Chapter Text
His name is John.
This is important. Nobody else is called John that he knows. There is David, and Martin, and James, and Kate, and Harley, and him, John. There are doctors who are all called Doctor and then strange things after, and that is how he knows that your name decides who you are. There are instructors, who teach them how to calculate infinitesimal limits, and also how to snap tendons and break bone. There are the omnipresent wardens. There are the Other Kids who are bigger than them, and the Other Kids who are smaller than them, and they do not mingle despite the wardens’ encouragement thereof. John does not know their names and therefore what they do and that makes him nervous.
And then there are the Misters, who are tall, and walk through the halls carrying their influence in a great dark coat around their bodies, making everyone else scuttle before and after them, who seem solely interested in the kids. Sometimes they look into doctor meetings, or watch their instructor meetings, or inspect their rooms accompanied by wardens. Sometimes the only trace of their presence is the fact that their warden for the day has been replaced and every adult seems more tense and quiet. Sometimes they order the kids to be sent into a room with them, one by one, and shut all the wardens outside the door. The wardens never like that.
John has never seen a Mister twice. So he isn’t fazed when the door shuts behind him and he turns around to see an unfamiliar face peering down at him. He’s wearing a dark suit, like all Misters.
‘Hello, John. I’m Mister Haffley.’
‘Hello, Mister Haffley.’
‘How are you doing?’
‘Fine, Mister Haffley.’ John doesn’t understand why calling a person’s name over and over is supposed to be polite, but he does as the wardens have told him, as he does what every adult tells him.
‘How are your lessons? You’re the fastest in your class, why is that?’
‘I like my lessons, Mister Haffley.’
‘Really? Is there a reason why you bit your self-defence instructor?’
John goes blank. That was a very messy incident that led to other instructors and wardens being called down and he’d ended up losing his socialisation privileges for a week. He didn’t talk much usually, so it was no great loss.
‘Well?’
The wardens never told him what to say about that, so he blurts out the truth. ‘I bit Instructor Tomke because he hit Harley.’
‘Hmm. Harley is your classmate, yes?’
‘Yes, Mister Haffley.’
‘And you like her?’
John again goes blank. ‘N-no, Mister Haffley, I-I mean, yes, uh –’
‘S’alright, son.’ John is confused because son is not his name. ‘So why did you bite Instructor Tomke for, mm, her?’
‘… Because she’s my classmate, Mister Haffley?’
‘Stop with the Mister Haffley, it’s getting annoying,’ Mister Haffley suddenly snaps. John is becoming increasingly unsettled. ‘Well then. How do you get along with your classmates then, son?’
‘I get along fine, M-.’ John cuts himself off in time.
‘Great. Great. Just great. I have to tell you, son, you and your friends are doing some very important work and it’s absolutely critical that you put in your very best. You’re cut out for great things, son. You understand that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Great. Well, run along, Don.’
John leaves the room and shuts the door behind him, just a little bit harder than he has to, because apparently important wasn’t important enough to get his name right, and what could be more important than that?
*
‘I don’t like them,’ Harley declares, tugging at her recently-cut hair. John knows she hates when they cut her hair down to regulation length because it irritates the back of her neck. He knows that Kate gets to keep her hair long because she volunteers for extra-credit projects with the doctors. He knows that David has a half-friend two years up whom he talks to because they look like photographs of the same blond-haired blue-eyed person two years apart. He knows that Martin sprained his knee in solidarity with James breaking his leg.
He knows that he is scoring better in his training than the two Twelves who are four years older than him. He knows his friends are sticking with him because there are no Thirteens.
‘Get ‘em to cut it shorter, like a boy’s,’ Martin says through a mouthful of apple.
‘Not that!’ Harley snaps in reply. ‘I’m used to that.’ She flips up her shirt collar to cover the back of her neck. ‘Them.’
‘The misters?’ James looks up from his storybook, called Moby Dick. John thinks if he spent more time reading his textbooks instead of his storybooks, he’d do better.
‘Yes.’ Harley lowers her voice some more. ‘They’re creepy. And they make everyone unhappy.’
Everyone murmurs assent. John looks over at the omnipotent wardens, scuttling about like frantic ants.
‘Do you think they let you change your name, when you grow up?’
Like a single clockwork toy, everyone stops eating and stares up at him in unison. John stares back at them. It’s a reasonable question.
‘Why?’ David asks, eventually.
‘I want to be a mister, when I grow up. But I’m a John.’
They keep staring at him until Kate snorts and starts sniggering, and then everyone else is sniggering, and John just sits there completely confused, as an uncomfortable hot prickling starts crawling up his skin. He’s never felt that before – well, that’s not true. He felt something similar being interrogated by Mister Haffley. ‘What,’ he snaps.
‘John, mister isn’t their name,’ Kate tells him. ‘It’s something that they do. You can be called anything and be a mister.’
John looks around, and they’re still laughing at him, so he gets up and dumps his unfinished meal in the trash can and goes to class, fifteen minutes early. He spends fifteen minutes willing the heat rising off his back to go away.
When the rest of them come in to class, he pre-emptively stiffens, but Harley goes right up to him and wraps him in a hug.
‘We’re sorry we laughed at you,’ she murmurs into his shoulder. John looks at the others who are standing, looking at him with nervous, uncertain eyes. He realises that they still need him; that they still don’t know what lies beyond the white walls of their school or why all the dark-suited misters are so interested in them or why they are being taught to smash a man’s skull open or why, most fearful of all, there are none of them that make it to Thirteen. They know that he is still their best chance for answers.
He realises that they are looking up to him. This makes him feel big, and powerful, and strong, and also benevolent, so he puts his arms around Harley and watches everyone relax.
‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I forgive you.’ And he does. His friends.
Then the instructor comes in and they start their lesson on Survival in an Urban Environment.
*
David joins them at the beginning of breakfast one day, which is odd, because David usually spends the first ten minutes of breakfast talking to his Eleven half-friend. He’s on edge, so John ignores him entirely and leads everyone in pretending there is nothing more important in the world than their breakfasts, including David.
‘Leonard’s gone,’ David says suddenly.
Everyone stops, again, and stares at John, like a single clockwork –
‘What do you mean,’ Harley asks urgently.
‘He’s gone.’ Leonard is the name of David’s – ‘My twin is missing.’
‘How do you know that?’ John demands to know.
‘I-,’ David is starting to tear up, which is unacceptable. John jumps up, drags him to the toilets, and locks them into a cubicle. He knows he needs to get them out of sight of the wardens as soon as possible.
‘What do you know,’ he snaps at David.
‘He- I couldn’t see him yesterday at lunch so at dinner I tried to ask around and –’ David starts to sob.
‘And what?’ John pins him to the wall by the shoulders, and for all that it makes David even more terrified, at least it forces him to look at John and answer him.
‘And he was gone,’ David forces out. ‘Nobody would talk about him, it was like – like he was erased.’ David is shaking, looking up at him with equal parts fear and expectation of guidance. John files the information away for later, then makes a quick decision, bending over the toilet bowl and digging his fingers down his throat. He retches up the little breakfast that he ate.
‘What are you doing?’ David asks, shivering.
‘You were sick,’ John wipes his mouth with toilet paper and drops it into the bowl, just as Warden Hanson kicks the cubicle door open. As expected, he is instantly repelled by the sour smell of sick.
‘What happened?’ Hanson demands of them.
John tries to suppress his heaving and swallow past his burning throat, but David picks up for him. ‘I was sick,’ he says, meekly, using his flushed, tear-stained face to convince Hanson. ‘I think I ate something bad yesterday.’
Hanson takes a long look at both of them. John meets his eyes because he knows that confidence will convince people just as much as a plausible story. John can see when the preference to get out of the tiny, dank, acid-smelling cubicle outweighs Johnson’s ingrained duty to always know what his charges are doing.
‘I’ll take you to the doctor, David.’ He leans over and flushes the bowl, helps David up, and leads him out. John steals a drink of water from the taps to wash out his mouth. When he goes back to the dining hall, he is gratified to see that his classmates have already cleared both his and David’s trays, so nobody can tell what happened. He is, however, also slightly disappointed, as his breakfast had just been flushed down the toilet.
James palms John some apple slices that he makes sure to swallow before the instructor walks in. Because David wisely asked for a glass of water before he was examined, the doctors cannot determine anything definite, and he returns to class in the second period. But if John looks closely, he can still see the shadow of David’s missing twin hanging over him.
*
John wakes up to frantic banging on his door.
He yanks it open to a pale bundle spilling hard into his room. He knows it is Kate without having to make out her features in the gloom, because Harley left 5 weeks ago. She is wearing the exact same set of pyjamas as John. Where Kate used to roll up her sleeves and trouser legs to show off the needle marks and scars on her arm that earned her her extra privileges, now they all have the same arrays of scar tissue, the same traces of healed fractures, the same marks on their lower lumbars administered from different but same doctors, a never-ending carousel of faces wielding a spinning spindle of hypodermic needles. They’ve all gotten used to it; or, they forgot to realise that they didn’t use to do that, in between the muscle-burning physical training and mind-numbing memory exercises, the gradual reduction of unsupervised time, the discouragement from going outside when they had ‘better things to do’. John knows that there is a moon in the sky tonight but he does not know what it looks like. Kate is incoherent at his feet.
John drops to his knees before her. The clock is ticking. The clock started ticking the moment Kate slipped out of her room, and because John cannot account for that time, he needs to be as fast as possible.
‘What is it, Kate, what is it –’
‘They’re taking them away, they’re taking them away –’
‘Who, what, what are you talking about –’
‘They’re – oh god, they’re coming for us too, they’ve got us –’
‘Kate, pull yourself together,’ John shakes her forcefully, ‘and tell me what happened.’
‘They’re – I heard James screaming,’ Kate’s voice dropped to a whisper, ‘and when I looked out their doors where open, wide open –’
John lets her drop onto the floor and leaps out the door. He only glimpses in passing the three gaping dark rectangular maws that have spit his friends into the night. He runs down the length of the black endless corridor, chasing the glimmers of light and noise at the end. As he gets closer he hears them, his friends, struggling hard and shouting muffled words. He can’t stop now.
He knows he will get to them. He knows he can catch up because he is faster than the wardens already. They all are. He knows he will win because he is barely a quarter the age of his taekwondo instructor and he once broke the man’s wrist just by squeezing. He knows he will best them because he has been taught how to walk quietly, kill quietly, breathe quietly, and he is employing every single one of those skills now. He sneaks from shadow to shadow further and further down the corridor, drawing closer and closer to himself as he approaches them. He stops just outside the door leading to the wardens’ quarters. He hears them –
‘What did mm—’
‘Where is—’
‘—m—arley—’
‘AAAAGH!’ That’s not an Eleven’s voice, that’s a warden’s voice. David has bitten his captor.
‘WHERE’S LEONARD? WHAT DID YOU DO WITH LEONARD, WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HARLEY? WHERE ARE THEY? WHERE –’ a dull metallic clang cuts him off, and Martin and James’ voices soon disappear too. There remains only the laboured breathing of the wardens.
‘How bad is it, eh?’
‘There’s blood, man. There.’
‘Ouch. You might need to get a rabies shot for that, those mad bastards.’
‘Yeah, laugh at my pain, real classy. You know, in the old days they’d just shoot a rabid dog.’
‘Christ, those little buggers don’t give up. You’d think they’d be well-behaved, but all kids are the same, eh? Little horrors.’
‘Too many of ‘em go poking their little sticky noses where they shouldn’t. God, they’re strong. I don’t get paid enough for this shit.’
‘Where do they send them off to? Do you know?’
‘After what they’ve seen, where else do you think? You’d better get that cleaned up.’
‘Anyway, they’re not important. Not individually. It’s the numbers they make up, that’s important.’
‘Speaking of which. Better shut the door, we don’t want to wake up the remaining two. We keep losing them in the upper two years, it’s a real waste.’
The man’s voice gets closer and closer and John suddenly realises, belatedly, that he isn’t supposed to be there. He is so frozen with terror that he doesn’t move at all as the man goes and shuts the door, not seeing him. In the sudden absences of things to hear John notices what seems like a huge river rushing past in the walls, and then, realises that is his own blood sounding in his ears. He stays perfectly still until the lights go off behind the door, then waits another three minutes, then runs without stopping all the way back to his room and locks the door.
Kate is no longer there. The next day there are only two people in class. They obediently swallow the story that David, Martin, and James were transferred to another institution ‘more suited to their developmental needs’, exactly like Harley.
*
John wakes up alone.
That in itself is not unusual. They have always had separate rooms, and when curfew came, would be locked in. Come graduating to Ten, they were given control over their door locks, but most of them, by habit, kept to themselves at night. The night Kate came to his room was an exception.
Tonight is an exception too.
John bolts upright in bed with the cold sinking conviction that he is alone, that on the last night of being Twelve he is now the last of his kind. He knows in his thudding heartbeat that Kate is gone, but his mind doesn’t believe it, so he leaps out of bed and runs across the hall, to Kate’s room, and opens it with the warden’s stolen passcode. He enters it by feel, having rehearsed it endless times since his other friends ‘left’, since he started having nightmares about Kate being attacked in her room.
He yanks the door aside, unheeding of the noise, wishing that the sliding door would slam, even, so that more people can wake up and tend to Kate, who is in danger, who is –
Sleeping soundly and peacefully, curled on her side, in her bed.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled in warning and the chills down his spine cried out something’s wrong something’s wrong even before he could see it. All the practice he’d undergone training him to notice when the slightest thing was off came down to this, John seeing the blood before seeing it.
The blood –
– was spreading out, slowly, sluggishly, in a womb-shaped pool, from her peeled-open arms, around the curled, cold body of Kate.
John doesn’t remember the rest of the night very clearly. At some point the lights went on, abruptly stabbing their merciless rays into his dilated eyes, lighting up the bed like a garish horror pastiche, making him jerk in surprise and almost tumble off the bed. As he instinctively curled up to protect his eyes he became aware of some kind of odd, shrill, tuneless, shrieking in the room, like a captured rabbit, then he realised that the sound was coming from him, and very soon after that that he couldn’t stop it. They hauled him bodily out of the room as doctors and nurses formed a ghostly huddle around the bed, so the last thing he saw of Kate was his night-vision view of her shadowed body in the near-dark.
When he comes back to himself he is standing in the toilet, looking at a white, pale-eyed, black-haired, clean-suited boy, splattered all over with livid bright blood, a Pollock painting in black, white, and red. As the sun comes up the image becomes both more real and less real at the same time. Before long they bring him a towel and a uniform and tell him to get cleaned up. John does.
Today he is graduating to Thirteen. He’s the first. And he is alone.