, she pats him on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Trev,” she says, doing her best to sound reassuring.

The girls gathered in the doorway to the dining hall — even more of them than before — part like the Red Sea parted for Moses, and then close in again, trapping Frankie, the sinner, inside. And behind her, there’s a click. The doors to the outside, closing and locking behind her.

She kind of wants to swear really, really loud.

Instead she says, for anyone who will listen, “He’s not a girl. I know how he looks, but he’s not a girl.” All eyes on her. “It was done to him. Treat him like a man. And go easy on him; he’s had a rough couple of months.”

“And you know that,” says Blondie, still holding up Maria but now aided by Val, “because you were there, weren’t you.” There’s acid in her voice, and it corrodes her pretty face.

“She was not there by choice,” Val says, and Frankie can’t conceal her surprise. They’re not friends, not really; they’re veterans of the same abusive death cult, and here, with other people who are more like her, Val has no need for Frankie. And yet. “I cannot say she was as much a prisoner as I was, but I cannot in good conscience say she was there of her own free will. Dorothy was controlling her movements.”

“She was here by choice, though,” Blondie says, not letting it go. “She took the job here.”

“That is as may be. But young Trevor Darling and I would not have escaped without her. Now.” Val hefts, ever so slightly, the woman she and Blondie are supporting together. “There must be somewhere we can take her, yes? Somewhere close. With comfortable chairs.” She flicks her eyes dismissively at the wooden chairs around the kitchen table. “We cannot hold her in our arms forever,” she adds, in defiance of her apparent lack of expended effort.

Everyone looks at Beatrice, who doesn’t seem to know how to answer. She doesn’t seem to know how to do anything. Easy to guess why: she’s been looking for Val for thirty years, that much Frankie knows, and meanwhile, Val has been in one fucking place. Bea’ll be replaying those lost decades, wondering what she could have done differently, wondering if she could have saved her. The guilt must be eating her up. Frankie could make her crack with just one word—

Jesus, Frankie. Stop.

It’s being back here, that’s what it is. Despite the situation, despite the near certainty that she’s never leaving this place again, there’s something about the kitchen at Dorley Hall that changes her. Just the approach to the Hall had them stirring in her, those old, controlling instincts. The persona she built here, when her rage was long gone, when she still had a job to do. Sometimes she thinks she got worse when she was faking it, more focused on looking for angles on the people around her. And she’s doing it now, analysing Bea, finding a way to manipulate her.

She won’t do it.

In the end, a younger girl steps forward and answers for Beatrice. Probably to break the awkward silence.

Jesus; a much younger girl.

“There’s sofas and stuff in the dining hall,” she says. “On the far wall. By the fireplace.” Good God, she might be the youngest one here. A slim little ginger thing, not actually short — she’s taller, for example, than the butch girl who now, in the absence of anything else helpful to do, holds Maria’s limp hand — but she’s at most mid-height compared to the taller-than-average girls still waiting around. More strangely, she seems very underdeveloped. If Frankie’s an expert, and she bloody well is, then the girl’s been on hormones a few months at most. She’s had no facial surgery and the injections have barely even begun to soften her features. Oh, she’s pretty, and with the surgical mask pulled down so she can speak, it’s clear she’s going to have a face to die for when she graduates — and a lot of nasty little whiteheads much sooner than that, assuming all those little red marks are from an electrolysis session; ouch — but no-one’d mistake her for a real girl.

Whoops, Frances; a cis girl.

What’s Ginger doing up here, anyway? From what Frankie understands about the new programme, they stay in the basement for a whole year, so they can feminise gradually, so they can’t escape. They’re not allowed even to socialise outside their circle. One of the purloined essays Frankie read — which she now realises was written by the girl who left with Trev, Tabitha Forbes — described it as ‘concentric positive and negative feedback loops’, and that fairly strongly implies keeping them all in one fucking place. There’s no way Ginger should be up here, running around just a single locked door away from freedom. If she’s had a year of hormone therapy, then Frankie is a bloody donkey.

And Christ, the butch girl, the one who was with Ginger until Maria’s little episode, she’s not butch after all, not necessarily. She’s the same as Ginger: two or three months on hormones at most. Still got her boyish haircut. Still got most of her boyish figure. And yet, somehow, like Ginger, she’s upstairs, socialising with the older girls, in defiance of everything Frankie knows about the new programme.

Unless something’s changed.

“Perfect,” Val says to Ginger. “We will make use of the ‘sofas and stuff’. Young lady—”

“Steph,” the girl says, and then adds, in a more formal tone, “Stephanie.” Frankie, watching her, could swear her lips form briefly the shape of an M, and feels a kinship with Stephanie; she, too, sometimes wants to call Valérie Barbier ‘ma’am’.

“Stephanie, then. Please pick up the pieces of Béatrice’s mug. Put on dishwashing gloves first, and watch for sharp edges. Save them in a bowl or tray; there’s no reason to throw away something that can be repaired.”

“Yes,” Steph says. “Um, ma’am,” comes a moment later, and Frankie has to cover her mouth.

“We don’t have any food-safe adhesive,” says Blondie. “We ran out.”

Val shrugs. “Any glue will be fine. We will mend it with whatever we have.” She turns a smile on Beatrice. “Are you coming, Béatrice?”

Beatrice nods. Steps delicately over the smashed crockery. The girls in the doorway part again to let through Beatrice, Val, Blondie, Maria and the short girl — or boy, or girl-boy, or however it works here now — and most of them break off to follow them into the dining hall.

The ones who remain are uncomfortably focused on Frankie. The last loose end. The least of them all. Frankie, though, can’t take her eyes off the exit to the dining hall. It’s almost empty now, with just one girl — older, perhaps, than Stephanie and her butch little boy-girl friend, but otherwise difficult to place — leaning against the jamb. The girl’s frowning at her, the way everyone has been, but Frankie’s looking past her, into a dining hall rendered near-dark from this angle, the way it always used to. At this time of year the kitchen always did capture through its high-up, barred windows a kind of diffuse, lazy sunlight that rendered the rooms beyond almost invisible until you walked through.

Frankie shudders; it’s too much like being home. She doesn’t want Dorley Hall to be home.

“Excuse me,” a voice says, and steps back to find a begloved Stephanie coming up to her with a Pyrex dish full of broken crockery. She makes a shooing motion, and adds, “There’s a bit just behind you.” With the bright yellow rubber glove on, with the glass dish and the look of concern, the whole scene is so domestic, so out of place, so at odds with Trev’s worsening social anxiety, Val’s brittle insistence on helping everyone but herself, and Frankie’s constant spiral into unhelpful memory, that Frankie can’t stop herself from laughing, just a bit. It doesn’t help the looks she’s getting from the older girls.

She takes that step back, though, and gives Stephanie the space she needs.

“Thanks,” Stephanie says, “but it’s— No, it’s still behind you. To the left? No, my left, sorry. Just— Come forward a bit? No, okay, stay still. No, no, just stay right there. I’ll just nip in and grab it.” She straightens up and places her prize carefully in the dish. “Thanks.”

“Y’welcome,” Frankie murmurs.

One of the other girls claps her hands together, and then spreads them to encompass the entire room. “Well!” she says. “Now that the most awkward part is out of the way, let me introduce the team who’ll be keeping an eye on you.” She jerks a thumb into her chest. “I’m Indira. That’s Monica, and that’s—”

“Monica?” Frankie asks. She doesn’t even realise she’s said it out loud until the schoolteacherish one, Indira, grinds to a halt and looks at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Do we know each other?” says one of the others. This one’s tall, pale, and quite built for a Dorley girl. She’s leaning against the sideboard near the sink, and though it’s not fully visible from where Frankie’s standing, her black hair hangs with a weight that suggests it reaches the small of her back.

Monica. Fucking Monica!

It was the last time she saw Declan properly, when Dorothy insisted she pretty him up, get him ready to be paraded in front of some new funding prospect, some new pair of pervs who have, now that she comes to think about it, been suspiciously silent ever since.

So she got Declan ready. And he was a wreck. An exquisite physical specimen, obviously — old Dotty would have it no other way, and Jake had clearly taken pains to keep most of the bruises he inflicted hidden under Declan’s clothes — but a broken one, quiet almost to the point of catatonia. She couldn’t even get from him a confirmation of which name he preferred; she’d used Declan, and the boy didn’t contradict her.

But he wasn’t completely silent.

“Monica,” Frankie says, “you’re Declan’s sponsor, right?”

Monica flinches. Balls her hands into fists. Says quietly, “Yes.”

Indira tries to say something but Monica waves her into silence. Steps forward and sits at the table, with enough uncertainty in her step that Frankie knows she’s truly rattled. Frankie feels like she ought to sit down with her, ought to show a bit of human fucking compassion, but instead she stands there. Stands there and spools out from her memory like a machine.

“He always liked your name. He told me that. I was getting him ready and he sounded out my name a bit and then he did yours. Said he liked it. The right kind of syllables. He didn’t know the word for it, but that’s what he meant. He did that a lot. With names. Sounded them out. Almost sang them, sometimes.”

“I remember,” Monica whispers.

“You were getting him ready?” asks the third girl at the table. Frankie doesn’t know her name and doesn’t remember her picture from the files. She’s darker skinned than Monica, and her black hair’s almost as long. She’s holding Monica’s hand. Comforting her.

Frankie glances around. Now that Stephanie’s gone — Frankie didn’t see her leave, but she probably took the dish full of mug bits into the dining hall to go watch the Val show with everyone else — there’s only the four of them left. Frankie, and three fully actualised Dorley girls.

Two of them are holding hands.

Dorothy would despise this place.

“Yeah,” she says. “I was getting him ready. Hair, makeup. You know the drill.”

“Ready for what?” Monica asks, her voice hoarse.

Frankie shrugs. “Some stupid sales pitch. You probably already know this, since I guess you lot have been watching Dorothy as much as she’s had people watching you, but she’s been trying to rebuild the farm. On her own. Stupid. And I would’ve told her that if she’d asked me, told her she got out with all her skin still attached and considering the size of the wallets of the people she got tangled up with, she ought to consider herself lucky. But she didn’t ask, and I didn’t know what she was doing until it was too late, until she threw Karen at you — or not; I still don’t have all the details on how that happened — and yanked me back in to replace her. And I got there and found bloody Val there! I don’t have to tell you how fucked up that is—”

“Chop chop, Frankie,” Indira says.

“Right. Sorry. Anyway, she got herself in hock to Silver River, and that came with stipulations. Brakes on her behaviour and stuff. Meant even after she had Trev mutilated—” she doesn’t quite choke in shock that she used that word, but the way Trev’s been acting lately, there’s no other way she can see him; Indira, at least, reacts, though only with a repeat of her raised eyebrow, “—she couldn’t use him. Earmarked, y’see. For the Americans. So when she wanted to—”

“The Americans?” the third girl says.

“Whoever they are,” Monica says quickly, “they’re Bea’s problem. Or Elle’s. Or— Or fucking someone’s. I don’t care. Just continue, Frankie. Please? I need to know.”

Frankie nods. Stretches her fingers a little; tries to be a bit more human for the girls. It’s difficult.

“This isn’t going to be nice to hear,” she says.

“Say it. Please.”

“Dorothy wants alternative funding. Outside of Silver River and the Yanks. To get it she needed to show… the product.”

“Declan,” Monica murmurs.

“Yeah. And it fell to me to get him ready, because even in a prison where she had all the keys to all the locks, she didn’t trust Val or Trev. And Trev doesn’t know shit about makeup and clothes, and Val found out— Uh, Val found out what Declan did. To end up here.” She points downward. Monica nods softly. “She wouldn’t’ve worked on him even if old Dotty had threatened her. So, yeah. My job. I was to make him look like… Fuck. You know the score, yeah? Dorothy’s Dorley. The way it was here, back then?” She waves an irritated hand. “I needed to show off the product.”

“We understand,” Indira says quietly. The third girl gestures her agreement, and Monica just stares.

“While I was getting him ready, I tried to give him, you know, a bit of quiet space. Away from Jake and Dotty and all that. He always had to be on, is the thing. Always ready for it. Some of the girls, they can’t take it. They never could. It got to be too much, too fast.” Her voice is shaking. She knows this. She cannot stop it. What’s the point of self-control, anyway? She’ll never leave this place. They can think what they want of her. She might not even be here any more, in the kitchen. Or not in this version of the kitchen, anyway. She could swear the light’s close to blinding her, just the way it used to, when she stood right here. “Some of them might’ve. If they’d been given the chance. The time. But they never got it. Never alone because they were always being watched. Always a fault to find. Always a weakness to exploit. Always a—”

“Frankie,” Monica says, and Frankie halts herself.

Shit. Where was she? Where is she?

“Right,” she says. “Yeah. Okay. Declan and me. We talked a little. I tried to keep it light. It was mostly me talking, but he talked about you. And your name, like I said.”

“Mo-ni-ca.”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t come with you, did he?”

“No.”

“Where is he? Is he okay?”

“Don’t do this to yourself, Mon,” the third girl says.

Monica pulls her hand away. “Oh, fuck off, Lisa! You’ve never even had a washout.”

“Monica,” Indira says, with a warning to her voice.

“You can fuck off, too,” Monica says, but she quietens, leans back in her chair. Looks back at Frankie. “Is he okay?” she repeats.

“Honestly?” Frankie says. “No. You have to understand, life at Stenordale was… Fuck. In some ways it was worse than it used to be here. Trev got the least of it, because the Americans wanted him, and Val, she’s been living this longer than half your girls have been alive. She knew how to deal with it; fuck, she crushed a Silver River guy’s balls just for trying to sympathise with her. It was brilliant. But Declan, he got it all. Dorothy wanted to recreate this place, how it used to be, and that all fell on Declan.”

“And doing those things to him, that was your job?” asks the third girl; Lisa.

“What? No. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on Trev. Which, hah, look how that turned out—”

Monica slaps her hand on the table. “Who was it?”

“It was Jake.” She’d spit his name if she could. “Silver River soldier. We had two there at all times. At the manor. To keep an eye on us, make sure we didn’t try anything. Well, they were mainly there for Val and Trev.” Jarring, to remember she’s not a part of any ‘us’. Never was. “Declan wasn’t a problem. Was quiet most of the time. Mostly from being so bloody shell-shocked. But yeah, Jake. He was in charge of her. And he was… Christ, he picked it up so quick. I think Dorothy was coaching him? Or maybe he’s just a fucking sadist. He used to beat her. And worse. Much worse. I won’t say what. I think you know. I didn’t stop it. I couldn’t risk it. Not with the plan to get Trev and Val out. What he did to her… I don’t know if I could have stopped it, but I didn’t. I’m…” Don’t say you’re sorry, Frankie. Don’t you fucking do it.

Monica’s covering her mouth with her hand and Indira’s got her arm around Monica’s shaking shoulders and Lisa’s leaning up against her, and just as Frankie thinks the girl’s about to go completely nonverbal, Monica sniffs, fixes Frankie with another glare, and says, “‘Her’?”

“What?”

“You said ‘her’. About Declan.”

“Oh. Yeah. I do that sometimes. Look, she had this way about her. She made herself— Okay, so it was the surgeries, I s’pose? The way they made her look. The clothes. The makeup. The… expectations. It all got to her. And I saw her like that. A lot. I remember she did, too. You’d see her looking at herself, and this was when she was barely speaking at all, but… I don’t know. I think she couldn’t process it. But yeah, if I try, I can think of Declan, I can picture him how he was when I first saw him, still bruised. Still unfinished. Barely out of recovery from all the surgery. Because old Dotty, she did it all at once. Recovery from that is nasty. Took him a long time to get his voice back, even after— after Jake… But she did. In little bits. She was working him out, y’see. Finding a way to survive, I think. She made herself small. To protect herself. And Jake liked it, so—”

“Stop,” Monica says, through her hand. “Please.”

“All right.”

“Just tell me one thing. After you escaped, where did she— he— whatever; where did he go?”

Frankie’s turn to frown. “She didn’t go anywhere. There was no way to get at him most of the time. ’Specially not for the escape. He was always kept separate. Upstairs. He was Jake’s toy.” Unwise choice of words; Monica looks like she’s about to hyperventilate. Fuck it. Plough on. “Point is, he didn’t get out with us. He’s still there, best of my knowledge.”

“He’s not,” Indira says quietly. “Or if he is, he’s—”

“Don’t,” Monica whispers.

“What’s going on?” Frankie asks.

“You don’t know?” Indira says.

“Know what?”

“Stenordale Manor. It burned down.”

Oh.

Oh Christ.

 

1962 June 10
Sunday

There’s an air of death to the place. A feeling of everything coming to an end. The wind that whips through the hallways even on the warmest day has a bite to it, and for the first time since they got here, Dorothy wants to leave.

So she can’t blame the others for being vocal about it.

Esther, who was down there in the basement when it happened, she’s already packing, and Gladys, their one independent find, she’s coming down to make food for herself and for the other boy, but is otherwise remaining in the second-floor room she fixed up for herself.

None of them signed up for death; not one of theirs, and not one of them.

At least Gladys, who reads detective novels, helped out in one key respect. On her advice, they wrapped the Mount boy in sheets and an old tarpaulin before burying him, to keep him contained. And they didn’t use the obvious clearing in the woods, but rather picked an arbitrary and awkward spot and dug below the tree roots. The roots will pick him up, Gladys said, and carry him to the surface; but if he’s deep enough and if they’re careful, they’ll plough the soil above him and bury him even deeper.

Dorothy enjoys the imagery. Wallace Mount, slowly and inevitably unravelling, undiscovered, deep beneath the surface.

And she sent the bloody film. The first one, anyway. The one with their faces hidden. As it is, it’s a story without a denouement, but if it’s all over, why not go out on a high before she goes into hiding?

“Knock knock,” says a voice, a voice that reminds Dorothy of Mount, of the others at his functions, of hundreds upon hundreds of years of unwarranted and hateful dominance. It’s accompanied by a light rapping at the door that leads from the kitchen to the darkened outer hallway. The door makes its customary hollow rattle; probably only weeks of useful life left in it.

Hah; just like the other boy.

And then she understands, coldly, that her designs for Chester, the survivor, unavoidably must end here and now, for the man waiting for her in the dilapidated doorway is none other than Crispin Smyth-Farrow. A relative of Albert’s, a (presumed) friend of Hugo Mount, and likely the coming architect of her own messy end. She wonders if she’ll end up next to Wallace under those trees.

“Who are you?” she demands. She refuses to be deferential any longer.

“My word,” he says cheerfully, leaning against the door. Under his weight, it cracks. “Dorothy Marsden! As I live and breathe.” She glares at him. Unaffected, he continues, “Crispin Smyth-Farrow, at your service. We’ve met, you know. Repeatedly. You gave such delightful dinner service. I believe you served me a succulent roast duck one enchanting evening; another, rat poison.”

“How was it?” Dorothy asks. She wonders if there’s a way she can signal Gladys and Esther to run without tipping him off.

“The rat poison? My dear, it was a delight. Especially when it finished off the Admiral’s wife. She was very—” He interrupts himself with a hand around his throat and some uncannily accurate choking noises. “She’d been teetering on the edge for a while, you know, so you could almost call it a mercy.”

“Not my intention.”

“And that,” Smyth-Farrow says, stepping forward, stabbing a finger into a palm with each word, “is the core of it. Wonderful work, Dorothy Marsden, simply wonderful.”

Dorothy can’t stand the curiosity any more. “How did you find me?”

There are a handful of rickety chairs in the kitchen, around a central table, and Smyth-Farrow scoops one up, sits on it with a terrible insouciance, and leans on the table. “You really shouldn’t have made your little film in the basement, Dorothy, dear; it’s terribly distinctive.”

“Distinctive enough to find me? From scratch? Hard to believe, Smyth-Farrow.”

“Oh, you’re a firecracker, aren’t you? Fine; I admit to an ounce of cheating. I’ve visited this dump before. It has rather a lot of potential and a positively disgusting history, but I was unable to convince that awful Lambert fellow to give up the lease, so unfortunately it lies fallow. Until your good self, that is. I love what you’ve done with the place.”

This act is becoming unbearable. “What I’ve done with the place,” Dorothy says, leaning forward and, in the process, tipping the wobbly kitchen table back towards her, “is trap one aristocratic boy and kill another.”

That gets a reaction: a raised eyebrow. “Which boy did you kill?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters!” snaps Smyth-Farrow.

“Wallace Mount. He attacked us. Killed Constance.”

“Well,” Smyth-Farrow says, leaning back, his avuncular attitude already restored, “you did remove his testicles. And he seemed rather vexed about the dress and the makeup, too. But to be clear, young Charles Mount-Farrow is alive?”

“Not his name, but yes.”

“Good. I promised his father I’d return the boy. Oh, and don’t worry about Wallace. Not even his mother cares for him. I imagine they’ll commission someone to find you, pay for a bit of half-hearted gumshoeing, but they won’t dig too deeply. No, revenge failed, I believe.” He leans toward her again. “That is why you’re doing this, isn’t it? For revenge? I can’t imagine the slight, but I also can’t imagine another reason for you to dress up these boys of privilege as pretty girls. A lot of work for such meagre reward”

“Not when you’ve been used the way I have,” Dorothy says. She’s tired of this, and before she dies it would be nice for someone from the upper classes to understand how hard the world works to keep them afloat.

“Hmm. Yes.” Smyth-Farrow nods. “You are referring to the… little privileges, are you not?”

Through gritted teeth, Dorothy says, “Yes.”

“Always thought it a frightfully boring way of entertaining oneself, if I’m honest. A dismal exercise of some of the pettiest power imaginable. But I see your point. So the death of the Mount boy, that was an accident, I take it?”

“As I said: he attacked one of mine. Killed her. Attacked me. So I stopped him.”

“And as for his current whereabouts?”

“Buried.”

“I see.”

“Come on, then,” Dorothy says loudly, and hopefully loudly enough that at least one of the other girls will hear her and fetch the other, thereafter to depart, “do what you came here to do.”

“And what is that?”

She shrugs. “Arrest me. Kill me. Pick one.”

“I choose neither, Miss Marsden,” says Smyth-Farrow, smiling his infuriating smile again. “I came here for the boy, Albert. Oh, I planned to deliver young Mount back to his father, but his death is not especially vexing; the Mounts are a waning influence.”

“And the Mount-Farrows are not?” Dorothy asks.

Smyth-Farrow laughs. It comes out of him accompanied by spittle, and he apologetically wipes his lips with a handkerchief. “Oh, they are small fry indeed,” he says, “but no more nor less than they have been, historically. No, as you have surely guessed, young Chauncey is a relative of mine. Distant. And from a foolish branch of the family.” He lowers his voice, whispers conspiratorially. “They never should have hyphenated the way they did. ‘Mount-Farrow’? Sounds like something one ought to climb, doesn’t it?” He laughs again; this one is a bark, the undignified snort of an aristocrat who enjoys their position a little too much. “Though, I must admit, I did climb Mount-Farrow’s wife on occasion. Back in my younger days, you must understand; she’s a right old horror show now. Face’d be more at home on the prow of a decommissioned ship, or a chocolate ha’penny.”

“Ah,” Dorothy says.

“I’ll swear him to secrecy and deliver him back to his mother. There’ll be monetary incentive. Did you, perchance, geld him yet?”

“No. Didn’t know what to do with him, really.”

“Wonderful! That will considerably lessen the outlay required to keep him quiet. The Mount-Farrow line will live on. May a thousand more mediocre boys clog up the class lists of Eton—” he mimes a toast, “—until the sun sets on the Commonwealth of Nations.”

Dorothy frowns. “Five years ago, you were toasting to the glory of the British Empire.”

“Ah! You do remember me, after all! And I’m a realist, Dorothy Marsden. And that ties into my real reason for coming here in person.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, yes.” A ruthless smile. “If all I’d wanted was the boy, I would have sent someone and had them return with your head. No, I have a proposition for you, Miss Marsden. But first, a hunch requires resolution.”

He’s waiting for her, his sense of theatricality clearly requiring a prompt from her. She provides it: “Go on.”

“Kidnapping those boys, trapping them, keeping them under your control, taking their manhood from them, forcing them to do your bidding… You can’t tell me you don’t find it all just an eensy bit exciting, can you, Dorothy?”

2020 January 5
Sunday

You only have to look at Trevor Darling to understand why Grandmother decided to have some fun with him rather than simply have him killed, which Tabby assumes would have been the outcome if he’d looked more like your average male PMC soldier. But Trevor’s small and he’s pretty and his manner is careful and a little delicate in a way that makes her think of Will, when he drops all his shit, when he forgets for a moment to pretend to be a macho man. That’s not to say that Trevor Darling is trans — he almost definitely isn’t — but he lacks the swagger Tabby’s come to expect from soldiers. If Tabby had been in Grandmother’s position, and possessed her flexible ethical outlook, she might have done the same thing.

And it’s better than death, right?

Hah; tell him that. Since the kitchen doors opened, Trevor’s seemed like every second he’s had to spend around people has been akin to a thousand daggers digging into his skin, and while Tabby’s familiar with the look of it from many years working in the basement, there’s an intensity to Trevor’s reaction that’s new to her. As if he really can’t survive this. As if there is some critical level of exposure that lies somewhere in his future, and every person who looks at him takes him a little closer.

Reminds her of Steph. Or, more specifically, of Stefan.

Trevor insisted to her on the way up the stairs that he wants nothing more than to have what was done to him reversed, and considering how much he relaxed when it was just the two of them — and allowing for the fact that he’s done nothing specifically basementable, as far as she knows — she’s motivated to respect his wishes until someone tells her otherwise.

She looks back at him; he really is making himself small, isn’t he? Wow.

The thick-sided and centrally holed rectangle that is Dorley Hall has all of its active second- and third-year accommodation biased to one side, nearest the two main stairwells, and what that means for today is that Tabby has to lead Trevor on a relatively long walk. As they pass the second years’ rooms, she wonders what he makes of the colourfully decorated nameplates, and of the odd door left open, leading to adolescent messes. It’s almost a shame none of the girls are around to reassure him, to lend their voices to hers, to tell him that here, at Dorley Hall, no-one cares if his biology and his internality don’t match up. That whatever he thinks everyone is thinking of him when they look at him is simply untrue. It might not help with the dysphoria, but it’d probably stop him treating every new blind corner like it might harbour some new and even more awful gender, just waiting to violently apply itself to him.

They continue around the corner, away from the in-use bedrooms and the large bathrooms, and pass the still-lightly equipped second-year common room. The closed doors to empty bedrooms are always a little depressing; Tabby can easily imagine a version of the programme that has the resources to handle bigger intakes, but with the basement capping out at ten people and the staff an even more serious limiting factor, the rooms along here — and their counterparts on the second floor — will probably remain empty for years to come. Excepting the occasional visitors from recently burned-down competing forced-fem operations, obviously, but that doesn’t seem like something that’ll come up all that often.

Trevor continues to fidget.

Another corner, and the first floor becomes even more bare bones. There are two more bathrooms here, which usually go unused unless all the second years decide to have a shower at once, and a lot of empty and unpurposed rooms that once upon a time might have housed patients but now are home to nothing more than dust. There’s also a large room on the corner, matching the room on the other side of the building that was turned into a common area; here, it’s storage. Clothes, shoes, coats and jackets, all carefully mothballed and boxed away. Much of it is out of style, but Beatrice works on the assumption that everything comes back around again, sooner or later.

“Ta-da,” she says to Trevor, wiggling her hands and failing to extract from him more than a confused frown. “Clothes,” she explains, kicking at the door and opening it all the way, exposing the inside of the room. “For all occasions. Categorised by function and style and, within that, roughly by size.”

“Aren’t these all going to be… women’s clothes, though?”

Tabby does not roll her eyes. “Women’s clothes are only women’s clothes when it’s women who are wearing them. Besides, we have tracksuits and shit. Very neutral. Have a look! Pick out some unisex stuff. We can do you an order online when you’ve picked a room and gotten settled in, but this’ll do for now.”

“I’m… staying?” he asks, still waiting at the threshold even as Tabby walks around, pointing at things.

“Well, yeah. As long as you need. We have rooms to spare, Trevor, and plenty of food, and—”

“Okay,” he says. “Thanks.”

“Tracksuits,” Tabby repeats, pointing again. “Unisex. Get yourself three or four changes, okay? Just to tide you over until we can get you something specially for you. Maybe…” She eyes him again; he’s rather chesty. “Maybe a sports bra. Same section.”

He nods tremulously, breathes deeply, seems for a moment like he’s going to hug himself, and then shakes his head and starts sorting through sportswear. At least he isn’t in denial; he picks out four sports bras immediately. He looks around, wondering where to put them, and Tabby throws over a mesh bag. He thanks her silently, loads it up, and goes back to the racks and boxes of clothes.

“Tabitha,” he says after a while, pausing in the act of dropping some oversized hoodies into the bag, “do you think they can actually fix me? Frankie said you could, but—”

“Yeah,” Tabby says, trying not to sneer at the mention of Frankie’s name. She knows all about her — after the news broke about Trevor and Declan going missing, all the sponsors had to read up on Grandmother’s accomplices — and if she had her way, Frankie’d be following her pal Karen into the ocean. But it was obvious, even from a brief look at the three of them together, that Valérie, Trevor and Frankie are at least a little bit codependent, and ripping out a part of that dynamic before the more innocent parties have had a chance to stabilise would be… Well, it’d be the kind of cruelty Frankie fucking specialises in, wouldn’t it?

And Tabby’s not about to judge someone for how they survive the sort of forced feminisation that isn’t supposed to help you. Without the care the sponsors provide, without direction, without a clear end goal — without love — it’s just fucking torture.

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s just detransition, really. There’ll be a bit of time before anyone can take those implants out, so I can’t say what your immediate medical care is going to look like, but when that’s done, it’s just a matter of testosterone injections, like any trans man.”

Trevor’s staring at her. Going so white the natural red of his cheeks starts to look like a bloodstain. And just as she’s wondering what she could possibly have said to provoke such a reaction, he whispers, in a voice without breath, “You know about that? About my—” He glances down.

Oh.

“Yeah,” she says. “We know about the… standard practice. We do it here, but we’re, uh, nicer about it.”

Very convincing, Tab.

Trevor hugs the clothes he’s holding to his ample chest, and he wobbles.

Fuck.

Intervention time.

She hates doing this on the fly. She knows so little about him; she’s going to have to make this work purely on generalised knowledge about men. Which is a problem, because even though she technically was one for quite a while, the memories are a little fuzzy. And she always overcompensated, anyway; she has no first-hand memories of being a man who isn’t kind of shit at it.

A quick stride forward and she’s put the clothes he was holding away in the bag and put the bag on a bench, and then she’s guiding him, hand in hand, down onto a pair of comfortable chairs by the door. There’ll be no-one around to hear them, but she kicks the door shut, anyway.

“Sit for a bit, yeah?” she says.

Trevor nods. “Yeah.”

Even in that single syllable she can hear it: the stress of keeping going. She thinks back, trying to remember exactly when Grandmother took him; earlyish in November, she thinks. So, granted, he’s spent a little less than two months forced into this new appearance, and probably much of that was spent in post-surgical recovery. But he’s still packed as much physical alteration as a modern ISO standard Dorley girl gets in about a year — sometimes a few months more, depending on when they have facial surgery — into a staggeringly short time. And with none of the careful psychological grounding the girls here get, to boot.

The man needs to know he’s not alone in this. He needs to know he has a way forward.

He needs a good fucking cry. So, how to prompt one?

“Can I tell you about myself?” she asks. He nods again. “I’m Tabitha. You know that. People mostly call me Tab or Tabby, unless they’re annoyed with me. Or if they’re Aunt Bea, though I guess that might be tautological. But it’s not the name my mother gave me.”

“I— I know,” he says, fumbling the words.

“Nah. You don’t.”

“I do. You all have new—”

“You know it,” Tabby says, pointing at her head, “but you keep forgetting, don’t you? It’s hard to remember, isn’t it? We’re like cis women to you, aren’t we? Through and through, until you get confronted with it. People expect us to be all fucked up, but we’re too normal, at least until you get to know us. Trust me; I know. Every newbie goes through it.”

“I’m not a newbie,” he mutters.

“Right. Sure. Okay. What about Valérie? Tell me, what was she like as a man, Trevor?”

“What?”

“Picture it. What was he like?” She leans on the pronoun just a little.

“Hey, that’s— No!” He sounds more certain than he has about anything he’s said since he walked through the front doors. “Tabitha, that’s gross. It’s rude.”

“Yeah,” she says, “it is. But she’s like me, Trevor. And I’m like her. And so’s practically everyone else around here. Although,” she adds darkly, “the cis quotient has been rising, lately.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Shit. He probably doesn’t need to know about the cats Melissa dragged in. Shahida’s fine and probably on course to ask shyly about sponsoring in a year or two, assuming she gets a real job again at some point. Amy’s integrating with terrifying speed, and even Rachel seems to have relaxed somewhat.

Okay, so they’re fine, but Trevor doesn’t need to feel any more on view, does he? He’s already so fucked up that he prioritised getting into unisex clothes over having the wound on his neck seen to, an insane decision if ever Tabby’s witnessed one.

“Nothing,” she says. “People come and go. What I mean, Trevor, is that what happened to you? Happened to all of us. Yeah, granted, not as quickly, but practically none of us wanted it at the time. We—”

“I’m not— Shit. I’m not going to adjust,” he interrupts. But without confidence. He’s tripping over his words. Too many thoughts? Or is he too fragmented? “I can’t. I won’t! I’m just fucking— I’m not. Val tried, but she’s— Fuck.”

“Slow down, Trevor. Take your time.”

“Val tried to help me,” he says quietly. “Talked to me about her life. Not much. But enough for me to know I’m not her. I’m not you, either, I think.”

“You don’t have to be. Like I said, we’ll get you fixed up. Proper medical supervision and everything. But until then, and I want you to remember this, Trevor, because it’s important: we understand. We don’t want you to be a woman. We don’t want you to be Val. We don’t want you to be me. And we don’t want you to behave any which way around us. Just… do what’s natural. Whatever you need to do, whatever you need to be to get through the next little while, we’ll all respect it. No-one’ll make you act like a woman. No-one’ll make you act like a man. You can just chill.”

He laughs. It’s a wheeze, a smokestack laugh of the sort Tabby’s used to hearing from lifelong smokers, and she makes a mental note to get him fed and watered as soon as the medic’s done with him.

“Can’t act like a man, anyway,” he says. “Not any more. Not a real man.”

Tabby pretends interest, though she knows where this is going. “Oh?”

He doesn’t say anything, just looks at her and makes a snipping motion with his fingers.

“Ah,” Tabby says. “You think you need balls to be a man?” He shrugs. Looks down. Embarrassed by what must have felt so simple to him just moments ago. God; cis people! They come to the most simplistic and stupid conclusions! “Trevor, that’s bullshit.”

“It’s not. You wouldn’t know.”

“I wouldn’t?”

That gets him to meet her eyes. Only briefly. “You’re supposed to be a girl.”

“Maybe,” Tabby allows, “but that’s not what I mean. Okay. Let me tell you about my boyfriend.”

“What? Why?”

“Bear with me.” She adjusts herself until she’s sitting more comfortably. “His name’s Levi, and we haven’t been dating all that long, but this one feels like it’ll go the distance, yeah? And he’s sweet and he’s funny and he’s kind. He paints little plastic figures and he loses games with them because he’s terrible at the rules. And he’s hot, Trevor.” She gives herself a second, eyes closed, to remember their first night together. “He’s really fucking hot.” She shakes herself and looks Trevor in the eye. “And he’s all man.”

“What’s your point?”

“He also doesn’t have balls. Only difference is, he never did. Never did and doesn’t need them. Trevor, there are so many guys out there who are guys, and who’re just getting on with it despite not having been born with the balls you miss so much. And I get missing them, sure, that’s understandable, and maybe if the sacs haven’t completely withered then someone can put little silicone thingies in them so they feel right again. But they don’t matter. They’re not you. And they’re certainly not the site of your manhood. They’re just flesh. Not even very useful flesh.”

“Your boyfriend… he’s trans?”

Tabby sighs. “Yes, Trevor. He’s trans. And you’ve got a leg up on him, because unless Grandmother’s changed her habits in the last thirty years, your balls are all you lost, right?” She makes a wiggling gesture with a little finger; he nods. “Well then. You’ve got nothing to worry about; get some testosterone in you and you’ll be right as rain.”

He turns away from her. Leans back in his chair. “How can you be so blasé about all this?”

Tabby counts on her fingers. “Because I’ve seen it all, Trevor. Because I change people’s genders therapeutically for a living, and I’m good at it. Because I— Shit, Trevor. Because I can’t have kids. I can’t have kids and I really want to, and if I’m flippant, if I’m a bit abrasive about all this… I mean, you kind of have to be, right?”

Trevor nods. “No, I actually get that,” he says, perking up. “Val’s the same way. Talks about everything that’s happened to her like she’s reeling off a shopping list. I think, if I wanted to know what she really thinks about herself, I’d have to cut through about fifty layers of coping mechanisms. Wait, no; she told me once that womanhood is her proudest scar. That was about as real as she ever got.”

“Yeah,” Tabby says. “Yeah.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” he adds, leaning forward again, “she’s actually kind of wonderful. She always wants to help, you know? Just, she keeps a lot in.”

“Understandable.”

“You, um, you really want a baby?”

“I mean, yeah. I haven’t talked about it with Levi yet. It’s too early. But I don’t know if I will. Adoption’d be a problem because we’re both trans. And if we wanted to carry, he’d have to do it, and that’s a huge ask. So, surrogacy, maybe. It’s possible. I could be a mum, Trevor. But I can’t ever carry a child. And it’s not something I knew I wanted before. You know what that’s like? To hit thirty and suddenly feel like something vital is just missing? There’s a part of me that was just… never there.”

“Shit. I’m sorry, Tab.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, and she’s about to wave off the hand that’s hesitantly reaching out to her before she remembers why she’s here, in this room, talking to him. So she takes it in both of hers. Squeezes gently.

“Hey,” he says, making no move to pull his hand away, “actually, while we’re here, I mean, before we go back down, there’s something I need to say. Something Val might not. But it’s important.” He frowns, uncomfortable. “Don’t throw the book at Frankie. Please? I know what she did. Maybe not the specifics, but I know she was basically the Jake to Beatrice’s Declan. Except maybe without the, uh, the—”

“Yeah, I know what you’re getting at,” Tabby says. “You don’t have to say it.”

“She’s done awful things. I know. And I don’t think she’s going to apologise for them. But it’s not because she doesn’t want to, Tab; it’s because she doesn’t feel she deserves to. She expected to die in our escape attempt. She didn’t say it. Not out loud. But I have some training. And I’ve met a lot of vets. The escape, she threw everything into it. She didn’t plan to leave with us.”

“Suicide isn’t redemption, Trevor.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s just… She’ll be useful. Not just for what she knows. But for who she is now. Tab, she fucked off to work at a dog shelter for fifteen years. She was out. She never wanted to come back. But Dorothy had her over a barrel. And… And back then, she helped Beatrice escape. Back in the eighties or nineties or whenever it was. She helped her get away.”

No.

Fuck that.

She did what?

It’s bullshit. Has to be.

No.

Because that would mean—

Tabby snatches her hands away, wants instinctively to recoil even more bodily away from him, away from the suggestion that Bea’s escape and her subsequent return, that the foundation of everything they’ve built here… is because of fucking Frankie.

“S—sorry,” Trevor says, sounding small again, retreating in his own way.

“Are you sure?” Tabby hisses.

“I mean, it’s what she said. I asked about this place, about how Dorothy lost it, how Beatrice took it from her. And she told me about letting Beatrice pickpocket the keys, about standing in the doors, pretending not to see her. Said she knew Beatrice ran to some homeless shelter. They got a tip. Frankie went, told Dorothy she was going to get her, but she barely went inside. Just stomped around, made a lot of noise, made sure Beatrice knew she was there, and left again.”

Tabby’s silent, taking all this in, cross-referencing it with the very little she knows about Bea’s life before Elle. She said something about a shelter once, about tracking down a man who helped her and finding him in a home and getting Elle to move him somewhere better. He lived in luxury until the end.

Shit. This might be real.

“Tab?” he says carefully.

“What?” she snaps. “Oh. Sorry. Yeah. I’m, uh, I’m going to have to talk to someone about this. Not Bea; she’ll be with Valérie. Maria, maybe. Shit.”

“You’ll go easy on her?”

“Not my decision, Trevor. Few things here are, and I like it that way. Come on; let’s get you dressed, and then we’ll get all this—” she swipes a hand back and forth across her neck, “—fixed up.”

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t feel real. Valerie— No. Beatrice corrects herself, vows never to ruin her name again: Valérie, the woman who saved her in every way that mattered, who showed her how to survive, showed her how to scrape together a life, to find joy in any situation. Alive. Here. Staggeringly beautiful, just the way she remembers. And fussing over Maria while Bea herself sits uselessly in the armchair she was guided to.

“Edith,” Val’s saying, with a gentle hand under Maria’s neck, lowering her onto the sofa cushions, “are there any special care considerations?”

Edith’s bustling up with more cushions and a blanket. In her busyness, in her competence, a miniature of Valérie. Funny. Bea never really noticed that before. “Post-concussion care,” she says. “Are you familiar?”

Maria murmurs something that could be, “I’m fine. You don’t need to fuss.” Edith quietly scolds her, then turns her attention back to Valérie.

“Not intimately,” Valérie says, frowning thoughtfully. “I watched an instructional VHS. Several times. But I have no hands-on experience. Not with a concussion.”

Bea missed her voice so much.

“It’s not recent,” Edith says. “She’s out of the recovery period and hasn’t even had a dizzy spell for a while. But she went back to work too soon.” This last remark isn’t directed specifically at Beatrice, but it might as well be; she’s been having thoughts along those lines since Maria took up her sponsoring duties again.

Bea bites the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood. She has to pull herself together! What has she done since Valérie walked through her front door? Stared uselessly at her, allowed her senior sponsors to take charge in lieu, and watched her more-or-less adoptive daughter very nearly faint right in front of her!

“How is she?” she asks Edith.

Maria says, “’m fine.”

“She'll be okay, Aunt Bea,” Edith says. “She just needs to rest.” She punctuates this with a light press of a forefinger to Maria’s upper chest, compressing her into the sofa cushions and putting an end to her incipient squirming. “She’s described the dizzy spells to me before. They’re disorientating, and, worse, she says afterwards that, looking back, her judgement is impaired. She’ll do things—” finger to the chest again, “—that she ends up regretting. Like standing up. And telling everyone she’s fine. She also needs fluids.”

“Fluids?” Valérie says. “Allow me.”

Bea places a hand on her arm. “No,” she says, “it’s okay.” She nods in the direction of the pack of second-year girls — and Bethany — who followed them into the dining hall. Bethany steps forward, along with Faye and Rebecca.

“Yes, Aunt Bea?” Faye says.

“What can we do?” Bethany asks.

“They call you Aunt Bea,” Valérie whispers with a smile, and Bea realises she’s still touching her. The sundress she is inexplicably wearing has short sleeves, and Beatrice is touching Valérie’s arm.

Don’t get distracted.

“Bring us tea, please,” Beatrice says. “And plain biscuits. Digestives, perhaps. Not the chocolate ones I saw Stephanie sneaking, earlier.”

“And a bottle of water,” Edy adds.

“And Bethany: sensible mugs, please.”

As Bethany raises an innocent hand to her breast, Valérie asks, “You have mugs that are silly?”

“We are plagued by them,” Edy says. She pinches her eyebrows together; were she not preoccupied with Maria she would likely have performed a more emphatic gesture.

“In what way are they silly? Are they shaped oddly, or are they silly in some other fashion?”

“They have jokes on them,” Beatrice says, weighed down by inevitability.

Valérie considers this for a moment. “I think I would like to see some silly mugs.”

Bea directs her attention back at Bethany, Faye and Rebecca. Bethany especially. “Okay, girls. Tasteful mugs, please. And I would remind you,” she calls, as they turn away, “that it takes only one girl to carry a tray.”

In response to Valérie’s confusion, Edith says quietly, “Sometimes they try to be clever. That’s usually when messes are made.”

Bethany rushes off, with Faye and Rebecca in tow and, as if loosely and elastically connected, the other second years hesitantly follow them. On their way out, they absorb Stephanie, who is exiting the kitchen with a glass dish for some reason, and after a whispered conversation, the whole group turns around and heads for the stairs.

“Do they always move in a pack?” Valérie asks.

“I think of it as more of a herd,” Edy says.

“Why does one of them have cat ears on her hood?”

“Because it’s twenty-nineteen,” Beatrice mutters.

Edy says, “It’s twenty-twenty now, Auntie,” and if Beatrice were a little less discombobulated — and if Maria were okay — then Edy might be on the receiving end of a faceful of cushion right about now. The cheek!

Stephanie, left behind by the group, deposits her dish on a table near the fireplace and sits, pulling her feet up under herself.

“I suggested they use another kitchen,” she says. “There’s a bit of a discussion happening in there.”

“Is anyone throwing anything?” Edith asks.

“No, but when I left, they were talking about Declan,” Stephanie says. Beatrice feels herself tighten, and she notes Valérie’s sharp intake of breath. “I know he washed out, but they were talking about him like something else happened to him. Something after he washed out?”

It’s a question no-one wants to answer. Well, not so much a question as a bomb lobbed at Beatrice personally, via an impudently implicating rising intonation, but someone’s going to have to catch it.

“You shouldn’t be talking about this, Steph,” Edith says, though she doesn’t look up from Maria.

“And yet she is,” Beatrice says. “Stephanie, when someone is washed out, they are… delivered elsewhere. Declan was intercepted. By, it turns out, a private military associated with Dorothy Marsden. Remember ‘Grandmother’?” Stephanie nods, and as Bea takes a second to decide what she’s going to say next, Valérie slides her wrist out of her grasp, takes her hand, laces their fingers together, and continues on her behalf.

Unfair. Just because her voice was shaking.

“Declan was delivered to us,” Valérie says, “straight out of recovery from his surgeries.” Stephanie pales, and Valérie nods, gently. “Yes. Those kinds of surgeries. You saw young Trevor Darling? They had essentially the same work done. Face, breasts, and a quick snip down below. They even were given the same retroussé nose. Although Declan was larger up front, to account for his bigger frame.”

“How did he take it?” Stephanie asks, and Valérie leads her — and Beatrice, by extension — through a summary of Declan’s time at Stenordale Manor, of his near-catatonia, of Valérie finding out about his past and effectively rejecting him, handing him off to Frankie. She alludes to Declan’s later role, and Beatrice hopes against hope that Stephanie’s minimal knowledge of Dorothy Marsden’s proclivities will prevent her from reading too closely between the lines.

Declan was a toy for a brutal man and has now most likely perished in the fire that consumed Stenordale Manor, and Beatrice thinks, perhaps, that she will never forgive herself.

When Bethany and the second years return, distributing mugs and delighting Valérie with one that spells out in bold pink letters the word FIERCE (and alleges that it stands for Feminine! Independent! Elegant! Radiant! Castrated! Empowered!), and ensuring Maria has access to water and digestives, when Faye and Rebecca sit down on the sofa near Maria and ask if there’s anything else they can do, when Bethany and Stephanie share a kiss and an embrace and look upon the situation with concern in their eyes, Beatrice decides there are enough people to watch over Maria and to keep Valérie company and temporarily removes herself, striding quickly from the dining hall and up the stairs to find another room, any room, in which to sequester herself.

It would not do for the sponsors to see her cry. Nor the second years.

Nor Valérie.

 

* * *

 

“Honestly, I feel good about removing ourselves from that situation. I mean, yes, high drama, totally fascinating and everything, but realistically, it was only a matter of time before someone gave me a job.”

“Or,” Paige says, “until you volunteered for one.” She reaches for the gearshift again and fumes — again. Christine’s been subjected to Paige’s complaints about automatic transmissions before; she feels as if her left hand has nothing to do, and no amount of tactfully placing it on Christine’s thigh will prevent it eventually wandering back to the gearshift, there to find itself useless.

“True. Think we’ll get in trouble for this?”

Paige quirks her head, shaking it the way she does when she’s driving and needs to keep her eyes on the road: very slightly and very carefully. “I’d be astonished if anyone notices we’re gone.”

“So, what, we just show up again this afternoon with Abby and act like we were there the whole time?”

Paige laughs. “Yes. Let’s do that. Let’s see if anyone has the brass nerve to call us out for it, after our chaperone practically passed out and your sponsor—”

“—ex-sponsor—”

“—elected herself chief of the Torturer Handler group. If they wanted us supervised, they should have supervised us better.”

“Yeah. True.”

“Hey!” Pippa says, from the back seat. “I’m technically a sponsor, you know.”

Paige snorts, then frowns at herself. “Sorry. Rude.”

“I mean, it’s a little reassuring, actually.” Pippa sits back, and after a moment’s struggle, pops the seat belt back into place in the centre of her chest. “I’d rather the thought of me sponsoring be amusing than anything else.”

“Feeling the weight of responsibility?” Christine asks.

“Hardly. Last I saw, Steph was being ordered around by a French woman. I don’t do that any more. Just movie nights, stuff like that.”

“Where’s Rachel, anyway? She spent the night with you, didn’t she?”

Pippa rolls her eyes. “Don’t you start, too. Jane called me a homewrecker earlier. I know she didn’t mean it, like it was a joke, but all the same—”

“I know, Pip,” Christine says quickly. “I just meant, who’s chaperoning her right now?”

“Jane,” Pippa says, shrugging. “And Melissa, Shahida and Amy, I suppose. Who were those people? I thought I recognised one of them, but I couldn’t place her.”

Christine talks her through it — to the best of her knowledge; she didn’t exactly memorise Trevor Darling’s file when she skimmed recent senior sponsor updates — while Paige negotiates with a complicated intersection and deposits them onto the M11.

“So,” Pippa says, when the M11 has shed its hard shoulder and become the A11, “what’s the plan?”

“Bring Abby back,” Christine says, and adds with a shrug, “That’s about as complex as it got.”

“We appeal to Abby’s affection for Melissa,” Paige says. “And, if that doesn’t work, we tell her Beatrice needs to talk to her.”

“Is that true?” Pippa asks.

Christine says, “Unfortunately, yes.”

 

* * *

 

He holds Tabitha’s hand on the way back down the stairs. He’s not proud of it — and she reminded him, quite pointedly, that she has a boyfriend already, which caused him to inform her that he is gay, thank you very bloody much — but he can’t pretend that he isn’t rattled by this place. And, contrary to what Tabitha said, it’s not because of the way people look at him.

Okay, it’s not entirely because of the way people look at him. But as soon as he first looked in through the windows in the kitchen doors, he realised that if what Frankie told him about Dorley Hall was true, then every single one of the women looking back at him had a history just like his.

Taken. Transformed.

And they adapted. They became the women they appeared to be. And not just the ones who went through the relatively cushy programme under Beatrice; both Maria and Bea herself survived the same brutal regime as Val, were both reshaped for someone else’s pleasure.

On some level, he knows this is nothing new. Because Val’s Val, right? Like he said to Tabitha, she claims her womanhood, despite its origin. But it was always possible for a small part of him to believe that she was lying to herself, that she was a woman because she had no other choice.

Well, here’s a whole building full of women who had the choice. They all made it.

So why can’t he?

Why does even the thought of it fill him with creeping horror? Why does the idea make his skin crawl and his teeth clench? Why, when he thinks about spending another year — fuck, another month — like this, does he want to dive for the nearest knife and take the easier exit?

Is he really that weak?

He’s not ashamed because the women of Dorley Hall look at him and see a woman, or a man, or a man who was forcibly made into a woman; he’s ashamed because they see someone who fucking failed.

And he’s being stupid. He knows it. Tabitha said it: they don’t care. And Frankie said something ages ago about the selection criteria for the new programme being carefully tailored to weed out men just like him, men who can’t make the switch — though how that actually works, he has no idea. Do they have statistics? Do they send someone to sit by them in a bar and see if they have the right vibes? Are they just extraordinarily lucky?

Whatever. He can as easily make himself believe that the men like him, the ones they weed out, aren’t merely unsuitable; they’re the weak ones. The ones who aren’t strong enough to be women.

Christ. He needs a therapist. Or a gun.

“Trevor?” Tabitha says, squeezing his fingers to get him to let her go. “We’re here.”

“Hm? Oh. Sorry.”

She shakes her hand a bit, flexes the knuckles, and he resists the urge to apologise again. He probably held on a bit too tight towards the end, largely because he can’t believe he’s about to introduce himself to even more people.

Only two, though. Tabitha called ahead; the soldiers will be kept out of their hair. “They’re not interested,” she said. “They’ve seen a million girls who used to be boys already.”

It took a little badgering to get her to confirm that they haven’t been told about his specific situation; they probably would be eager to get a look at a former colleague.

The door to one of the portacabins — mid-sized, and of a configuration he doesn’t recognise — opens as they approach, and a pretty, dark-skinned woman leans out and waves at them. She’s not dressed in fatigues as he expected, but instead wears a sweater, a calf-length skirt and long boots. She’s got her hair pulled tight against her head and tied up at the back, though it spills out quite spectacularly, even more so than Tabitha’s. The two of them clearly know each other: they embrace, and then the new woman turns to Trevor and introduces herself.

“Hi, Trevor. I’m Jan Golding. I represent Elle Lambert’s interests.” She holds out a hand, and when Trevor accepts it and shakes, she giggles. “Now that the pompous part is out of the way: welcome to our little village.”

She waves them inside, and Trevor finds a small but not cramped infirmary, with a staff, apparently, of one. The one beckons him over, and he sheds the coat he pulled on for the walk and goes over to meet her.

Behind him, Tabitha and Jan are talking quietly:

“You’re sure I can’t persuade you to stay in the Hall? Girls’ night?”

“Sorry, Tab. One encounter with Aunt Bea was enough.”

“Her bark is so much worse than her bite.”

“Perhaps. It’s still no, though.”

“Fair enough.”

“Trevor!” the medic says, pulling him in to shake his hand. “I’m Fatima. I hear you need some fixing?”

He shrugs and smiles. “Little bit,” he admits. Before he can get into it, Tabitha calls to him from the door.

“I have to go talk to Bea,” she says. “You’re serious about Frankie? About what you said?”

“Yeah.”

Tabitha sighs. “Then I have to go talk to Bea,” she repeats. “Jan’ll walk you back to the Hall when you’re ready.”

“Just as far as the door,” Jan says.

“Okay,” Trevor says. “Thanks, Tab.”

“Don’t be a stranger,” she says, and ducks out of the door, closing it behind her.

“Shall we get this off, then?” Fatima says brightly, poking at the edge of the tape that’s been holding him closed. He nods, and Fatima makes sympathetic noises as she yanks away at the tape, followed by a low whistle when she finally exposes the wound.

“Yeah,” he says, “it wasn’t pleasant to look at when we put the tape on.”

“I suspect it’s probably worse now,” Fatima says. “But nothing we can’t handle. Just sit back and we’ll get you nicely numbed up…”

 

* * *

 

Frances talked more than once about the time she saw them, talked endlessly about the Indian girl who was so friendly and so pretty, talked about the way she moved, her voice, her hair, and when she was drunk she spoke of her frustration that when she worked at the Hall all they were doing was producing throwaway toys, how they could have been making beautiful, vibrant people, and that was usually the point where Valérie kicked her until she shut up. Val assumed she was exaggerating — not lying; the old woman doesn’t have any lies left — and that the girls at Dorley Hall would be more like the better-adjusted girls Valérie used to find in her (brief) care at Stenordale, the ones who had found a way to live with themselves until, despite Val’s efforts, they were killed.

She assumed they would be something like Val fears herself to be: patchwork creations, facsimiles of women. Survivors, above all else.

They are emphatically not. There’s joy here. There’s love.

It’s humbling. And it makes Valérie so fucking angry. She sees in them everything the girls she cared for could have had. Everything she could have had. Because while Valérie can’t imagine what her life might have been like as a man, she’s always been curious what it would have been like if she hadn’t been kept prisoner.

And now she can see it.

She can see it, and her chest burns. She’s dragged down, memories a gravitic tug on her heart, a binding and inescapable force.

The graves she was made to dig.

The girls she was made to bury.

The life she was made to live, within sight of the stone markers she left to commemorate those even less fortunate than her.

“Are you okay, Valérie?” the dusty blonde one asks. Edith. Edy. Sweet girl; doting on the other one, Maria, the one who lost all control at the sight of Frankie. The only one here, Béatrice aside, who stands the slightest chance of understanding her.

Maria had looked ready to murder, and in that, Valérie understands her right back. She wanted to do the same to Frankie, the first time she saw her again. Unfortunate that the cantankerous old bitch grows on you.

“Mademoiselle Barbier?” Edith asks again, and this time, Valérie registers it properly. Perhaps it’s Edith’s suddenly flawless French accent. She stifles a laugh; Frankie would call Edith a swot.

“Oh,” she says. “Yes. I’m fine.”

“You must have a lot to think about.”

Val shrugs. She says, “How is Maria?”

“I’m fine,” Maria insists.

“She’s doing better,” Edith corrects.

Maria’s sitting up now, and drinking carefully from her second bottle of water. Edith has the plate of digestive biscuits on her lap, and occasionally hands one to Maria, accompanied by a meaningful look. She does this now, and as Maria rolls her eyes, shares a brief, slightly embarrassed look with Valérie, and eats her biscuit, Val has to look away.

She’s like her. Like her and her girls. Maria, Béatrice, Valérie, and a handful of other girls who were lucky enough to still be at the Hall when Béatrice and Elle came storming in. Oh, Frankie says there were one or two others, from before Béatrice’s tenure, snuck away and sworn to secrecy lest they invite death upon themselves and their former captors, but she’s presented no proof, and it’s still nothing against the sheer number of dead.

Valérie can feel them when she breathes.

It’s all so unfair.

It’d be easier not to think about all this if Valérie had something to do. But Béatrice has run off, and Val knows better than to go chasing straight after someone in such a state. And Béatrice tried so hard to hide her tears. She is respected here, she is loved, she is…

To be frank, some of the younger girls seem to regard her with a mixture of awe and naked fear. Not the youngest, though, not Stephanie, which is curious. She has a rather more pragmatic view of Béatrice, from what Valérie’s seen.

Val got the rundown from Stephanie. An earnest little thing, ginger-haired and terribly pale and apparently some variety of feral trans woman, a kitten who ran in off the street and then refused to leave. Another step further away from Valérie’s own life, and thus a little easier to talk to. She got a potted history of the Hall — rather simplified, Valérie is sure — and Stephanie introduced her to everyone nearby, obliging Val to learn several new names and faces very quickly.

She picked the most visually distinctive one as an anchor for her memory: Mia. The one with the pretend ears on her outfit and the long socks and the improperly washed-off remnants of eyeliner whiskers on her cheeks. Chalk-white and excitable, she seems almost permanently attached to Aisha, darker-skinned and more conventionally attired but no less energetic. Their next-most-rowdy friends are Faye and Rebecca, and the two quiet ones are Anne and Fiona. Together, the six of them comprise the 2018 intake, and they are each of them at most six-ish months into their identification as women.

Remarkable, really.

Stephanie described the second years collectively as a polycule. She then had to describe for Valérie what a ‘polycule’ is, and then had to emphasise that she was only joking. She seemed unsure about it, though, so Val let her off the hook and asked her instead to introduce the only one who remained unnamed: the darker-haired one, no less pale than Stephanie, but smaller in every dimension. And so Val met Bethany, an event which prompted in everyone around her, including the semi-aware Maria, an anticipatory gasp, but which proved to be anticlimactic.

Bethany is a quiet, sombre girl, content to hide behind her surgical mask, to smother herself in Stephanie’s embrace, and to drink deeply from her mug of tea. She’s very concerned with Maria’s wellbeing, and the few words she’s spoken have reflected that. She did seem proud of having broken some sort of record — “Two, actually,” she said, when queried; “one, first girl in the basement who wasn’t a girl when she arrived; second, first basementee to give another basementee a bona fide nervous breakdown.” — and became briefly quite animated, but sobered immediately when Maria asked her to pass over a new bottle of water.

“Valérie?” Maria asks. She’s so quiet, and given the pained expressions on both Edith and Bethany’s faces, considerably more so than usual.

“Yes?”

“Do you plan to stay?”

Ah. One of the difficult questions, then. “I don’t know.”

“Stay,” Maria says. It’s almost a hiss. “Please. For a little while. For Bea.”

Valérie nods. “Of course.” Where else would she go? Who else would she be? Concepts made alien by time.

“Thank you.” And Maria leans back. Closes her eyes again. Still conscious; just resting. Edith and Bethany fuss over her some more, and Valérie crosses her legs, rearranges her arms, sips at her cooling black tea, and considers Béatrice.

So different now. She remembers her: the scared child, still learning defiance, still learning survival, still learning womanhood, still afraid to claim it, to spit it in the face of their captors. Béatrice when she was Dee, when she was unnamed, unclaimed, running towards her in the midnight kitchen, being knocked back and rising again, bleeding, ready for anything, for Val’s sake.

Valérie has possessed that memory for a long time. She’s coveted it. Nurtured it. For a long time she thought it was all there would ever be of the girl: a moment of rebellion, buying five minutes for the two of them to say goodbye. Dee and Valérie, aborted women for whom nothing awaited but their humiliation, their abuse and their deaths.

And then, miraculously, they survived. Val knows Frankie helped Dee escape, knows she got out of the Hall and then away from Almsworth, but she knows nothing of the years between. More than a decade, in which Dee became Béatrice, became someone who could return with powerful allies and strip her abusers of their power and their home.

In that same time, Valérie became something else. Her wounds scarred and her fears dulled, and even her hate faded somewhat. She became a corpse, animated by memory.

Still; they survived. And now Béatrice runs from her and Valérie must chase her.

She ought to clean up first, though.

Fending off protests from some of the girls — though they acquiesce quickly without their Aunt Bea around to tell them otherwise — she fetches up the crumb-covered plate from Edith’s lap and every empty mug she can find, and delivers them all to the kitchen, remembering only after she enters that everything on her tray originated in another kitchen upstairs, because Frankie’s been having some kind of standoff in this one. She still is: Frankie’s sat at the table facing three of Béatrice’s girls, and the atmosphere between them is tense.

Oh, well. She fills the sink with soapy water, anyway.

“Having a nice time, Frances?” she asks the silent room.

One of the girls snorts, and Frankie says, “I think I’m about to be locked in a dark closet for the rest of my life.”

Val locates a washcloth. “How nice,” she says. “I’ll have to visit.”

“Val,” Frankie says. “The manor. It burned down.”

She’s glad she already tipped her crockery into the sink, because just the thought of it makes her fists clench. Her mind’s eye fills quickly with imagery: the graves, burning; her awful little suite in the servants’ quarters, her home for decades, burning. And, oh no—

“Declan?” she says, turning around. “Is there news of him?”

“Thought you hated him.”

“Yes, Frances, I do, but my preferred fate for rapists is not necessarily that they burn to death.”

“S’not like there’s much of Declan left to burn, anyway,” Frankie mutters.

“Please shut up,” one of the other girls says.

“We don’t know anything,” says the girl who laughed before. She seems to be in charge. She glances briefly at Frankie before adding, “But we have people on the ground there. And… other ways of acquiring information. Elle’s people sent over an update a few minutes ago: the fire brigade found four corpses. Three in the entrance hall.”

“Callum,” Valérie says, as Frankie nods, “and the two delivery men from Silver River. They were in the entrance hall. Who was the fourth?”

“A man.”

“That rules out Declan, then. He wouldn’t pass for a man. Not even a dead one. Frances, do you know what that means? Jake is dead!”

“Told them all this already, Val,” Frankie says.

“For some reason,” says the girl who told Frankie to shut up, “we don’t trust you.”

“How did he die?”

“We don’t know,” says the first girl.

“He might’ve bled out,” Frankie says. “We did get him. A bit. Mostly Trev.”

“I hit him very hard in the face,” Valérie reminds her. Her knuckles are still sore.

“It doesn’t matter,” says the first girl. “It just means that Dorothy Marsden left with Declan. Probably started the fire herself.”

“You don’t know that, Dira,” says the girl who told Frankie to shut up. “They might not have found his body yet.”

“Why assume the worst?” Dira says.

“Why would Dorothy start the fire?” Val asks, returning to the washing up, if only to give her stiffening fingers something to do. The graves, burning…

“Because she fucked it, Val,” Frankie says. “Trev was the Smyth-Farrows’ golden girl, and we nabbed him right from under her. Her head’s going to roll. You remember what the Smyth-Farrows were like, don’t you? They liked you more than they liked her.”

Valérie nods. “The only point on which to recommend them.”

“Right. Fucking horrible people. ’Specially the girl. Hortense, or whatever her name is.”

“Henrietta,” Valérie suggests.

“Like father like daughter,” Frankie finishes.

Val rinses the last mug and sets it on the draining rack. “Can we finish later? I have to talk to Béatrice.”

“By all means,” Dira says. “We need to finish, ah, debriefing Frankie here.”

“Enjoy yourselves. But do remember: she saved my life. She saved Trev’s life. She even had a go at helping Declan. Don’t break her in any way that can’t be mended.”

“You’re a doll, Val,” Frankie says.

Valérie blows her a kiss on the way out, to the bemusement of Béatrice’s girls, and sweeps through the dining hall, picking up on her way the dish with the broken cup. Some helpful soul — Stephanie, perhaps — has added a tube of glue. She smiles at the gathered groups of girls in the dining hall, and notes that Stephanie and Bethany have both gone, along with a handful of others, and she contemplates staying, to keep an eye on Maria, but decides against; Edith is speaking quietly with her, and Val doesn’t want to intrude.

Besides, she has somewhere to be and things to do.

She’s dredged up from the depths of her memory a rough map of the lower floors of Dorley Hall, and she’s pretty sure she knows where Béatrice will have gone. The stairs she ran to lead directly to the first floor, and to Dorothy Marsden’s old flat; it’s the biggest single space Valérie knows of, so the odds are decent that Béatrice lives there now. It’ll be on the first floor, assuming she isn’t wildly wrong.

If she is, well, the Hall seems to possess an infinite supply of intriguing and helpful young women; one of them will be able to direct her.

Dorothy’s flat turns out to be right where she remembers, though there’s one of those hefty thumb scanners on the door now, so she knocks. Does her best to blank her memory as she waits. With luck, Béatrice will have rearranged the furniture, because if it looks inside the way it always used to…

Dorothy and her guests sometimes preferred to keep their entertainment private.

And then the door opens, and there’s Béatrice.

 

* * *

 

Diana wakes with a jerk and finds the sheets twisted into knots around her, tying her limbs into place, and she can’t stop another spasm of fear from ripping through her body, because she’s immobilised, her dream made physical. It was Jake! He was—

Shut up, Diana.

The thought pulls her to a stop. Drags at her. Wakes her more completely and helps her to reassert reality. And as she carefully untangles herself from the sheets, as she wipes her sweaty face with a tissue, as she stretches, she reflects on it.

Has she called herself Diana before? So directly? In the silence of her head?

She doesn’t think so.

That feels permanent.

Yeah, and is that bad? Why would she want to be anyone else, anyway? She’s been Diana less than a day; she doesn’t know anything about her yet. Except that people are kind to her. And is that bad? That she shows off the way she was remade, speaks in a certain voice, pretends to be Diana, and people are inspired to help her?

“Manipulative,” the memory of Aunt Bea says, loud enough to be in the room with her. “You’re manipulative, Declan. You’re more than clever enough to lie and to charm when you need to, and that poor girl kept coming back to you, even after you—”

Shut up, Diana!

Where did that nice, reassuring reality go…?

She’s half out of bed and she almost falls. It takes her a second to collect herself, and she slumps against the edge of the bed. Butt to the floor. Hands by her side. Fingers curling into fists but with nothing and no-one to hit.

“What’s your plan, mate?” the memory of Stefan asks her, because she’s back in the shower room, executing some idiot plan to get Stefan by the throat and use him to force the sponsors to get free. “What’s your plan?”

Stupid.

So what if the sponsors had been protecting Stefan? So what if he was on their side? It wouldn’t have changed the fact that Declan Shaw is a fucking rapist.

Hands into fists. She wants to pull him out of herself, enact upon him everything that was done to him, times a thousand, times a fucking million, she wants to choose it, she wants to own it, she wants it to be her fists, her fingernails, she wants to fucking violate him—

Shut up, Diana.

No-one is violating anyone.

She should have that shower. She’s still filthy under everything, and her hair smells of smoke. But she’ll have to disrobe to do so. It’s the final hurdle.

No. Don’t be stupid. It’s just the next hurdle. But Diana hasn’t seen herself naked since before she escaped the manor, and she doesn’t know how well her hastily constructed identity will stand up to the sight. It’s one thing being Dina or Declan or whoever and having to be a woman because she was made to be that way, because her choices had all been taken from her, because punishment awaited her if she didn’t keep herself to Jake’s standards, because she was his doll—

Jesus Christ, Diana. Shut up!

Declan would have hated her. She knows it. Coldly. With certainty. And with a little satisfaction, also. He would have thought her weak, would have disdained, among other things, her new habit of disappearing into her own head, into memories, of thinking too much.

Except it’s not new, is it? Did she just forget?

Fists into hands again. Pushing up from the floor. Making her way over to the long mirror in the corner. It’s not full-length, but it captures her from the knees up. It’s enough.

She starts pulling off her clothes, so fast she rips a seam on the joggers Noor gave her, and she throws them aside, wrinkling her nose as the smell of smoke escapes from their depths and folds.

There she is. There’s Diana. And her head swims, just for a second, because if she’s truly honest with herself, she doesn’t know if she’s okay with this, if outside the control of Jake and Grandmother and the punishments promised to her, she can live with this body, this shape. And she doesn’t know anything about it, really. She shaved it, and she knows how to do that, obviously, but the lotions and things she was made to put on, even the types of makeup she was made to wear; she learned it all rote and used what was given to her. Out here, she’ll have to start from scratch.

And does she want to?

Diana’s tall, and that’s obvious even in the mirror, without anyone else to compare herself against. And though she lost a lot of weight, at Dorley Hall but particularly at Stenordale Manor — and she thinks there might have been some fat redistribution or some other surgery done when they did everything else — she’s still broad: her ribs are as wide as her hips, and her shoulders slightly wider. But Grandmother’s surgeons knew what to do about that, and she’s balanced out in front by large breasts. They were uncomfortable when she first got them, and they got in the way and they made her back hurt, but in the time since, she’s gotten used to them. They sag a little more than they used to, as well, the way breasts are supposed to, and she experimentally tucks a finger into the fold of skin under each one.

With every passing week, they seem more a part of her.

Hmm. One thing she hasn’t looked at. She avoided it as much as she could at Stenordale. Cleaned it, dried it, even used it for sex when she was made to, but never really looked at it. Jake taunted her about it quite a lot, but she got good at blanking him out.

Just do it, Diana.

She forces herself to look at it, and it’s… fine. Not at all as bad as she expected. It’s not shocking. It’s not ugly. It’s just a penis. It doesn’t even look out of place on her.

She reaches down. Tucks it under a little. It’s easy, considering they took away everything else down there. She crosses her thighs and it disappears.

She feels lighter, suddenly. The feeling comes from nowhere, and she doesn’t even know how to interrogate it, except perhaps that it’s another step away from him.

Taking a step back — while being careful to keep her penis tucked away — she looks at herself. Top to toe; well, top to just below the knee.

God. She thought she’d look off. Wrong. That she could pull off the girl thing with clothes but that naked, she’d be misproportioned and ugly.

Couldn’t be further from the truth.

Diana strikes a pose. She can’t help it. She raises her fists, not to punch, but as a show of strength. It’s a pose she remembers from a cartoon that was always being rerun at the weekends, a show one of her older brothers used to watch obsessively, before he moved out. She ended up watching it herself, to remember him, and got quite into it, too.

Superheroes. She can picture them all. And with her build, with her broad ribs and the chest they gave her, with her fists raised, she looks like—

Oh my God.

The girl in the mirror smiles at herself, and the smile becomes a laugh and the laugh infects all of her, and she has to support herself on her knees, because it’s just so stupid, it’s just so perfect, it’s just so absolutely ridiculous.

She feels like Wonder Woman.

Oh my God, Diana!

She giggles again.

Diana.

Not so much of a scary thought. Not any more.

And Declan would hate this. Declan would hate her. Would loathe looking at himself and finding this creature looking back.

And that’s reason enough to love her.

 

* * *

 

Beatrice is well aware that her eyes are probably red. That her hair is a mess. Her clothes, rumpled. Her boots, discarded. When she shut the door behind her, she threw off the persona she normally inhabits, and with it her inhibitions and a whole layer of clothing. She’s downed three measures of gin and is considering a fourth when the knock comes.

She considers ignoring it. Here she is, a regression, a version of Beatrice whose responsibilities have been left downstairs. Along, most likely, with her dignity. And there are few people she could stand to let see her like this.

Best roll the dice on it being one of them, then.

And behind the door, Valérie.

Beatrice Quinn is gone, and someone else, someone younger, is here. Valérie’s presence causes what remains of her to flee, and she can’t help but smile back, giddy and foolish and a little bit childish.

Stuff it. It’s better this way. Let her be Dee, and let Valérie be Val, and let them be young again.

Beatrice feels twenty years old.

Val’s standing in the doorway, holding the fragments of the Round Tuit in a Pyrex dish, so Bea takes it from her, twists quickly around and deposits it on the drinks table next to her open bottle of gin, and returns to Val. Still standing there. Still smiling, though slightly quizzically now.

So much better this way. Just the two of them.

“Won’t you come in?” she says.

“Thank you,” Val says. “And I apologise.”

With a frown, Bea says, “What for?”

“The tale I told. Of Declan. I could see it getting to you. And yet I continued. Because to tell the tale…” Val hesitates. Stands there, still. “It heals me, I think.” She looks directly at Bea. “I could have helped him. I chose not to.”

Declan. The years come rushing back, with momentum. Beatrice sees him again, a large man, rendered small by the cell, by the glass protecting her from him. She remembers what she told him.

All of it.

She asks the question before she can decide not to. “Why didn’t you help him?”

Why didn’t she?

“He was a rapist.”

“Yes. I spoke with him about it. In his cell. Before I— Before I sent him away. He is a rapist. I… have to remind myself of that.”

“He was a rapist,” Val says carefully, taking another few steps, leaving Bea behind at the bar. She sits down on the couch by the window, looks around. “But I do not think he will be again. I’m glad you changed the furniture, by the way.”

“Couldn’t stand looking at it,” Bea mutters. “What do you mean?”

“Frances spoke of him. And she didn’t say it, not exactly, but I think he is changing. Profoundly. In the manner of your girls, perhaps. Though under a catalyst I think you and I would recognise, more than your girls. But I still… resisted spending time with him. I think because I didn’t want to see it. I wanted him to remain a rapist. Because then I could despise him properly.”

Beatrice’s hands find the table and she leans heavily on it, rocking but not tipping the bottles on display. She wants to grip something, wants to take one of the bottles in front of her and tighten her hands around it until it breaks, until it cuts her, until she ruins herself on it.

Instead, she says, “I understand.”

There’s a creak, the tap of shoes on floorboards, and then arms close around her waist. Another time, she might exult in the sensation, but for now, she seeks and finds comfort.

“We both failed him,” Valérie says, “and neither of us did. If he is different, different the way your girls are, well, that may be better for him.”

“I remember I said to Stephanie,” Beatrice whispers, “that we don’t waste people. But we did, didn’t we? I did. I threw him away. Tossed him to the wolves. Into the arms of Dorothy fucking Marsden. And, Jesus Christ, Valérie—” she twists around, but Valérie maintains her grip, “—I left you with her! For decades!”

“Shush,” Valérie says sharply. Her breath washes over Beatrice, who concludes absently that she’s been drinking black tea. “Did you know I was there?”

“No. No! Of course not!”

“Did you keep looking for me?”

“Yes!”

“Even after people, I suspect, told you I was almost definitely dead?”

“Well, yes.”

Valérie leans closer, leaves a kiss on Beatrice’s cheek. “Then you did not abandon me. You did not throw me away. And—” Valérie steps away, takes back her embrace, “—you did not throw Declan away, either. You offered him a chance and he rejected it, no?”

“I—”

“Pour me a drink, Béatrice. Something alcoholic. Cognac, for preference.”

Beatrice nods, and for the next minute or so, occupies herself. When she has the drinks ready, she finds Val has pulled out one of the small stacking tables and placed it in front of the couch, offset from her slightly. An invitation for Beatrice to join her, to abandon any silly ideas she might have gotten, while staring intently at the bottles, about pulling up an office chair or otherwise keeping her distance.

She sits.

“You can come closer, Béatrice.”

Can she? That feels presumptuous. And then Val points out her idiocy:

“Béatrice, I just kissed you. Whatever space there is between us exists only in your head. I do not know what kind of relationship we have, but I do know that it is not one where you sit—” she waves a hand, “—all the way over there. Come, Béatrice.”

Fine. Bea shuffles up to where Valérie is patting an empty sofa cushion.

“You know,” Valérie says, “it is reassuring that you are so bad at this. Thirty years without going outside, and I thought I would be the awkward one.”

It’s a horrific reminder, but delivered with such a sly grin, and with such a laugh in her voice, that Bea can’t stop herself from snorting, and the undignified noise — and the way Val’s eyes light up when Bea belatedly covers both her mouth and her embarrassment — is enough to break her.

Bea laughs, and Val laughs, too.

“Goodness,” Beatrice says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I promise you, I’m usually considerably more on top of things.”

“I believe you. I’ve seen how your girls look at you.”

Bea addresses her glass. “Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t. I feel like I turned around and suddenly became forty, and the shock of that is so hideous that it takes another few minutes for me to remember that I’m actually fifty-five.”

Valérie salutes Bea with her cognac. “You wear it well.”

Bea clinks with her. “As do you.”

“Well, someone has to ask the awkward question, and I’m going to do it first: what happened to you, Béatrice? What happened after I left the Hall?”

“That’s not fair. I wanted to ask that.”

Valérie shrugs. “I spent thirty years wearing stupid outfits — ranging from practical to pornographic — and cooking roast beef for disgusting Englishmen and women. That’s it. Your turn.”

“There’s more to you than that.”

“No, Béatrice. There is not. Can I be honest? Everyone here wants to ask me about my past. I can see it on their faces, and I know I’m going to have to address it sooner or later. Thank you, by the way, for having the audacity to be the first. My problem is, I don’t want to talk about it. Because every time I talk about it, every time I think about it, I am forced to realise everything I have missed. All the things I don’t know, that I never learned. And I remember that I am a woman because I am no longer a man, because my manhood was taken from me and I embraced the alternative out of hatred. But inside me there is little to be found, Béatrice. I exist in opposition to the world, always knowing that if the world were ever to stop pushing back, I would fall. And now, quite suddenly, it has. I have been free for a day, Béatrice, and already I fear it. I am falling, and when I hit the ground, I will shatter.”

“Val… I’m so sorry.”

“Fuck your pity,” Valérie says, swilling the remains of her cognac around in its glass, and then necking it, “and fuck your guilt. They are unnecessary and unwelcome. All I want is time, Béatrice. Time, and somewhere to spend it.”

“You can have it. You can have a room here. Come and go as you please. But, Valérie, please, if you fall, if it’s bad, you have to let me catch you.”

“Béatrice, I will allow you to try. Now.” She stands, picks up the shot glasses and takes them over to the bar. When she returns, she’s carrying the glasses pinched between her fingers, each filled again, and in her other hand, the Pyrex dish. “I am done talking about myself for a while.” She places the glasses on the little table, and pulls out another of the stacking tables for the dish with the smashed mug in it. “I have superglue,” she says.

“Is it going to be safe to drink from?”

“I do not know,” Valérie says. “But I do not think it matters. We will repair it, and — if you will allow me to be pompous; I have listened to a lot of Englishmen and I am now quite good at it — though it may no longer be useful, it will still have value. I think I like that metaphor.”

“I think I do, too.”

“Let’s get on with it, then. We will glue this mug back together, and you will tell me about your life.”

 

* * *

 

Steph’s getting used to the way Bethany’s fingers stiffen as they walk down the stairs to the lowest level of the basement, and she wonders again if it was cruel to let her back up above ground every so often without actually granting her as much freedom as Steph. The last time this happened, they’d only gone as far as the first basement level, and still Bethany’s grip on Steph’s hand tightened on the way back down; Steph had led her quietly to her room and held her tight until she reacclimated, until she once again became the version of her who exists down here: a little more wary, a little less bright; a little less. But more prone to talk a lot.

She can’t do that today. They have a job to do.

But she can at least hug her, and that’s what she does, pulling on her to get her to move more quickly and then rounding the corner to the bedrooms quickly enough that the women following them are left far behind. They duck into Steph’s room, shut the door, and Bethany collapses into her arms.

Steph surrounds her.

“We can’t—” Steph says.

“I know,” Bethany says.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know that, too.” And then Bethany shakes herself, kisses Steph on the cheek, and steps away. “How do we get ourselves into these situations?”

Steph’s already at the wardrobe, pulling out fresh clothes for the both of them; basement-issue joggers and hoodies, one set from her side of the wardrobe and one from Bethany’s. “Don’t ask that question around Indira. She probably has an itemised list ready to go.”

Bethany holds up her first finger and attempts Indira’s South London accent. “‘January first, two thousand and one: hit another boy with a Transformers toy in playgroup.’” She adds another finger. “‘January second, same year: came at the boy again; bigger Transformers toy; more sensitive strike area.’”

“Clean clothes,” Steph says, throwing one of the sets of clothes at her. “Wear them.”

“Fine,” Bethany replies in a mock-whine, but she obliges, stripping off her dirties.

It started out as such an ordinary day: get horribly tortured in the morning (via small needle probes for Steph and a hair-obliterating laser for Bethany) and then spend the entire afternoon feeling sorry for themselves. Possibly scamming the sponsors out of some convalescent chocolate. And while the chocolate had gone fine — and, shit, she still has Raph’s biscuits in the pocket of the hoodie she just took off — everything else went to shit.

She and Bethany had ended up in a huddle with Melissa, Shahida, Rachel, Amy and Jane, watching everything go down from a discreet distance. Steph had had a bit of trouble getting Bethany away from Maria, but Edy clearly wanted some privacy, and she wasn’t in any actual danger, so Steph tactfully suggested Bethany come over and spend some time with Melissa. She is, after all, practically Steph’s sister. It led to some whining about how Maria is Bethany’s sister with a capital S, and that surely that wins out, but Steph was always going to win; if nothing else, of the two of them, she’s slightly stronger, and can physically drag Bethany, if necessary. She might, she told her, even consider a leash.

Bethany said that was hot, which prompted Steph simply to leave, to walk back over to Melissa’s group on her own, secure in the knowledge that Bethany would probably follow, if only so she could ask questions like, what if I pulled on the leash, what if I pulled hard, what would you do?

She did. Steph was a little proud.

So they got together with the others, but the conversation quickly faltered. Rachel left first, saying she needed to apologise to her wife, with flowers and her favourite takeaway and other, less specifically described things. Melissa and Shahida tried to exit shortly after, but were intercepted.

“Steph?” Indira says, via the speaker over the bed. “Beth? Now I’ve got you alone, I need to ask you to keep an eye on Amy. Just to make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid. And Shahida, when she comes back down.”

“Isn’t that Jane’s job?” Steph asks.

“And it’s yours, too.”

“Question,” Bethany says, “are you going to pay me?”

“Yes,” Indira says, so quickly and so straightforwardly that Bethany drops the sock she’s about to put on. “Standard junior sponsor rate. For however long this takes.”

“Okay. Well. Shit. There goes almost my entire objection.” Then she smirks and looks up at the ceiling, towards one of the cameras. “Say, warden,” she says, performing an accent so terribly it takes Steph a moment to guess that it’s probably supposed to be Texan, “are you gonna give us more library time, too? Maybe a football to throw about in the yard? While you’re feelin’ awful generous.”

“Bethany,” Indira says, “I remind you that I do have that list, and I can read to you from it whenever you like.”

Upstairs, Indira explained that not only did practically every sponsor already have her hands full — with Frankie; with Trevor; with Maria’s problem — but the sponsors on duty in the security room and the basement were still on duty and had been since early in the morning. And with it being the weekend, and the last one before the proper start of the semester, most of the off-duty sponsors were offsite and difficult to bring back at short notice. Tabby is going to be pulling double duty: taking care of Trevor when he gets back from being sewn up, and watching Frankie, which is why Frankie, for now, is locked in one of the rooms out back.

Steph asked about the third-year sponsors — she never seems to see them around; surely they can help — and was told that the third year of sponsorship is generally the most loose, and much latitude is allowed for time away. If, by her third year, one’s girl-in-training can’t function on her own most of the time, she’s probably not going to graduate that year, anyway. In short, they’re mostly off campus.

Bethany swears at the speaker in the ceiling and Indira passes on her love, and then it’s time for them to join the others in the common room. Lisa, the only other third-year sponsor onsite today, is in the main kitchen, hurrying through preparing a basic dinner, with Shahida’s help, and with everyone else either busy, exhausted or away, that leaves the job of monitoring the boys in the basement to Jane, Steph, Bethany… and Melissa and Amy.

Melissa had been reluctant to take the job, but she agreed to help out. Amy then invited herself along.

“You’re not a graduate,” Tabby pointed out.

“I can fake it,” Amy said. “Check me out—” and she held up an imaginary mug, “—I just got this back from Funny Mugs Dot Com: Hurt People Hurt People, and, see, I added a bit by hand that says, Intentionally.” She did a little curtsey. “What do you think?”

Tabby responded by slapping Jane lightly on her upper arm. “You’re not allowed to kiss any more outsider girls, Jane,” she said.

Officially, and as far as the other inhabitants of the basement are supposed to be concerned, neither Steph nor Bethany has any role other than reluctant girl-in-training, so it’s Jane who’s going to relieve the sponsors currently camped out in the common room. Which is why she’s waiting for them in the corridor, with crossed arms and a surfeit of irritation, and Melissa and Amy hovering behind her.

“What took you so long?” she whispers.

Steph gestures at the two of them. “We had to get changed. We were gross. Do you know how uncomfortably sweaty you can get after two hours of electrolysis?”

Jane’s expression softens. “Well, yeah. Come on, then.”

In the common room, Pamela practically collapses with relief when she sees Jane in the doorway, and then she frowns, as the faces that follow her are less encouraging. She looks around to make sure her lips can’t be seen, and then she mouths, Amy? at Jane. Jane just shrugs.

Harmony joins them at the door, and they have a quick, whispered conversation, with everyone bar Jane still hidden in the corridor.

“How’re things upstairs?” Pamela says. “Because down here they’ve been tense as hell. Ollie’s out of his cell, and, oh yeah, Ollie’s out of his cell, and that wasn’t my idea and apparently it wasn’t Harmony’s, either.”

“Maria said, since we’re bare bones today, he should be in gen pop,” Harmony says. “And he’s not been a problem, Ella; he’s just been sitting there. I’m a bit worried about him, actually.”

“Him ‘just sitting there’ might be the problem, Harmony! Will’s pretty different from how he was and even Raphael’s been borderline pleasant, but Ollie’s the same guy who hung out with Declan! He’s the same guy who helped Will attack Maria! He scares me.”

“Yeah,” Jane says, “I know. He kind of scares me, too. Look, Pam, just go rest, okay? We’ve got this.”

“Do you actually?” Pamela says. “Because the only sponsor I see here is you, Jane.”

“We’ve been drafted,” Steph says. Beth nods and Melissa shrugs.

“I volunteered,” Amy says.

“Oh? And what will you do if Ollie comes running at you?” Pamela snaps.

Amy pats her pocket. “Zap him.”

“Will you, now?”

“I was pretty good at laser tag as a kid.”

“Reassuring.”

“Pam,” Jane says, “get some sleep.” She glances at Harmony with raised eyebrows, and Harmony nods, takes Pamela by the shoulder and starts to lead her out. “All right,” Jane continues, when it’s just the five of them, “Steph, Bethany, you know the drill. Hang out, chat, be normal. Bethany, today would be a bad day to push people’s buttons.”

“But what if I really feel like backsliding?”

“Save it for Maria. Melissa, you know what to do?”

“Not really,” Melissa says, “but I remember what it was like to be them. Kinda. I can be aloof and mildly threatening, I think.”

“Good. You’ve got my utmost confidence. Amy, you good?”

“Hang out, keep my distance, pretend not to know those two.” She nods at Steph. “And electro-murder anyone who comes at me.”

“Let’s go, then.”

 

* * *

 

The Grants’ house, positioned roughly centrally in a row of terraced houses, has no space available on the street in front of it, nor anywhere near it, and Christine hides a smile as Paige grumbles under her breath, looking for somewhere to park. Eventually, Paige gives up and announces that she’ll stay in the car and keep it idling. She’ll do a lap if any other cars come up behind her.

“Be quick,” she says as Christine and Pippa hop out.

“Wish us luck,” Christine replies, and they exchange blown kisses. By the time they’re halfway up the moss-dotted path to the front door, Paige is already gunning the engine and starting her first lap, so a supermarket delivery van can get past.

The front door is bright orange and looks recently painted. There’s a bell, but it doesn’t play a tune. Christine presses it twice, anyway; the dong-dong sound is pretty satisfying.

“Coming!” Mrs Grant yells from inside, and when she opens the door, she still has oven gloves on. “Christine!” she exclaims, pulling them off, depositing them on the key table just inside, and grasping Christine by both hands, the better to drag her inside. “How wonderful to see you again! And… who is this handsome young woman?”

“Pippa,” Pippa says, as the front door closes behind her. “Hi. I’m a friend.” She follows Christine’s lead and kicks off her boots, places them in the clearly marked ‘guest’ spot on the shoe rack.

“Are you—” and here Mrs Grant lowers her voice, “—‘part of the family’?” Christine can hear the quote marks lock into place, and wonders if Abby’s told her parents any more about her history, or if that’s just her mother’s way of referencing the trans community in general.

Pippa doesn’t hesitate for a moment. “Just a cis girl,” she says, sticking faithfully to her NPH. “Oh, ‘cis’ means—”

“Don’t worry!” booms another voice, and Abby’s father comes out into the hall. “Abigail’s given us all the information we need! We’re up on the terms now.”

“We joined a support group,” Mrs Grant says. “Lovely people. Do you know, the woman who runs it is famous! Been on the news!”

Christine wants nothing more at this point than to sink into a hole in the ground and see if there are any locally accessible basements who need an IT technician, or possibly just an emotional punching bag. Because, yes, while there are umpteen support groups for the parents of trans people, there’s only one she can think of that is regularly visited by — and technically administered by — a woman who’s been on the news. Multiple times.

“Oh? Who’s that?” Pippa asks, presumably because someone has to.

“Aasha’s her name,” Robert Grant says, ushering them through into what turns out to be the living room. It’s cosy, done up in warm, earthy colours with brighter green accents: cushions, bookshelves, and the cloth over the dining table at the far end. “Forget her surname,” he adds, frowning.

“Chetry,” Christine says. “Aasha Chetry.”

Mrs Grant claps her hands. “You know her!”

“I know her daughter.” Her daughter saved my life, Christine doesn’t say, and Aasha Chetry is one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met.

“Small world,” Mr Grant says, and then cups his hands to his mouth and leans back out of the living room door. “Abigail! Company!”

And a familiar voice yells out, “Coming, Dad!”

When Abby arrives in the doorway and sees Christine and Pippa, she doesn’t react the way Christine expects. Abby’s been distant for a while, emotionally and physically, and Christine’s slowly convinced herself — though this is a fear she hasn’t shared, even with Paige — that Abby’s decided she’s better off cutting everyone from the Hall out of her life altogether. That the breakdown of her faltering relationship with Melissa and the subsequent arrival of Shahida, a woman who can be for Melissa everything Abby can’t, was the last straw.

But Abby launches immediately into a hug, and even, after a moment, beckons in a bemused Pippa. Abby squeezes so hard, Christine thinks her ribs might crack.

“I’ve missed you, Chrissy,” she whispers.

“I’ve missed you, too,” Christine replies, and she wonders how she ever could have doubted her Sister.

 

* * *

 

Frankie remembers this room. She remembers most of them, especially the ones on the ground floor, the ones where the girls were brought to visit with guests. She remembers the first time she oversaw such a session, remembers the thrill it brought her, the gleeful, vengeful satisfaction.

The feeling didn’t last. It didn’t take all that long, really, to get it through her thick fucking head that these were just girls — or boys, or men, or whatever — who’d done nothing particularly wrong, usually; nothing beyond stealing for food or for fun, or the occasional spot of light GBH. And there, but for the grace of Dorothy, went Frankie.

No, they were just girls, because she never could stop doing that, never could stop seeing it in their vulnerability, their innocence, and, as she got older and the intakes did not, their youth. Such things have always been girlish to Frankie, and though she’s aware of it as a character defect — and a pretty fucking severe one, recently — she’s never sought to correct it. In the past, it nurtured her growing conscience as much as it buttressed her nightmares; now, she’s just too bloody old to change.

They were just girls, and she brought them to these rooms so that they could be humiliated. Held down. Hurt. Sometimes they never came out, and in those instances, it didn’t matter whose hand did the deed; it always felt like Frankie’s were the filthiest.

It occurs to her that, were she male and still young, the modern programme at Dorley Hall would take one look at her and wash her out, same as Declan.

Oh, well. She never claimed to have the moral high ground. And at least the room has a pool table in it, now, and briefly contained two more of the tall and pretty girls of Dorley, whom Tabitha brought quickly up to speed and who decided to go out for dinner rather than stick around.

Sensible.

Beatrice’ll be along to deal with her when she’s good and ready, she was told, so here she waits, next to the pool table, in a room stained with blood.

Frankie indulges herself in a little cry. Of frustration, mostly: she did what she set out to do, she got Val and Trev back to Dorley, back to safety, back to their people, and she even survived, which was unexpected. But, briefly, she hoped to be useful after that, to provide information on Dotty, on the layout of Stenordale, on the likely plans going forward. But Stenordale’s gone, and Dorothy’s fucked off, and if she’s fucked off with Declan, the way Beatrice’s girls think she has, Frankie’ll find a hat and eat it. Without someone to stand between them, Declan could knock Dorothy over with a feather.

Which leaves Declan dead or in the wind or recaptured by Silver River. It leaves Dorothy probably having gone to ground. And it leaves Silver River and the bastard Smyth-Farrows, heirs to their hated father’s legacy, fuck only knows where. It’d be lovely if she had the first clue what the Smyth-Farrows’ plans are, save that they want to start it all up again. They won’t have Dorothy’s expertise, but the old cow was overblowing it, anyway; if you don’t want functional girls, you can do what you want to any man and get something superficially girlish who will function for long enough to have a little fun, and if you do that for long enough, you’ll luck into another Val, another Beatrice, another Maria, another Barbara.

Another Rhia. Another Naomi. Another Kelly.

Another corpse.

It’s a good job there’s a metal bin in the corner of the room, because Frankie fills it. Not much in her stomach but acid, but up it all comes, anyway.

She’s useless. She’s useless and she’s stupid and she’s very, very guilty. No jury would take more than thirty seconds to convict her. Throw away the key.

Just get her out of here. Put her somewhere in this godforsaken building where she hasn’t overseen the debasement and ultimate destruction of so many people.

The lock turns. Frankie drops the bin. Turns around, expecting the girl Tabitha, who dropped her off here, or Indira, the one who was leading the ‘civil conversation’ in the kitchen.

No.

In the doorway, silhouetted against the darkening corridor, is Maria.

“Frankie,” she says.

“Shit, Maria,” Frankie babbles, “you shouldn’t be up and about, you were practically fainting a few minutes ago, let me get you a chair or something, let me call for—”

“If you raise your voice,” Maria says levelly, “I will tase you. And when you’re down, I will cut you.”

Frankie has nothing to say to that. With her sleeve she wipes at the corner of her mouth, where a spot of stomach acid irritates her lip.

Maria steps inside, and her gait is wobbly, uncertain. Her eyes, though, remain locked on Frankie’s, and Frankie would do anything to escape them. Anything except apologise; it wouldn’t matter how much she might mean it, to do so would be the worst insult imaginable.

“Would you like me to cut you?” Maria says. Her ankle threatens to give way, but she adjusts her balance. Stabilises. Barely. “Karen always liked to cut me. Do you remember? I think you remember. She always threatened the vein. Never quite slicing it. I think she wanted me to do that part. To give up. To give in. To open the cuts myself. To tear just that little bit more.” She’s holding a knife, Frankie realises. Serrated; did she take it with her from the kitchen, or has she just been wandering around, unsupervised despite her state, collecting weapons? “I almost did it, Frankie. I could have torn myself open. With my nails. With my fucking teeth. And she wanted that, didn’t she, Frankie? Did she talk about me with you? Up there in the kitchen? Did she tell you how she longed to find me one morning, bleeding out in my bedroom?”

Frankie, not entirely steady on her feet herself, her eyes blurred from tears, her gut emptied and sore, her joints failing her, wonders if she can catch Maria before she falls without getting a knife in her belly.

“Karen was a psychopath,” she says.

“And you weren’t?”

“No, I was.”

Maria rests her knife hand on the edge of the pool table, fingers splayed, the knife trapped under her palm, scraping against the polished wood as she advances. “You want me to think you’ve changed? You expect forgiveness, just because you show up after fifteen years with Valérie Barbier and some wounded stray?”

“No,” Frankie says, “I never expected forgiveness. I would never ask for it.”

The knife carves a groove in the wood.

“Do you know who I was? You don’t, do you? Not really. You don’t even know the name I had when I came here. You only know what Karen and Dorothy twisted it into. I bet they didn’t even write it down.” She stops, gathering her balance once again. Leans against the pool table, the tips of her slender fingers caressing the knife handle. “They wouldn’t have the first idea how. I think that was the worst thing, Frankie. Dorothy imprisoned me and Karen cut me and Dorothy had me castrated and they both made me do things but the worst thing, Frankie, the worst thing, was that after they murdered my family, they called me Nic. They found a sound from my name and they stripped it out and even then they couldn’t say it right and they branded me with it just as much as they scarred my skin. Call me Nic, Frankie. Go on. Like you used to.”

“No.”

Maria leans a hip against the pool table. Scoops up the knife. Points the blade at her. Barely a few feet away. Just one lunge would do it. Just one lunge would end it, even if Maria fell.

“Call me Nic.”

“I won’t.”

“Do you want me to cut you?”

She has left only honesty. “I don’t care.”

“You were there, Frankie!” Maria says, and it’s almost a wail this time, a sudden loosening of her throat, because if she can’t prise the things that were done to her out of Frankie’s skin then she will fucking scream them, she will spit blood at the sky, and Frankie understands her more in that moment than she ever did. Fifteen years ago, when she watched a kind boy be abused and altered. When she watched him survive. When she watched him evolve into someone who would ultimately help wrench Dorothy’s entire regime out from under her. Someone who kept her kindness, honed it, and with it built a home to support her sisters and Beatrice and generations of new girls. “You were there! She was cutting into me and you were in the next room! And when they pulled me out and they took me up here… Up here… Into this room. This room, Frankie! The other girls, they don’t know. I never come in here or any of a dozen others, but they don’t know. They put a fucking pool table in here. They put you in here. In this… this fucking room.”

Old soldiers, Frankie remembers. Val spoke of it. At the time, Frankie had been almost flattered.

“I know,” she says.

Maria gestures with the knife. “That corner. There was… Shit. It was a woman. They were mostly men, weren’t they? But, occasionally, there was a woman. And they didn’t like to touch. Not me, anyway. And this one… She watched. She made me—”

“Don’t say it,” Frankie says. Interrupting her is chancing it, it’s risking provoking her, but she has to stop this, or Maria will get herself caught in a loop. She’ll resurrect every horror, every crime that was wrought upon her body, every claw that was raked across her soul, and she will never be free of it.

Such is for the guilty, not the innocent.

“She made me—”

“Maria!” Frankie says. She pushes forward. Catches Maria’s wrist, knife still pointing wildly outwards. Ignores it. If it cuts her, it cuts her. “Stop this, Maria.” She speaks the way she did with Declan, with Dina, with whoever that was who lay wounded in her bed. “This isn’t you. This was never you. This is what was done to you. But it isn’t what made you.” It’s what she would say to Val, if Val ever showed weakness for more than a moment. It’s what she would say to Trev, if Trev ever would accept it from her. It’s what she would say to Dina, if Dina ever were to return. She barely knows this girl, knew only the child made subservient to Karen Turner more than fifteen years ago, but she’s here and they’re not and though she’s just as unlikely to accept help from her — more so — she might just be vulnerable enough to have no other choice. “You were just a child, Maria,” Frankie says, in the steadiest, kindest voice she can manage. “A prisoner. And we were monsters. Forget about what we did, if you can. Focus on who you are.”

“Fuck you,” Maria whispers. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you—”

She slips, and Frankie quickly grabs her other arm so she doesn’t fall. In Maria’s weakened grip, the knife falls from her hand and lands point-first on the pool table, where it sticks for a moment, before toppling.

“I’ve got you,” Frankie says.

“You’ve got me,” Maria sneers, “oh, yeah, you’ve got me. You going to fuck me, Frankie? You going to have some fun, Frankie?”

Frankie’s stuck. Holding her. Doesn’t know what to do with her. Can’t let go: she’d go for the knife; she’d fall and hurt herself; both. Maria’s got nothing in the tank but fumes now. Hate’s not enough to keep you upright when it’s all you have.

Maria’s probably going to spit in her face or something. Wouldn’t be Frankie’s first time.

“Maria—” she tries.

“Why are you here?” Maria croaks. “Why did you come back?” Frankie glances behind her, hooks her ankle around a chair, drags it over. “Why couldn’t you have died out there?” Maria’s saying, her voice a wet rattle in her throat. “Do you even know how many of us you killed? How many of my sisters?”

Sisters. It’s a funny thing, Frankie reflects, as she lowers Maria onto the chair. Val thinks this way, too: thinks of all the people who were abused by Dorothy’s Dorley as her sisters, even though most of them claimed their manhood right up to their end.

But it’s not all that different to Frankie, really. She can’t stop thinking of Declan as a girl. Can’t help but remember everyone who passed through her hands as girls, no matter what they claimed. An affectation of conscience, of regret, of guilt, of internalised misogyny, perhaps. Funny that the better side of her is still so repellent.

Or is this new? She likes to tell herself that she softened on her girls, but is that the guilt talking, too? She doesn’t know. Memories are unreliable enough in your sixties; more so, when you’d rather not confront them in all their grisly detail.

Frankie drops into another chair, a decent distance from Maria. At least the girl isn’t about to injure herself any more. Or injure Frankie.

“I kept count,” Frankie says. “So, yeah, I know.”

Maria mumbles something like, “Fucking bet you did,” and then nothing comes out of her for a while. She’s still conscious; she’s just unable.

They sit. Waiting.

In the end, neither of them makes the next move. The door, sat slightly ajar for their whole confrontation, opens slowly, and the dusty blonde one looks carefully inside. Takes in Maria, head down, breathing slowly and shallowly; Frankie, sprawled on a chair at the back of the room, undignified and unladylike. Frankie only realises she’s sat there with her legs apart and her head lolled when she’s looked at, when she’s forced to see herself as someone else would, and another memory crawls the length of her spine:

She used to do this on purpose. Karen and the others, they were all quite feminine, if a bit posh about it, and Dorothy, she had the dignity of age, and of someone who in childhood was probably whipped with a belt if she ever opened her legs in a skirt. But Frankie always liked to lounge, to cut her hair short, to emphasise to the poor boys they were making look and dress and preen like pretty young things that she was exempt from all that, that she got to choose.

Amazing how she found cruelty in everything. What a skillset.

“Edith…” Maria whispers. “’m sorry.”

“If you need help with her,” Frankie says, “you’d better get someone else to do it.” With her eyes, she gestures at the pool table, where the knife is somewhere in the green.

“I’ve got her,” Edith says, and crouches in front of Maria. Lays a hand on each of her thighs. “Maria? You don’t need to apologise. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you, not even for a minute. Tab needed to talk, and— Never mind.”

“What’s up with Tabitha?” Maria murmurs. There’s a bit more strength behind her voice, though; she’s coming back to herself.

Edith glances at Frankie. “Tell you later.” And back at Maria, smiling gently for her, waiting for her. “I’ll take you home, Maria. You need to rest.”

Maria finally raises her head, meets Edith’s eyes, and the rage and the years fall away, and Frankie understands with absolute clarity the depth and sincerity of their love for each other. Understands that it blossomed here, in the places that made Frankie filthy.

She wants to vomit again.

“Will you stay with me?” Maria says.

“Of course I will, sweetheart,” Edith replies.

Edith takes Maria’s weight. Not all of it, for Maria is coming back to herself, wants to support herself. She doesn’t hang in Edith’s arms any more, not like in the kitchen.

At the door, Edith turns around, says to Frankie, “You don’t have to stay here. You shouldn’t have to, I mean. I can have someone watch you. I can—”

“No,” Frankie says, “it’s fine. I’ll stay.”

Edith nods, and the door closes and locks behind them.

She’ll stay. With her memories, with her guilt, with the knowledge that she made every possible mistake. Maria’s knife, the hatred in her eyes; Frankie deserves it a thousand times over.

She’ll stay. In the place where she made the girls under her dubious care do awful things, suffer every indignity. Where she forced them to unmake themselves. Where, every time, she chose herself and her own survival instead of theirs.

She’ll stay.

Someone has to.

 

* * *

 

They don’t, as an amateur sponsor group, make the best first impression, and Amy’s willing to let most of that lie on her head. She lets Jane go in first, heroically resisting the temptation to hold her hand and establish her claim on her, just so the boys don’t get the wrong idea. Amy follows her in at a chaste distance, but stops short straight away, and she’s pretty sure she doesn’t successfully hide her surprise: this place is bloody depressing.

It’s a concrete box. Oh, there are sofas and a half-million bean bag chairs and plenty of places to sit and read, though they are made of metal and bolted to the floor and don’t look all that comfortable; one of the boys, Martin, is sat at one of the metal tables, and as he looks up from his book and frowns at them, he wriggles his back against the rigid seat. There’s a TV on the wall and cabinets running along nearby, and an instinct Amy buried after her last ever week at summer camp instructs her to avoid them, because they probably contain board games.

Melissa and the others sort of pile up behind her, but she’s not done looking around. There’s Raphael, Jane’s boy, to whom Jane accidentally let everything slip, early this morning. She said she wasn’t sure how he took it, but right now he’s pretty relaxed, with his legs up on the arm of the sofa nearest the telly and head resting lightly on his folded arms. Amy cocks her head at him, unconsciously, and tries to see how the estrogen’s changed him already. He’ll be a tall girl, that’s for sure, but that’s hardly unusual around here.

There’s Martin, of course, propping his chin on his hand and putting his book down, watching them with polite interest. And there’s Ollie. He’s not actually in the common area; he’s sitting at the lunch table in the adjoining room. The door through’s been left open, so he’s not cut off from everyone, but he’s separated. And he either hasn’t noticed their entry or he doesn’t care. Jane said he was bounced briefly into the cells again, and only let out a few hours ago just to reduce the number of people required to keep an eye on everyone, and to watch herself around him, though if Amy’s half the expert at body language she sometimes pretends to be, Ollie could go hours without even acknowledging the existence of anyone else right now.

Will, Tab’s one, he’s on another of the sofas near the TV. He looked up when they all came in — correction: when Amy came in and immediately announced her obvious unfamiliarity with everything by just standing there and bloody well staring — and now he’s craning his neck to look around her. Steph and Bethany are next into the room, and he nods at one or both of them. It’s such a masculine gesture, so much the thing she would expect to see self-conscious teen boys greeting each other with, that she smiles, and it unglues her, sets her in motion. She angles over to the metal tables, picks the one next to Martin’s table and sits, choosing a seat that gives her a view of everyone.

“Hi,” she says to the room.

“You’re new,” Martin says.

She shrugs. Three separate Dorley girls, Jane included, told her to pretend to be one of them. “I just don’t take shifts that often,” she says.

God, she’s glad she got Jane to give her the rundown on all the boys the other night, or she’d be totally lost. She’d probably be cosying up to Ollie, or something. Score one for morbid curiosity.

Wait; where’s Adam?

The others take up their positions. Steph and Bethany slouch onto the sofa next to Raph; Steph uses the packet of chocolate digestives she brought him as a lure, directing him like a fisherwoman reeling in her biggest catch of the day, to get him to move his legs. Liss takes one of the sofas by the door, trying to conceal her obvious discomfort with a too-casual flop into the cushions. She immediately rests her taser in her lap, covering it with both hands. It is still incredibly obvious.

Jane joins Amy, picking the seat next to hers, and rests her weapon much more casually on the table. “Dinner soon,” she announces to the room, and when she receives a handful of nods and grunts, she turns her attention to her taser, balancing it on the metal table with her thumb on one end, and twisting it idly around.

Amy takes the opportunity to ask the question on her mind. “Where’s Adam?” she whispers.

Jane snatches up her taser and leans in close to reply. “In his room, as usual. Don’t expect him to show up for dinner, either; someone’ll send something down in the dumbwaiter, or Edy’ll go see him later. I haven’t seen his face in… Shit, I don’t know how long.”

“Jay, that seems kinda scary! Isn’t complete social isolation sort of…?” She mimes stabbing someone, and does the noises from Psycho.

“I mean, everyone who’s down here is here for being a bit scary. Except Steph.”

“Adam’s really okay, all alone like that?”

“Pretty much. Sometimes they need a lot of alone time to get used to it. Granted, his is going on kinda long, but he’s Edy’s problem, not mine, and if she says she’s handling it, she’s handling it.”

“Is she?”

“She’s more senior’n me,” Jane says. “So, probably?” She leans back, raises her voice. “Hey, Raph! Don’t eat too many of those; you’ll ruin your dinner!”

Raph, now sitting more or less upright, having made room for Steph and Bethany, turns around to face her with a chocolate digestive sticking out of his mouth, and shows her two fingers.

“Very funny,” she says. “Now you owe me a biscuit.”

When he stands, Raph moves differently to how Amy expected, especially after Will’s amusing little head nod. She wanted him to move like a swaggering football player, like the boys she used to notice when she was a teenager, but he steps carefully instead, watching where he places his feet, keeping his hands inside his frame. He navigates around a few scattered bean bag chairs and sits at Jane and Amy’s table, on the far side. And, seeing him upright, he’s taller than her and Jane, but not as tall as she thought; maybe five eleven, five ten.

He sets down the packet of digestive biscuits vertically on the table, and then pushes them across the metal surface, like he’s a barman in a Western.

Jane catches them. “Thanks, Raph,” she says.

“Don’t ruin your dinner,” he says. “Hi, Amy.”

“Oh,” Amy says, “hi.”

Jane pauses, a biscuit halfway to her mouth. “I didn’t tell you her name, did I?”

Raphael smirks. “Got my sources, made a guess,” he says. After a slightly uncomfortable moment, he adds, “Hey, listen, is, uh, is everything okay? Upstairs? Pamela and Harmony were all stressed out, and even that other one, Nell, even she seemed…”

“Also stressed out?” Jane suggests.

“Yeah.”

“God.” Jane slumps a little. Gesticulates with half a digestive as she talks. “It’s just another crazy day in a crazy house. But crazier than usual. Sorry, Raph; the shifts are all messed up today.”

He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter to us. Been as boring as ever down here. Steph did her disappearing act again, and took Beth with her, but I’m used to that now. And I got biscuits out of it. And fuck knows about Adam. But, Jane, why’d you let Ollie out? He was barely in the cell five minutes.”

“More like five hours,” Jane says, “but, yeah. Wasn’t my decision.”

“Look,” he says, “I know she’s probably knackered, but maybe you should get Harmony back down here soon. He needs someone whose job it is to keep an eye on him. Since he got back he’s just been… sitting there.”

“Is that bad?” Amy asks.

“Normally he does things. Like, he’ll poke at his arm with a plastic fork or some shit, or he’ll say something really fucking stupid and one of us won’t be able to let it lie, and there’ll be a huge argument, or—”

“It’s usually you who can’t let it lie, Raph,” Jane interrupts.

“Yeah, it is. That’s how I noticed. He’s been doing nothing, Jane. Just fucking staring at the table. For hours.”

“Maybe we should get him a big plate of mashed potato,” Bethany calls, from the sofa, “and see if he sculpts anything psychologically revealing.”

Raph hides his smile and shows Bethany his middle finger. Amy catches his eye and he shakes his head minutely at her, sharing with her… something? She’s sure she’s supposed to be reading something from that look he just gave her, but she’s bloody well fucked if she knows what. He doesn’t seem right.

She quickly does the maths in her head: he’s been here since, what, early October? And Jane said they restricted their testosterone right away and started estrogen a few weeks later. So that’s… somewhere around thirteen or fourteen weeks to turn someone like Raph, who by all accounts was controlling and self-important and not particularly pleasant to be around, especially if you were his girlfriend, into someone who gives you cryptic looks and shares his biscuits with the woman who controls his life.

“Anyway,” Raph says, “that’s what I wanted to say.”

“Thank you, Raphael.”

“Yeah. Can I have my biscuits back?”

“Oh, sure,” Jane says, and swipes two before sweeping the packet back across the table towards him.

“Thanks,” he says. He doesn’t get up, though; he seems distracted.

“Raph?” Jane prompts.

“Can we talk? Sometime? Not tonight. I know.” He frowns in Amy’s direction. “You’ll be busy. But I just… I have to know more. About all of it. I’m thinking about it. A lot. But it’s big. Too big. I need to know about other people. Other people who were like me.”

“Sure,” Jane says warmly. “Of course. And don’t worry, Raph. You’ll be fine.”

“Easy for you to say,” he says, but he still has the faintest hint of a smile, and when he stands, he nods at Amy, and while it’s just like Will’s, it’s not as funny this time. His politeness, his superficial kindness, masks something deeper. Fear, maybe.

Well, yeah, fear obviously. Fear of exactly what, Amy’s still trying to guess.

Her hand finds Jane’s, and Jane squeezes hers.

“I know,” Jane whispers.

“How do you deal with it?”

Jane bumps shoulders with her. “I look in the mirror every morning, and I remember being him. Seeing a face like that looking back at me. It’s a journey, Ames. He’s just starting out. But he’ll be okay.”

“And Ollie?” Amy asks, glancing into the lunch room at the near-motionless man. “Adam?”

“Not my job,” Jane says.

 

* * *

 

Abby spends the journey back catching up with Christine and Paige and chatting with Pippa, who she never knew as well as she wanted to, and then they’re there, at the Hall, and she feels more than a little silly for assuming she could turn her back on the place for even a month. But Aunt Bea needs to talk to her, in person— Correction: Aunt Bea ‘would like’ to talk to her, according to Christine, and Abby knows better than to wait for a request from Beatrice to become an order.

Christine also promised that it wasn’t her who leaked it, but apparently the whole sponsor body and most of the live-in girls now know where Abby’s been. She’s been thinking about that all the way back, and still doesn’t know how to feel about it. She was always jealous of Indira, so she should probably prepare herself for some mild hostility of the sort she experienced when first she reconnected with her family…

Then again, apparently the rolling disaster at Dorley Hall has expanded over the last twenty-four hours to include more or less the entire distributed British forced feminisation network — or the parts any of them know about, anyway — so even the girls who miss their families probably won’t have time to be mad at her for ignoring all the rules they’ve forced themselves to live by.

Mind you, that’s a group that includes Pippa, and she’s been nothing but sweetness and light.

That’ll be it, though, won’t it? They won’t be jealous; or they won’t be just jealous. They’ll be hopeful. Abby broke the rules. Combined with Indira’s successful but carefully monitored reunion, that’s two Dorley girls who’ve returned to their families. It doesn’t matter that Abby didn’t have permission; now the secret’s out, it makes it that much more likely that someone else will be emboldened to have a go. And just because Abby was careful, doesn’t mean the next person to try it will be.

And she wasn’t all that careful, now she comes to analyse her actions, now she’s walking in through the front door, trying to anticipate every angle of attack from Aunt Bea. She met them in Almsworth, for Christ’s sake! That’s just down the road! Hell, she took Christine along!

No, she wasn’t careful. She was reckless.

Oh, well. If she has to be made an example of, at least she got to see her family again. At least they know she’s alive. They know her name. They know a version of her they can be proud of, a version she can be proud of, whether that’s Abigail Meyer or Abigail Grant.

Huh. The place is… kind of empty.

“Chrissy,” she says, her voice echoing in the late afternoon kitchen in a way it really ought not, “where is everyone?”

“No idea,” Christine says. “When we left, it felt like everyone in the building was trying to squeeze through these doors.” She taps on the frame as they pass through into the dining hall; also empty.

“Um,” Pippa says, trying not to sound panicked, “no-one’s updating the— Oh.” She taps at her phone a bit more. “Indira’s in the security room. She’ll know what’s going on.”

“I don’t know what’s so confusing,” Paige says, following them in and walking past them, striding towards the stairs. When they don’t follow, she stops, turning around with her hands on her hips and a delicate, frustrated pinch between her eyebrows, as if she can’t believe what idiots they all are. “It’s obvious what’s happened. The youngest woman, she was injured, so she’ll be out back, with a chaperone, getting that seen to; the oldest woman, she was one of Grandmother’s, so she’ll be somewhere else with another chaperone; and the other one was Valérie, the woman Beatrice’s been mourning for decades, so they’ll be together, too. Maria was in a bad way when we left, so that’s Edy accounted for. And the shift downstairs was getting long in the tooth when we left, so they’ll have to have been relieved. And there just weren’t that many sponsors around today; we’re still running light after the holiday.”

Christine nods. “So the second years’ll all be upstairs, with one sponsor—”

“And everyone else will be in the basement,” Paige finishes. “Except for Indira, apparently.”

“You really do know everything. You should run this place.”

“No.”

“She’s in the security room,” Pippa says again, proffering her phone. “I’ll, um, go check in with her. I mean, you’re right, Paige, I’m sure, but—”

Paige laughs and languidly waves her off. “Go. I’m not offended. I need a shower, anyway. But,” she adds, “I can check on the second years first, if that’ll make you feel better.”

“Just put something in the group chat?”

“I will.”

Paige reaches out, beckoning Christine toward her, and they share a kiss — quite a long one, with Christine leaning in and up, her back arched — before Paige smiles at Abby and heads off up the stairs. To her other side, Pippa shrugs, waves to both of them, and jogs toward the ugly concrete basement entrance.

“Where to?” Christine asks, turning to Abby. She’s a bit flushed, and—

“Chrissy, you have so much lipstick on your face.”

“Occupational hazard.”

Abby hands her a wipe as Christine digs in her bag for the little folding mirror Paige made her start carrying around, and she quickly cleans herself off and applies a bit of gloss.

“You’re not going to, uh…?” Abby mimes applying some pressed powder.

“Abs,” Christine says, “Aunt Bea’s lost love, or sister, or whoever, she came back today. I don’t think Beatrice’ll even notice if I’m a bit shiny.”

“Oh, I think she will.”

Christine shrugs her indifference, and starts walking away towards the stairs, until she realises Abby’s tugging on her sleeve, holding her back. She turns, puzzled, and that’s Abby’s opportunity to sweep in and hug her, to hold her even more tightly than she did back home.

She has no idea how this little thing of a girl — yes, okay, Christine’s taller than her, but so’re most people; Christine’s shortness is metaphorical — became so important to her in such a relatively short time, but she did, and time away from her has ached more and more the longer it’s gone on.

“Um, Abs?” Christine says. “Didn’t we do this already?”

“Yes,” Abby says, “but now it’s just us.”

“Oh. Okay.”

And Christine hugs her back, just as hard, resting her chin on Abby’s shoulder and nuzzling against her head.

In some ways, some very specific ways that have nothing to do with her growing anxiety about Beatrice or her concern over what she’ll even say to Melissa, and, shit, what about Shahida, what’s she even going to do about her? This is all—

Christine squeezes her. “Missed you,” she whispers.

“Missed you, too,” Abby says.

In some ways, it really is good to be back.

 

* * *

 

“I can’t put it in the office,” Béatrice says.

“Oh?”

“It wouldn’t feel right.” She pauses awkwardly, a long cream skirt in her hands. She fluffs it at Valérie. “What about this?”

“No, thank you.”

Béatrice re-racks the skirt and goes back to sifting through her wardrobe.

They fixed the mug together, and Val decided that, while the glue set — which it ought to have had more than enough time to do by now, but caution is its own reward — she would shower and wash her sweaty hair and finally change out of Trevor’s pretty but bloodstained sundress. She asked if Béatrice had anything she could borrow and now she’s here, wrapped in a sinfully luxurious robe, damp hair hanging limply around her face, looking through Béatrice’s clothes.

They’re all very middle-aged.

“Why would it not feel right?” she asks, after shaking her head to turn down another terrible skirt.

“It was Linda’s mug,” Béatrice says, sounding strangely young. “She gave it to me. It’s not a part of—” she waves a hand downwards, “—all this. When I met her, my life was… precarious. I was barely a girl, didn’t even know how to get my own hormones, couldn’t talk like this… She was like another mother. Her and Teri. For more than ten years, she supported me, encouraged me, helped me out with what little cash she had if I needed it. Loved me. And if she knew what I do here, what I’ve been doing… She wouldn’t approve, Valérie.”

Val leans against the wall. Despite her height, Béatrice looks very small here, holding her ugly skirt in both hands, kneading the hideous elasticated waistband with her fingers.

“And you think about that a lot,” Valérie says.

Béatrice shrugs like a disaffected teen. “I feel like I can hear her,” she says, “with every new intake. Every year. Asking me what the heck I think I’m doing to these boys. Telling me, in no uncertain terms, that there are real-life transsexuals out there who need saving. Asking me, kindly but firmly, if there is no other pursuit to which my life could be directed.”

“What do you say to her?”

Béatrice blinks at Val. Seems almost ready to drop the skirt. “What?” she asks eventually.

“When she asks you these questions, what do you say to her?”

“I… don’t. I don’t say anything.”

“Well,” Valérie says, “maybe you should. What would you say to me, if I asked you the same questions?”

That gets through to her. Béatrice laughs, a gentle little trickle of amusement, and returns the skirt to its place. “Truth be told, I half-expected you to slap me when you found out what I do.”

“I have had a while to get used to the idea. Frankie told me.”

“Of course she did.”

“And, no, I’m not going to slap you,” Val says. “Why would I?” Béatrice, by way of reply, simply gestures downwards again. Val rolls her eyes. “Would I have done it in your position? Probably not. Is it my problem? Absolutely not. Do I think you’re doing a bad thing? Well, your girls seem very nice. Even that tiny one who seems to have been on hormones for less than ten minutes. So, who can say?”

“You really aren’t bothered?”

Valérie leans closer. “No, Béatrice. You’ll notice that, unlike young Trevor, I am not shivering with fear at being seen by others? I am comfortable in my womanhood.” She prods gently at Béatrice’s arm. “You are comfortable in your womanhood. And I knew many girls who were, also. Or would have become so, had they lived.”

“Val—”

“Do not want to talk about them. Shouldn’t have raised the subject.” Shaking her head, flexing her fingers, Valérie clears her mind. She’s out. Out of Stenordale. And while Dorothy lives, there remains a chance she can find justice for the memories of the girls she buried. Maybe there’s even a chance Elle Lambert’s horrible military machine can be aimed at the odious Smyth-Farrow children, too. “Béatrice,” she says, leaning in again and picking at the hem of the skirt Béatrice is still holding, “what is this stuff? I never pictured you quite so… Oh, God, what is the word? Frankie used it constantly. To describe herself. Ah! Yes: frumpy. I never pictured you this frumpy, Béatrice.”

“‘Frumpy’?” Béatrice exclaims, contriving to sound both relieved and moderately offended.

Val flicks through the hangers. “You have barely any casual clothes, and you have hardly anything nice. Do you even have jeans?”

Throwing the skirt messily onto the bed, Béatrice says, “I have jeans.”

“Oh?” Valérie steps closer, challenging her. “Show me.”

Béatrice pushes her aside and starts sorting through the drawers set into the wardrobe. “I have jeans,” she repeats. “Just… not here, apparently.” She looks around, frowning. And then she lunges for her mobile telephone, one of those slablike colourful things, the things Valérie’s still trying forcibly to decouple from her earliest impression of them — that they are like the Guide from Hitchhiker’s Guide, a book series her father encouraged her to read to help with her English — because outside of the manor they seem to be everywhere. The association, if she lets it, bites deep at the back of her throat.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“Look.” Béatrice activates the device and navigates through the interface at baffling speed until she alights upon a photograph of herself, wearing a canary-yellow top and, yes, blue jeans. She points at the screen. “Jeans,” she says. “I have jeans.”

“Very nice,” Valérie comments. It must be a recent picture, since she looks more or less identical, though she’s had her roots done in the time since.

“I stopped wearing them around the Hall so much. I have an image to maintain.”

Valérie makes bunny-ear quote marks with her fingers. “That of ‘Aunt Bea’?”

“Precisely. And one of the girls called me a MILF a few years ago. I was wearing jeans at the time. Rather… clingy jeans.”

“Dare I ask what a MILF is?”

“You can ask, but I won’t tell you,” Béatrice says.

Val smirks at her. “I’m going to get one of those… telephones, I imagine? I saw Frankie use one, though she used a soft-tipped pencil thing and not her finger. But it seems easy enough; I can simply look it up. Actually, are they like Star Trek? Can I say, ‘Computer: define MILF’? Ah. Apparently not.”

They lock eyes for a moment, and Béatrice’s resistance — as temporary and as pantomimed as it is — evaporates. She steps closer until they’re standing side by side, and then takes Val’s left hand, manoeuvres it upright, and places the telephone in it.

“Fine,” she says. “Tap.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She demonstrates. “Tap the screen. There, where the little G is. That will bring up the search function.”

Following the instructions, Val taps her way through. “In what language does ‘G’ mean ‘search’?” she mutters as she does so, and though she is talking half to herself, Béatrice provides the answer anyway. The little keyboard that pops up is awful to use — she hasn’t used a computer since school, so her memory is hazy, but she swears the keys are laid out wrong here — and the device is both too small to comfortably type on and too large to hold, but eventually she works her way through to the page with the appropriate information.

“Hmm,” she says. “‘Mom I’d Like to Fuck’. One of your girls said that to you?”

Béatrice laughs, easily and sweetly. “She wasn’t a girl back then, but yes. I can point her out to you, if you’d like. Although she’s fairly distinctive; she dresses like a goth.”

Valérie pictures it, and decides she’d better employ the same techniques she used when she had not to express too much outward loathing for her erstwhile captors, because it wouldn’t be polite to burst out laughing at the sight of one of Béatrice’s girls, even if she is a mass of teased hair and bicycle chains.

“I can’t believe you still have goths,” she says.

“Two decades into the twenty-first century,” Béatrice says, “and no new trends have yet to emerge. It’s just the old ones, on repeat, forever.”

“So, what you are saying is, I don’t have to learn a new way to style my hair?” Valérie says.

Béatrice snorts, a sound that, as much as Val’s been trying to avoid nostalgia, unavoidably yanks her back more than thirty years. But even though the briefly vivid image of Dee, of Béatrice as she once was, is saturated with fondness, it cannot survive, because the woman in front of her — once she abandoned her absurd and unnecessary guilt — could not be more of an improvement. Val can’t help it: she giggles.

“What?” Béatrice asks.

“Oh, nothing. Show me how to see the picture of you again.”

Béatrice guides her finger this time, showing her how to swipe up from the bottom of the device to go to what she calls the ‘home’ screen, how to open the gallery application, and how to swipe through photos. Béatrice doesn’t take all that many pictures, but she takes enough, and by the time Val reaches the jeans photo, she’s also seen Béatrice in a variety of other — boring — outfits.

“Wait,” Val says, zooming in with her fingers, the way Béatrice showed her. “What is that you’re holding? Is that another one of your funny mugs?”

“Not exactly,” Béatrice says. “It was made by one of the girls.”

Val zooms in and out, but enough of Béatrice’s fingers are covering the text that she can’t make out more than the first words. “What does it say?”

“My other sister is also a kidnapper,” Béatrice says, sighing.

“Ah! That’s cute.”

“It’s… flippant.”

“And yet there you are, holding it.”

“I like to encourage the girls,” Béatrice says.

Val laughs, full-throated this time, and wraps an arm around Béatrice’s shoulders. Despite her height, it’s easy, because Béatrice leans into it, and Val rests her head on her shoulder.

“You love it,” she says quietly. “You really do. You love all of it. Being called ‘Aunt Bea’. The girls running around all over the place. The questionably tasteful mugs. You love it. I can still read you, Béatrice Quinn.”

“Like a book,” Béatrice whispers.

“Remember our plan?”

“The restaurant thing? I never really learned to cook, I’m afraid.”

“Yes,” Valérie says, nudging her with her forehead, “but the plan was that I teach you. Because I did learn to cook. Yes, mostly disgusting English slop, but I can do great and terrible things with a kitchen knife.”

“I believe you,” Béatrice says, and then she recoils, laughing, pushing Valérie away. “Your hair!” she exclaims. “It’s still wet!”

Valérie throws the phone back onto the bed and spreads her arms wide. “So find me something to wear, Béatrice, and I will put it on and then I shall dry my hair. Not,” she adds, side-eyeing the wardrobe, “any of that, please.”

“How about I get us another drink,” Béatrice says, “and then I’ll find you some things I guarantee you’ll like.”

 

* * *

 

She tried to talk to Ollie, she really did. Yes, Steph knows what he’s like and what he thinks of her — of all of them, at this point, with the possible exception of Adam; even Raph has grudgingly accepted that he can’t stop what’s coming, even if he hasn’t embraced it — but his life has been as ripped apart as anyone’s down here, and he is without question the most alone. Again, with the possible exception of Adam, though as far as Steph knows, he has a good relationship with Edy. Ollie has no-one.

She knows Harmony’s frustrated: she envies the rapport most of the other sponsors have been building with their charges, and not just for her own sake; for anyone to make the leap, she told Steph once, they have to understand that they’re not alone.

Harmony hasn’t disclosed everything to him yet, though. Presumably she thinks it would be unhelpful at this point. She’s probably right. Ollie isn’t pulling out his own hair any more, as far as she can tell, and the bruises from when he used to throw himself at his cell wall have faded and have yet to be replaced by new ones, but she gets a hair-trigger feeling from him. He reminds her of Will, when he was so scared of his own unpredictability that he cuffed himself, only without the pacifistic intention.

But she tried to talk to him anyway, when Shahida and Lisa came down with dinner: sandwiches with premade fillings, a couple of variety multipacks of crisps, several bottles of diet fizzy drink and two packs of Mr Kipling snack cakes. Steph picked out a few half-sandwiches — tuna mayo, cheese and pickle, egg and cress — and a bag of prawn cocktail crisps and, feeling strangely like she was fifteen years old again and struggling through another church picnic, sat down opposite Ollie, who hadn’t moved when Shahida and Lisa came in and had yet even to acknowledge the food.

She got three words into her greeting before he left. He didn’t take any food with him and he didn’t look at her once.

“Um,” she says, as soon as the door to the corridor’s closed and there’s no chance of him overhearing her, “should we tell Harmony about that?”

“Yeah,” Jane says. She and Amy had to stand aside so that Ollie could leave without coming too close to comfort, and she looks as unsettled as Steph feels. “Yeah, I will.” She whips out her phone to compose a message while Amy squeezes her shoulder.

And that’s that, for the rest of dinner. Raph exchanges a look with her and Bethany jokes that Ollie didn’t take any sandwiches because they’re not yet hard enough to injure himself with, and he’ll be back for the leftovers in a day or two, but the joke doesn’t land.

“Harm says she’ll bring him something to eat in a couple of hours,” Jane says, reading from her phone.

“Good,” Steph says, feeling like she ought to have more to contribute but not knowing what. “I’m worried about him.”

“Yeah,” Raph says, with a mouth half full of egg and bacon sandwich, “but there’s nothing you can do, right? The last time he spoke to me it was mostly swearing, and we were… Okay, we weren’t friends, we were…”

“Colleagues?” Amy suggests.

“I’m sorry,” Will asks, from the other end of the table. He’s been talking, surprisingly, to Martin. “Who are you again?”

“Girl class of 2015,” she says smoothly. “Just visiting.”

“Fine.”

Raph smirks and turns back to Steph. “Point is: don’t try and help him. And don’t sic her on him, either.” He points at Bethany, currently eating from a bag of salt and vinegar and watching with polite interest; which means she’s tired as hell, and is faking being even remotely awake just to get through dinner. “He’s not Will. He’s not even me. I don’t know if he’d attack you, but I don’t know he wouldn’t, either.”

“Raphael,” Bethany says, and Steph doesn’t know if it’s her sleepiness or her habit of saying the most inadvisable thing at any given moment that causes her to hesitate a little on each syllable of Raph’s name, like an echo of Declan, “I didn’t know you cared.”

He shrugs. “I’m being rational. She got me a pack of chocolate digestives. If Ollie loses his fucking nut and attacks her, the chances of me getting any more chocolate digestives are a lot lower. QED.”

“When did you grow a brain?” Will asks.

“Always had one. You just never listened to me.”

“Oh? What does ‘QED’ mean, then?”

“‘Quite easily done’,” Raph says.

Will snorts. “Thank fuck for that,” he mutters. “Thought the world was going off-axis, for a minute.”

 

1984 December 3
Monday

There are excuses, and then there is the reason.

The Smyth-Farrows have never been an especially powerful family. A matter of location, apparently, and some bad luck, and some bad investments a handful of hundred years ago, and some downright stupid decisions made when every other noble family was absolutely coining it in. They survive by virtue of their assets, their savvy, and their bloody-mindedness.

But what if one had an ace up one’s sleeve? What if one were to be loaned a mundane investment property under which some truly diabolical actions could be taken? What if one crafted a meticulous plan to extract from certain families, families which have wronged the Smyth-Farrows, finances, assurances, allegiances, and promises, all secured with the bodies of their children? For there is proof, you see, of what is possible, of what can be done to a young man with enough violence, enough surgery, enough birth control pills. And you wouldn’t want it happening to your sons, now, would you?

And the Smyth-Farrow name rose.

But that was always merely the excuse. The reason was that Crispin Smyth-Farrow discovered he liked nothing more than to put over his knee a girl who was once a boy, who remained a boy in most vital respects — including and especially his mind — and extract his pleasure. The discovery, the thing that kept the Hall going beyond the first few years, the thing that arguably kept Dorothy alive, was that he’s turned out to be far from the only moneyed man in England to have developed such tastes. If such raw material can be procured from less refined stock, and such girls manufactured on a predictable basis, and especially if — for the more sensitive customer — some details of their origin can be tastefully elided, then Dorley Hall will never not be busy.

The money poured in, and extortion became a side job.

Dorothy would have left. After the first year, after her revenge was secured, she would gladly have handed it all over to Smyth-Farrow or to one of the other women he found. Because, although he was right about her — although it thrills her to the bone to break a man, to reverse his development, to reduce him to a shivering, terrified boy, and then diminish him even further — there’s barely been a day she hasn’t feared for her life.

As much as she has learned to ape them, as much as some of them treat her almost as one of them, Dorothy Marsden knows she exists solely on the sufferance of a small and particularly rapacious segment of the aristocracy. On her ability to produce these creatures for them.

So she would have left. If not for that letter. That damnable letter.

One of Smyth-Farrow’s men came to see her, shortly after they inked their initial agreement, and handed her an unmarked envelope before leaving wordlessly. Inside, a photograph, grainy enough to have been enlarged from a film still, depicting Dorothy with her knife inside Wallace Mount’s neck, and a single piece of paper, on which was printed one word: Behave.

The camera had been running, the day Wallace Mount killed Constance, the day Dorothy killed him in return. And she’d been a fool to keep the film. And an even greater fool not to hide it somewhere better.

But Crispin Smyth-Farrow had been right about her.

And now, here he is with another of his little requests. They come in from time to time and interrupt the smooth mechanisms of Dorley Hall. But she has to fulfil them, and she has to admit — once again — that there is a certain frisson to them, to kidnapping and altering the child of someone truly powerful, to bite one of the many hands that feed them. To take one of their own is always a risk; to break one is a unique reward.

This one is a little different, though. The Barbiers. Erstwhile business partners. Some venture in France, from the larger and legitimate side of Smyth-Farrow’s operation, now done with. But the Barbiers have become a little too curious about the English end of things, and not in the prurient and exploitable fashion of Crispin’s other associates. Dorothy’s met them before, and she agrees with him that there is little chance they can be persuaded of the virtue of the operation at Dorley Hall, should they discover it. Too… Catholic.

So it’s to be done: new business will be arranged. The Barbiers will be dealt with. And the boy, he’s supposed to be quite pretty, for a young man.

He’ll be Crispin’s prize. And Dorothy’s, too, for a time.

 

2020 January 5
Sunday

Val’s playing with Béatrice’s telephone when she returns, laden with shot glasses. Béatrice takes it from her, leaves it on the side, and then pulls on Valérie’s forefinger, drags her out of the bedroom and through the living room to another door, one which Valérie, on their way through, had assumed was merely a cupboard. Instead it opens into a whole extra room — Béatrice has six rooms! — which, unlike the others, has no clear purpose. It hosts a pair of armchairs, a handful of scatter cushions, a small window, and a side table, on which sits some kind of leather-bound device with its cover open. Shoved into a cramped corner is a large, antique-looking armoire.

“I like to read in here,” Béatrice says, still leading her. Val allows herself to be led, and Béatrice opens all the doors of the armoire and one of the drawers, out of which she extracts a pair of jeans. “Look! See?”

But Valérie is too interested in the things hanging from rails to care about Béatrice’s triumphant jeans. Where the wardrobe in the bedroom lacked colour, the armoire is bursting with it. And such fabrics! Valérie runs her hands through and finds silk, cotton, cashmere.

“Why do you have a secret second wardrobe, Béatrice?” she asks, delicately examining a daringly cut dress in deep red.

“It’s not secret,” Béatrice says. “It’s just separate. There’s… someone.”

Inevitable that there would be, after all this time. “Oh?”

“She bankrolls this whole place.”

“Ah,” Valérie says flatly. One of those kinds of relationships.

“We’re not exclusive,” Béatrice says quickly. “And we don’t have a relationship, not really. But, well, I’ve never found anyone, not anyone real, and she is, well, she’s very attractive, and it’s like a game we play, except—”

“Béatrice. I am happy you have someone. And I’m sorry it is not real.”

Béatrice breathes deeply. “Sorry,” she says. “I knew I’d have to tell you. And I knew it would be awkward. And I don’t even know why it’s awkward, but it was and it is, and I…” She twirls a limp hand. “I’m fifty-five and I’ve never had a real relationship.”

Val takes her hand. Gently. Carefully. Raises it between them. Smiles for her.

“Neither have I.”

“And now you see what I mean about being suddenly very old,” Béatrice says, taking her hand back. “There are ways in which I’m still like a teenager, I think. Looking around, blinking in the light, wondering how I got here. Now, don’t get me wrong,” she adds, frowning and pointing a finger at Valérie, “I have been quite fulfilled in many ways, and not just with Elle.” Valérie files that name away: Elle. The woman who bankrolls the place. Isn’t that the woman Frankie talks about occasionally? The one Dorothy despises? “But I still feel foolish about it sometimes. Like, especially, now.”

Valérie waves away the concerns, both hers and Béatrice’s. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. She turns her attention back to the contents of the armoire, and unhooks something silky which caught her attention before. “Did you wear this for Elle?”

It’s black and it’s so light that it billows in the heat from the radiator in the skirting board.

Béatrice blushes. “Not yet.”

And Valérie, wondering if this is a wise thing to say, wondering if this is too much, too soon, and unaware of whether she even wants what she’s implying, but exposed so very suddenly and totally to the atmosphere of permissiveness here at the Hall and deciding the hell with it, says, “Don’t.”

Something passes between them.

And then there’s a knock at the door. The farthest door, it sounds like, the one into the office from the corridor. Béatrice shakes herself, and then cups her hands to her mouth and yells, “Just a minute!” and the moment is well and truly gone.

“Gosh,” Valérie says, “I should get dressed.”

“You do that,” Béatrice says, looking hassled. “Anything you want. I’ll go see who that is?”

Val nods and Béatrice, granted permission, rushes off. Valérie permits herself a smile, and then returns to the armoire.

She doesn’t go mad in the end. Béatrice has some very racy things — and she’s kept herself in shape, so even the tightest ought to fit quite decently — but Val settles in the end for a flattering but sensible diaphanous black skirt. It becomes less sheer towards the waist, a concession to modesty, though Val decides to concede a little more, and pairs it with a slip and some opaque black stockings.

“It’s still practical,” she tells herself, kicking out a leg. The material folds silkily around her, draping away at the calf without becoming an impediment. “See? If an emergency occurs, I can still run. Hmm,” she adds, shaking her head, “I am talking to no-one.”

She adds a dappled charcoal-and-white top with a modest neckline and sleeves to her elbows, and throws a loose black jacket over top. She can’t, however, borrow any shoes from Béatrice, as Val’s feet are smaller, so for now she slips on a pair of woolly winter socks. She’ll have to ask to be escorted to wherever in the Hall they keep their shoes. She’d prefer a nice ankle boot, if possible.

There’s a mirror in this little room, and she examines herself quickly. Hair still damp, but acceptable, and she can doubtless borrow a brush from someone if it needs sorting out later. No makeup, but she has nothing but the battered lipstick she escaped with, and she’d prefer not to use someone else’s. Besides, she’s never needed it to look good, a fact she always liked to believe was secret torture for Dorothy, a woman whose lipstick occasionally looked as if it had been brutally scraped across the desiccated lips of a corpse.

In the office, Béatrice is standing, leaning against her desk and looking exasperated, as a pretty — and strikingly short, for this place — Black girl talks herself into an anxiety attack, and a brown-haired white girl — also pretty; not short — watches from the doorway.

“I know I was reckless, Aunt Bea,” the Black girl is saying, “and I know I should have sought permission, but the thing is, I asked permission, I put in the request and it just sat there, and all that time I knew where they were and I just couldn’t stand it any more, and I knew they’d be fine with it, fine with me, and I’m sorry, but—”

“Abigail.”

“—I’m happy now, I’ve seen my parents again, I’ve seen my family again, my dad knows who I am now, my mum, she knows I’m alive, and they’re over the moon with me, they love me, and that’s all I needed, it’s all I wanted, I can tell them anything you need me to tell them over the phone, and—”

“What on earth would I want you to tell them over the phone?”

“—if it’s for the good of the programme, if it’s so the others don’t try anything dangerous, I’ll—”

“Dear Lord, child!” Béatrice exclaims, and it has the desired effect; the girl — Abigail — momentarily halts the flow of words and stands there, hugging herself, looking up.

“Aunt Bea?” she says.

“Abigail, sit down, please. You are worrying unduly. And you are making me look like a tyrant in front of Ms Barbier!”

“Oh,” Valérie says, closing the door behind her and smiling at the new occupants, who have both finally noticed her, “I’m Ms Barbier, am I?”

“Valérie,” Béatrice says, “don’t be cheeky. Go on with Christine. She’ll find you somewhere to hang your hat— Oh, no, I’m terribly sorry, my hat for the evening—”

“Will I?” the white girl, Christine, says.

“Yes,” Béatrice says firmly.

“Oh. Fine.”

“We’ll sort you out somewhere more permanent tomorrow,” Béatrice says to Valérie, before returning her attention to Abigail, who has partially calmed herself and taken the seat that was in front of her. “Now, Abigail, before we begin, I want to assure you that I have no intention of keeping you prisoner in this house, like a— like—”

“Like me?” Valérie offers.

Béatrice points to the door. “You. Go. Now.”

“Hi,” Christine says, as they close the door behind them, “I’m Christine. I get all the jobs.”

Valérie assesses her. She was one of the ones in the kitchen when she first arrived. Bringing up the rear. Attached to that tall girl, if she remembers correctly. She carries herself well.

“Valérie Barbier,” she says. “I have had only one job.”

“I like your skirt.”

“It belongs to Béatrice, actually,” Valérie says, and takes great pleasure in the look of shock she receives. Béatrice really is presenting herself to these girls as some middle-aged old fuddy-duddy, isn’t she? Perhaps she believes it makes the girls feel safer around her?

“I have never seen her in something like that,” Christine says, turning around to look properly at Val. “I mean, she dresses up for parties, but… Fuck me. Never anything like that! Oh. Sorry. Pardon my, uh… Never mind.”

Valérie huffs, amused. “You may swear around me, Christine. You have my permission.”

“Oh. That’s good. So.” She rubs her hands together, suddenly all business; a clone of Béatrice. “I gather I’m supposed to find you somewhere to sleep? And then we should probably go downstairs. I haven’t eaten and I bet you haven’t, either, and the sponsors are throwing out the rule book and ordering in rather than cook anything, so if you want the good pizza slices or to snag a naan before they all go, we ought to hurry.”

“Actually,” Valérie says, “first, I could use some boots.”

Christine nods. “Right. Follow me.”

Christine leads her to a stuffed-to-bursting walk-in wardrobe and helps her select a few pairs of shoes and boots in her size, as well as sleepwear and a few casual items, and then takes her to a row of bedrooms. For tonight, Valérie will be borrowing Christine’s room, and Christine herself will stay with her girlfriend, Paige. Just two doors up, if Valérie needs her for anything.

As they go, Val satisfies a number of minor curiosities. It is ‘throwing out the rule book’ to order in food for as many people as are assembled this evening because they try to avoid drawing attention to their numbers on off days like this: a Sunday before the start of the semester. A rule they break with reasonable regularity, according to Christine, who mumbles something about ‘godawful opsec’.

Elle is indeed Elle Lambert, says Christine, and she’s only recently properly met her. It was when Béatrice returned from the search for Valérie somewhat wiped out, she adds, embarrassed, after some prompting. Christine describes her as nice enough, but that she ‘looks at you like a piece of meat, but one she wants to rub all over herself, if you know what I mean’. Valérie assured her that, yes, she knows the type.

Christine herself is in the third year of the programme here and, yes, she started out as a boy, just like all the others. Would she go back? Absolutely not, she says, and Valérie finds herself reassured by this. It is something to discover a womanhood inside yourself that you never otherwise would have found, to create and inhabit her to protect yourself, to embrace her as succour as much as revenge. And Valérie found echoes of herself in some of the girls who came to Stenordale after her. But a part of her always has wondered: is she still her? Is there truly continuity between Vincent and Valérie? Or was he broken down, disintegrated, used up, raw material for someone new? Chatting with Christine as Valérie tries on shoes, selects a bathrobe, and admires the accommodations is thus more of a relief than she expected: the girl has been here less than two-and-a-half years, and not only is she happy and well-adjusted and dating, she also speaks of her former self with a detached fondness, with a sort of familial irritation. He’s a part of her still, she says, and that’s something she’s recently come to terms with. She wanted to believe he died, that she killed him — and Valérie had to wince at the parallel — but she’s recently accepted that she is, and always has been, one person.

She just learned how to be better.

Was taught how to be better, she adds.

Christine can’t wait for Valérie to meet Indira.

And so, with Val’s new belongings stashed by the side of Christine’s bed, they descend the staircase at the front of the building. It’s dark out, but it’s quite clear, and the university buildings, much closer than they were in Valérie’s time, are lit up like earthbound stars.

“We’ll get you put on the access list,” Christine says, as she presses her thumb against one of the omnipresent readers and lets them into the kitchen. She frowns as the doors open, and for a moment Valérie’s not sure why, until she realises that there are a lot of people in the dining hall, but very little noise. “Um, come on,” Christine mutters, and speeds up, half-running into the dining hall.

Inside, someone is leading a group of girls holding pizza boxes to the back stairs, and a couple of others are making phone calls in various corners of the room. A central table, laden with food, remains virtually untouched.

Christine hurries across the room, and Valérie follows her, catching up in time for Christine to tug at the sleeve of a strikingly blonde girl.

“Pip,” she asks, “what’s going on?”

“It’s Ollie,” the girl says. “He’s tried to kill himself.”