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When she wakes up, it takes a little while for Aurora to figure out what’s wrong. She and Steph had been up late last night, visiting upstairs with the second-years and some of the sponsors. They couldn’t go anywhere for New Year’s, of course, but there was no shortage of booze at Dorley Hall. Booze had indeed been drunk. She’d waited for the last moments of 2019 to tell everyone she’d picked her new name and, at the stroke of midnight, she’d had her first kiss with Steph as her new self, as Aurora (surname yet to be determined). They’d gotten dragged into bets over which member of their intake would change name or pronouns next; her entirely theoretical money was on Will. The more mischievous (or perhaps more drunk) second-years took the opportunity to give them highly contradictory ”advice” for the remainder of their time in the basement. What parts of it were coherent were also obviously inadvisable, but that wasn’t the point, Aurora knew. Eventually, on the basis that everyone was too tired and too drunk to escort them back underground, she and Steph had been allowed to spend what remained of the night in Steph’s first-floor room. It would be a once-off New Year’s treat, they were carefully informed, and they nodded, and went off to pass the fuck out.
That’s what’s wrong, Aurora decides. She fell asleep in Steph’s bed, with Steph right next to her, so logically Steph should be right there, and she’s not. There’s not even any residual body heat in the bed. She makes a low-pitched grunting noise of the kind she’s probably not supposed to make anymore, manages a sitting position, and blearily cracks one eye open, then the other.
It’s worse than Steph being missing, she works out a few seconds later, because this is not Steph’s room. Long term memory takes a little while to tick over, but eventually she places it. This is, in fact, the room she had in her first year at Saints — the room Aaron Holt had had, anyway. She hasn’t worked out yet the trick of reincorporating her past the way Yasmin had. Maria had told her it would take time to adjust. Maria had said that about a lot of things.
Aurora pinches her arm. It’s not a dream. She thinks she would probably know if this was a dream, but she doesn’t have a lot of better ideas. It would be in astoundingly poor taste as a practical joke, not to mention probably impossible even with the Hall’s nebulously far-reaching resources. Besides, she can tell just from looking down that she doesn’t have any of the (admittedly minor so far) changes the hormones had given her. She reaches over and grabs her old laptop, opens it up, gets the password right on the second try. The date in the menu bar reads 1/1/2018, which makes a depressing sort of sense. She opens a browser window. The college student directory is pretty barebones, but it’s enough for what she needs right now. “Stefan Riley” turns up in the search right away. “Christine Hale” doesn’t, but she’s not surprised. Christine is probably in a basement on the edge of campus right now, and hasn’t even picked that name yet. She tries a few more names and gets more misses than hits (unsurprising given the current date), but eventually she decides she’s found enough evidence that her brain didn’t completely fabricate two years of her life and a load of trauma as a sort of “surprise, here’s a mental breakdown” present. There’s no possible explanation, but she really is in the past, and now she needs to figure out what to do about it.
She entertains the thought, just for a moment, of lying back down and falling asleep again, in the hopes that she’ll wake up where she’s supposed to be, with the people she’s supposed to be with. Then she gets up and goes to take a shower instead. She shaves afterward, with shaving cream and a razor, the way her— the way Aaron’s dad had taught him. The face in the mirror isn’t as different as she’d been afraid it would be. It doesn’t have to be Aaron’s face that she’s looking out of. It can be her face too.
She’s deflecting, distracting herself, so she can come to grips with the choice without having to look straight at it. She woke up in the outside world and she didn’t call the police. The person she’d been a month ago would have done that, she knows. Shame about Maria, shame about the others who really like their new lives, but the boys currently in the basement would be grateful. It would be so easy. She didn’t do it, though. She made that choice without thinking about it, and she’s still not really thinking about it, just sort of sliding up to it from the side so she can get comfortable with it, because after that choice there are more, and for all that Aurora knows what her choices will be, she’s not ready to think about them just yet.
Aurora flips through the clean clothes that 2017’s Aaron had left for her. She settles on an athleisure outfit that’s similar enough to Dorley’s standard basement uniform, grabs a coat, throws her laptop and phone into a backpack, and locks the door behind her. Some of the things she’s left behind would be vitally important to the Aaron who’s supposed to be here; none of them are at all important to her. On her way out of the dorm building she passes a handful of people she’s pretty sure she used to know. None of them say anything; either she’s got a more unpleasant expression on her face than she realizes, or she really did suck at making friends. Probably the latter. She tries relaxing her face anyway but it only makes her feel more self-conscious.
She makes it to the grubby Student Union Bar, only to find it locked, because of course it is, it’s New Year’s. She wedges herself against the doorframe and settles in to figure out what to do now. Option the first: go back to her dorm and pick Aaron Holt’s life back up. Just be Aaron again. Aurora’s barely told anyone her name, and nobody at all in this time. Aaron can mend his ways, keep the memory of the Hall in the back of his mind, and he’ll be fine. All he would have to do is not be one of the eight worst boys in the nation, and of course give up on all the things she’s only just begun to admit she cares most about, like Steph’s happiness or Maria’s trust in her. The new and improved Aaron could send Steph an anonymous note to tell her where to go to find her way to Melissa. And then he could walk away, simple, clean, easy. Maybe he could even find some people to care about, sometime in the future. It could be like a hobby, since he’ll be getting rid of his old one.
Option the second: pull that laptop back out and make a data file with everything she remembers, all the secrets she’d been given in confidence, and whatever other evidence she can scrape together. Call it insurance. Call it blackmail, even. She can probably bargain getting transition care for Steph and reuniting her with Melissa, in exchange for her silence. Maybe Steph will even be willing to keep in touch with her, or with him, or whoever she ends up being in this version of her future. It’d be normal to have secrets she can’t share with the general public, right? Everyone else around here has them.
She winces. Somehow that option is even worse. She’s not sure why; maybe it’s the expression she imagines on Maria’s face after she weaponizes past hurts. Maria doesn’t even know who she is now, so it’s not like it’d be a betrayal. Except it would be, to her, because she’s not Aaron Holt, the fucked up little rich boy. She’s someone who wants to be better than that, who decided to be better than that. She decided to be Aurora.
So that leaves option the third, the one she’d known all along she’d pick, the one she doesn’t even have to spell out to herself. She’ll head up to the front door like a civilised person and ask to be slotted back into the programme. The choice itself is terrifying, but that’s the beauty of it: once she’s chosen it, there’s nothing more to be terrified of. She just has to do it.
Aurora spots a familiar face coming down the path and, before she can lose her nerve, unfolds herself from the doorway and calls out, “Indira!” Indira’s eyes flicker over to her with what is probably alarm, quickly masked. Oops. She doesn’t actually know what was going on in Indira’s life right now. Maybe this Indira isn’t as self-assured as she will be in two years. Aurora approaches her, careful not to step onto the main path where it might look like she’s cutting off Indira’s escape routes. “Hi, I’m Ro,” she says.
Indira tilts her head slightly, clearly looking her over. “Hello, Ro,” she replies. “Should I know you?”
“Not yet, I don’t think,” Aurora says. She taps her fingers together, a little anxiously, then shoves each hand in a pocket. “Can you do me a favor? Or, well, no favor, really; I just need to get a message to Maria. I need to talk with her as soon as she can spare the time.”
She doesn’t look impressed. “Do you now?” It’s not quite a question.
Aurora nods. She squeezes her eyes tightly shut for a moment, then opens them again. “Tell her… tell her I need her help. Tell her I want to come in from the cold.”
Aurora isn’t surprised to be met in the main foyer by Harmony, who in a few years will be Ollie’s sponsor, and ushered straight into the ground floor kitchen. It helps a little to have someone to focus on. It also helps that she’s not going through the massive dining hall this time. Less space to think about.
She isn’t surprised to hear the locks clicking shut behind her, either. At least it wasn’t straight down into the cells, but she is stuck here until they decide to let her out. She knows it’s a little weird that it makes her feel safe, but she doesn’t care, because it does make her feel safe. Indira has a whispered conversation with Harmony and then ducks out the door. “She’ll pass your message along,” Harmony says. She gestures expansively at the big table.
Aurora takes a seat as directed, leans over, and slings her backpack across another of the chairs. “Thanks,” she says, and tries on a smile and hopes it doesn’t look too fake.
“Would you like some tea while you wait?” Harmony offers. She makes it sound sincere. Maybe it is.
Aurora thinks about it. “I, uh. Better not. I didn’t have breakfast before I came over,” she admits. Harmony raises an eyebrow at her. “Yeah, not my smartest moment. I just— just rushed straight here.”
“We’ve plenty of leftovers.” Harmony opens the big fridge, positioned so she can still keep Aurora in her peripheral vision while she looks inside. “Some kind of quiche thing, or an egg and veggie wrap. Or we have Weetabix in the cupboard, I’m sure.”
Of course they have Weetabix. Aurora’s half convinced it’s some sort of long-running practical joke Bea is playing on all of them. Focus, Ro! “I’ll take the quiche, please,” she says. “And the tea, if that’s still okay.”
Harmony makes a mm-hmm noise and extracts some of the leftovers onto a plate, microwaves it, and then starts shuffling in one of the cupboards. Aurora assumes she’s looking for a non-incriminating mug. She’s half tempted to tell Harmony not to worry, she already knows about the mugs. But she doesn’t know Harmony that well yet. Eventually Harmony brings over the plate and a fork and a plain white mug of tea.
“Thanks,” Aurora says. Harmony nods and steps back to the cupboards to watch her from across the room. Aurora eats slowly and thinks about what she’s going to say. She’s nearly done with the quiche when the lock cycles open on the door from the dining hall. She puts the fork down on the plate and folds her hands around the warmth of the still-half-full mug, and the door opens, and Maria is there.
It hurts more than she expected it would, seeing Maria look at her without recognition. She can’t see where Maria’s hiding it, but Aurora is certain she’s armed with a taser; Harmony too. Still, Maria walks up and sits at the opposite side of the table, and part of Aurora’s heart is happy just to be near her again. She forces herself to focus. She needs to get this right.
Aurora waits a moment to see if Maria will start the conversation, but she doesn’t. So, “Hello, Maria,” Aurora says. “Thank you for coming to see me.”
Maria looks at her in the unamused way she’d seen so often in the early weeks of her captivity. “You told Indira you need my help. Mine specifically. And you said something about the cold.”
“I said I wanted to ‘come in from the cold’.” Aurora shakes her head. “Sorry, thought I was being clever. It’s my failure mode. Anyway. I’m going to explain, but it’s complicated. Not just complicated; impossible. I’ll try to make it all make sense. Just… It’s complicated.”
She takes a sip from her tea, as much to briefly collect herself as anything else. “My name is Aurora. ‘Ro’ for short. No surname yet, and I think you can guess why. I had a different name the first time I met you, down in the basement.” She watches Maria’s face for a reaction, but Maria’s expression is unreadable. She speeds on before she gets cut off: “And, yeah, I know you don’t remember that. I’m part of the 2019 intake, Maria. That’s why I’m here.”
Harmony scoffs. “Time travel?”
“I know, I know.” Aurora sighs. “I wouldn’t believe it either. I almost didn’t; I woke up in my old bed, with memories of things that haven’t happened yet. But it’s true. I could draw you a map of the basement, or maybe I could tell you some of the secrets that there’s no way I should know. But shouldn’t isn’t the same thing as can’t. And the things that made me believe it aren’t going to be the things that convince you, right?” She knows that look; Maria’s patience is wearing thin. She takes a deep breath. “So I’ll tell you this instead: In 2019 there’s some staffing issues and things start breaking, just a little bit. And so when we had our medical exams before the first hormone shot — you know, about a month in — the nurse was one of Grandmother’s people.”
Aurora notes the slight twitch in Maria’s hand and the way Harmony’s mouth, half open to offer some retort, snaps shut. “Exactly. I guess she’d made promises to play nice. But she didn’t. She came into our rooms and felt us up, for fun, and made you stand there and watch it, Maria. I thought at the time you were just trying to be professional. Later, after you told me some other things, I figured out you were just better at hiding your nerves.”
Maria leans forward, looks her right in the eye. “What was the nurse’s name?” she asks, slowly and deliberately.
It takes a moment for Aurora to remember. “K-something… Karen, I think. You told me once you knew her, from ’before’.” Aurora offers a wan smile. “If it helps, I’m pretty sure Aunt Bea had her killed over it. I never saw her after that; none of us did.”
“Fuck,” Harmony manages.
Aurora looks down at her lap. “Sorry,” she says. “I know it’s a lot, but I need you to believe me.”
“All right,” Maria says. Aurora looks up at her; she’s holding out a hand across the table. Aurora leans forward and grabs it with both of hers and holds on, and for a moment it’s just like it was before, downstairs in her room. “I haven’t thought about Karen Turner in a long time, but that scenario is, unfortunately, plausible.”
Harmony frowns. “You think Aunt Bea would let her back in?” She sounds as if she’s hoping Maria will agree that part has to be a mistake.
“Barb didn’t come to Christmas Eve this year,” Maria replies. “So, yes, if suddenly she stopped coming back, Auntie would do what she felt she had to. I believe her.” She strokes Aurora’s hand with her thumb. “I’m sorry you were subjected to that,” she says. “I’ll see what can be done to make sure it doesn’t happen this time around.”
“Thanks.”
“Who did we get in your time?”
Aurora frowns. “What do you mean?”
“For the next round of blood tests, she means,” Harmony says. She moves back across the room and leans one hip against the table. “We would have done them before the orchi, remember?”
“Oh.” Aurora pulls her hands back, wraps them around the now-much-cooler mug of tea. “That hasn’t happened yet, actually. I’ve only been in the programme three months.”
“Three months,” Maria repeats softly. “Three months, and you’ve come here for help?”
“Well, yeah.” Aurora takes a sip of the tea. It’s definitely too cold now. “I came to you, Maria. You’re my sponsor.”
Maria looks bewildered. “Three months,” she says again. “What the hell.”
They move out of the kitchen after that, so it can be used by the second-years. Aurora almost asks if she can stay and watch, before remembering that these second-years won’t be the second-years she knows from the future. Some of them gawk at her in passing. She wonders what they must think of her.
Once the three of them are out of the kitchen, they pause to let Aurora get her laptop and phone out of her bag. There’s nothing on them she cares about right now anyway; the only phone she cares about is the Dorley-issued one with selfies of her and Steph on it, and that phone is stuck two years into a future that she’s just annihilated. It will never happen the way it did before, and she mourns that just a little bit as she hands the devices over to Harmony, along with the necessary passcodes. Harmony, who seems baffled by how cooperative Aurora is, promises to bring her a replacement phone as soon as she can.
“She’s fun,” Aurora tells Maria as she’s led up a flight of stairs. “We never got to talk a lot before; her, uh, project was a troublesome lad. I think he may have set a record for getting zapped.” She sighs. “She deserved better.”
Maria shoots her a look. “Keep talking like that and we’ll have you on the books as an apprentice sponsor by the time he gets brought in.”
The unsettling thing is that behave or we’ll put more trust in you is actually a halfway effective threat. Aurora is by now profoundly aware of all the ways her first-year experience has been atypical, but that doesn’t make it any less weird when people act like she’s a prodigy just because she recognizes that the sponsors are trying to help. “I’ll be good,” she says quickly.
They’re met at the first floor landing by someone Aurora doesn’t know. Mystery-girl is tall, even by Dorley standards, with long straight copper-red hair going past her shoulders and a fringe in front. “Ro, this is Sophie,” Maria says.
“Hello then,” Aurora says, offering her hand. Sophie outstretches her own and takes Aurora’s hand in a practiced, almost formal grasp. Some part of Aurora’s psyche suspects she’ll be required to drill something similar, but she grins anyway.
“We’ll put you in one of the first-floor rooms for now, Aurora,” Sophie says. “We just need to air it out and get some things set up for you.”
Aurora looks back at Maria and realizes her sponsor is a lot more like she was back when they first met, with the hard edges that Aurora imagines were built up over a life spent here, first under Grandmother’s tender care and then rebuilding everything with Aunt Bea. They’ll have to work their way back up to the level of understanding they had before. “You’ll come check on me later?” Aurora asks.
Maria nods. “I have to rearrange a few things in my schedule, but I’ll come back.”
“All right,” Aurora says, and watches Maria disappear up the stairs. Then Sophie leads her onto the first floor hallway, past several doors. Only a handful of them have nameplates. Aurora had noticed that the second-year group seemed small, but she hadn’t really realised how small. The last door with a nameplate reads “Pippa” in neat, unadorned handwriting. She hadn’t recognised her in the kitchen; she must not have been allowed to cut her hair short yet. A shiver goes down her spine. Well, Ro, two years is a long time.
Sophie stops in front of the last door. “I thought we’d place you in this one,” she says. “It has an ensuite, so you’ll have a little more privacy.”
Aurora’s vision blurs. She’s tearing up, she realizes. “No!” she blurts out, putting her hand on the door where Stephanie’s nameplate should be. She wishes she could believe that if she opened the door, Steph would be there waiting for her. But she won’t be. Steph isn’t here yet, not until Aurora can go and get her back. “No,” she says again. “Any of the others is fine. But this isn’t my room.” She realizes she should probably explain that, but Steph had been there so much for her when she was explaining things, and that just makes it even harder for her to collect herself. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I promise I’m not trying to make trouble. It’s… It’s complicated.” She doesn’t really feel comfortable unburdening herself without Maria present, but she has to say something. “This room— I remember it being someone else’s.”
Sophie nods, like they’ve mutually agreed to move past it. “If that’s what you want.” They go back up the hall the way they came and Sophie stops in front of the next room, where she does something to her phone and makes Aurora put her thumb on the lock plate a few times. They must have done this for her to put her biometrics in the system back when she was first taken. The fourth time Aurora puts her thumb on the lock, the door clicks, and she opens it. Inside it’s the mirror image of Steph’s room, minus the bathroom. It smells a little dusty. Sophie steps in behind her, wedges the door open, and crosses to the window and opens that too. “Let’s get some ventilation in here,” she says cheerily.
They clean the room. They fetch sheets from a linen closet in the hall and make the bed. There’s not much more to do to put the room in order — Aurora wonders what the sponsors will do when someone remembers she only has the one outfit she’s wearing — and at the end it seems uncomfortably like a hotel room. But then Harmony turns up with the promised phone and a little plate with a banana muffin on it. “Baking lesson today,” she says. “They’re best while they’re still a bit warm.”
“Thanks,” Aurora says, and eats it. It’s pretty good. Sophie disappears for a little bit while Harmony helps her get her phone set up and the voice training packets downloaded onto it. Out of curiosity, she opens Consensus, but the app just shows an empty channel list.
“We’re running a little ragged today,” Harmony tells her, “what with the, well, washout last night. The boys are being restless.”
“Oh.” Not every washout is as universally hated as Declan, apparently. Is there a tasteful way to commiserate? Something like sorry your kidnapping didn’t work out, maybe? Maybe not.
Sophie turns back up with a folding chair and a laptop just as Harmony is leaving. “I’ll just sit out here, unless you need to talk to me for anything,” she says.
“I get it.” Aurora leaves the door half open and settles herself on the bed, back to the wall, and for lack of anything better to do, starts in on the voice training lessons.
After about twenty minutes of that, Sophie pushes the door open and hands her a bottle of water. “Don’t work too hard,” Sophie warns her. “Consistency is more important than pushing yourself to go as long as you can.”
Aurora smiles at her. “Thanks,” she says. She drinks some of the water and practices for another fifteen minutes before switching to the media library and watching an episode of a nature documentary. She remembers seeing this one before, but instead of David Attenborough’s familiar voice, there’s a woman narrating it. It takes Aurora half the episode before she figures out it’s Sigourney Weaver. Once that’s done, she switches back to the voice training for a little while, and keeps alternating between them until it’s half past noon and Sophie knocks on her door and tells her it’s lunchtime.
Back down on the ground floor, Aurora hears the indistinct chatter of several voices from the kitchen. As she enters, though, the chatter stops, and half a dozen faces peer curiously at her. Now that she knows what to look for, she spots Pippa on one end of the group clustered around the table. Her hair is brown instead of white-blonde, gathered in a high ponytail, and there’s a few other differences that she can’t quite pin down, but the biggest change is that this Pippa seems more uncertain of herself. Aurora can understand that; she’s uncertain of her own self much of the time. She offers the group of them (and Edy off to the side) a quick smile. “Hello, I’m Ro. Thanks for the muffin, whichever of you made it.”
Pippa tilts her head to indicate the girl next to her, a shorter girl with darker skin who seems as if she is about eighty percent floofy hair by volume. “Veronica made it,” she says softly.
“It was delicious,” Aurora tells her.
“Good thing it wasn’t mine,” another girl says. This one seems to be all cheekbones, with honey-blonde hair, hazel eyes, and dark cat-eye glasses. “Mine came out burnt on top and not done on the bottom.”
“That’s because you mix too much,” Edy tells her. “More isn’t always better.”
One of the girls gets up and fetches two plates from the counter where they were apparently set aside. Her deep black hair is longer in the front, down to shoulder level, and shorter at the back. She quirks her mouth in a mischievous sort of way as she sets them down on the table for Aurora and Sophie. Aurora looks over her shoulder at Sophie, shrugs, and sits down. She’d thought she’d be kept as a mystery for a bit longer.
Lunch turns out to be chicken in some thick dark sauce, roasted bits of potato, and of course a salad. Aurora takes a bite of the chicken and smiles at the tangy flavor of the sauce. Definitely better than veggie burgers.
“So, are you from the control group or something?” the black-haired girl asks, eyebrows raised.
“Gillian!” hisses the glasses girl, but Gillian just leans forward across the table toward Aurora. She would make an excellent plucky best friend in a coming-of-age film, Aurora thinks.
She smirks a little. “No, just an experiment that went in an unexpected direction.” She takes a big forkful of salad and crunches down. The other girls return to their own meals, but she still feels like she’s being watched.
“The truth is,” she says in a conspiratorial tone, “I’m actually from a parallel universe where the Hall takes bad girls and turns us into boys.” The glasses-wearing girl gasps audibly. “One of Uncle’s projects cracked open a door and I’ve come across as an advance scout.” She winks at Gillian.
Gillian’s eyes go wide. “Really?” she breathes.
Sophie gives Aurora a gentle bop on the head. “Not really,” she says. “She wandered in off the streets and we decided to let her stay.” Aurora stabs fiercely at a bit of potato and pops it in her mouth.
“But—” Gillian says.
“No buts,” Edy interrupts. “Interrogating this goblin is for people with a higher clearance than you lot.”
Aurora glares at Edy. “I’m a gremlin, not a goblin.”
“You’re an agent of chaos,” Edy retorts.
“Yeah, well, I was taught by the best,” Aurora says. It’s true; Maria really is the best.
The party is in one of the residential complexes on the outskirts of campus, one of the much-vaunted public-private partnerships the Tories keep throwing money into. The result is something that’s supposed to be more like a block of flats than a dorm, and is priced accordingly, but there’s an extensive common area and nobody cares enough to stop students from throwing parties in it, so there’s a party.
Aurora is heading away from the room with the music in search of a place where she can, first, hear herself think, and second, maybe find something to drink, when she comes around a corner and nearly runs into someone. She blinks, backs up half a step, and her eyes go wide. “Steph?”
Because it is Steph. It’s Steph who’s had a few years to finish her transition, with her long hair pulled back with a clip. Even in a t-shirt and jeans, she looks incredible. And she’s backing away.
“Wow, you look great,” Aurora tells her. “I mean you always do — and you know it too, so don’t argue — but you look fantastic. I didn’t know you were going to be at this party. You should have told me.”
Steph is looking past her now, with a bit of a panicked expression on her face. Aurora doesn’t understand. She looks down at herself; she’s in a basement-issue hoodie and sweatpants.
Another girl comes up behind Steph. “There you are, babe,” she says. “Who’s this?” Aurora looks at her, and it’s like looking into the future she was promised. This woman — and she looks unquestionably like a woman, looks completely comfortable in her v-neck top and her knee-length skirt — has an easy smile on her face and the sort of self-confidence that Aurora never achieved in her old life. “Wait, isn’t this the guy who got expelled for all those dick pics?”
“The Holt boy,” Steph agrees, sounding like just knowing the name nauseates her. “I thought you weren’t allowed on campus anymore.”
“I was…” Aurora tries.
“Leaving?” her otherself cuts in. “You need to do that right now, if you don’t want me to call the authorities.”
Aurora tries to think of something she can say, some way to explain who she is, but then the military contractors have come up behind her and grabbed her arms, and they march her out into the night. “You were warned to keep away from her,” one of them says, and the other one puts the muzzle of a gun against the back of her head, and then there’s a loud sharp sound like someone knocking on a door.
“What,” she mumbles, and throws an arm up over her face. The knocking on the door continues. “Minute!” she calls out and forces herself to get out of bed. She’d gone upstairs for a nap after lunch, but she doesn’t feel rested at all. The implication the dream had made, of a version of Aaron who had faced consequences but still hadn’t stopped walking over people’s boundaries, who’d apparently harassed Steph, makes her wonder who she thinks she’s fooling.
The knock comes again and Aurora realizes she’s been standing in the middle of the room. She shakes her head in a futile attempt to clear it, and goes to open the door. Maria is on the other side and her businesslike expression softens when she sees Aurora’s face. “Oh, Aurora, what’s wrong?”
“Bad dream,” she whispers. She knows Maria will understand, that a lot of the girls here have had to struggle with guilt. But Aurora deserves this. She hurt a lot of people in ways that last. She deserves to carry that weight. “I didn’t change, Maria. I just kept hurting people.”
Aurora knows this isn’t really her Maria. She knows that hoping for a hug is too much, so she dabs at her eyes and tries to stop the tears. She has to be strong. She has to have the right words and say them at the right time. It’s the only way she can save Steph, and if she can save Steph, maybe she can find a way to save herself. She has to be okay with that.
And then a miracle happens. And then there are arms around her, pulling her close. And then her face is pressed against Maria’s shoulder, and Maria is whispering in her ear, “It’s okay, Aurora. It’s okay.” And then she’s crying in truth, and it is okay, because her sponsor is holding her. She’s not going to be that person in the dream who was warned, and punished, and who kept hurting people anyway. She’s going to be the person Maria promises she can be.
When she feels a little bit better, she pulls away and looks up into Maria’s face. “Thanks,” she says.
“It’s okay to ask for help,” Maria says. She winks. “I’m your sponsor, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“So, as your sponsor, I do have to ask: are you ready to tell us more about your history?”
Aurora nods quickly.
Maria looks intently at her. “Are you sure? I can delay it; not for long, but for a little bit.”
“I’m sure,” Aurora says. She grabs her phone from the charging pad on the desk. “Ready when you are.”
Aurora follows at Maria’s heels, down the hallway, up some stairs. Better up than down, at least. “So, who’s ‘us’?” She tries to make the question sound casual; she doesn’t know if she succeeds.
They stop at the third floor landing. Maria takes one of her hands, gently. “For now, it’s me and Aunt Bea. You do know who she is, don’t you?”
Well, it had to happen eventually. At least it’s not happening in her own room, like it did for Steph. “Yeah, I know who she is. It’s— It’s fine.”
Maria doesn’t seem like she completely believes that, and that’s fair, because Aurora doesn’t completely believe it herself. But she puts thumb to the reader, opens the door, and ushers Aurora onto the third floor.
She’d heard from Steph about the relative luxury of Maria’s third-floor flat, so she’s not surprised to see how much space Maria has; aside from the kitchenette and the laundry facilities, she has a small dining table, a couple of overstuffed bookcases, and a fancy-looking armchair. As they enter, Beatrice rises neatly from that armchair. “Good afternoon… Aurora, is it?”
She’d thought it would be easier this time; she has all the things she knows that Beatrice doesn’t yet. But Beatrice is looking her up and down and Aurora has to swallow down her nerves. Put on a bit of a show; it’s for a good cause. “That’s me!” she says cheerily. “I’d say pleased to meet you, but I’ve actually met you before.”
“In the future from which you’ve come to us.” It’s not a question, but Beatrice sounds as if she would like it to be. Well, tough.
“I met you at the Christmas party, a week ago my time,” she explains. “You asked me if I liked ‘my accommodations’. I said they were fine.”
Beatrice tilts her head. “A special delegation up from the basement?” she asks.
“Well… in a way.” Aurora presses on. “Maria said you want my history, but my history isn’t the interesting bit. You have my phone already. I know what kind of a person I used to be and I’m sure you’ve seen nothing new there. My history’s just more of the same, predictable and fucked up, up until when you had me kidnapped, and even for a while after that.
“You want to know why I was allowed at the party. You want to know why I’m here now, talking with you, instead of having fucked off to the furthest reaches of Britain. That story starts a few years ago. You’ll probably want to take notes.”
Beatrice reaches into one pocket of her pantsuit and pulls out a slim voice recorder. She turns it to show it’s already recording, then places it on the dining table. “This will help, but you’ll find I’ve an excellent memory for details. So, then, Aurora, make yourself comfortable and let’s begin.”
So, for the second time today, Aurora finds herself sitting at a table, clutching a mug of tea. “Once upon a time, in the middle of her journey through the programme here, a girl named Melissa went to Tesco. I don’t know why; maybe it was some kind of test, or maybe her sponsor was trying to get her comfortable with the outside world again. But while she was there… just by chance, she ran into someone from her old life. If Melissa had been more confident, if she’d been further along in her transition… if Steph hadn’t been so observant, it might have ended there.”
She sketches it out, as much of it as she knows. The careful research into boys who’d disappeared, the corresponding girls that Steph recognised, the almost correct explanation Steph had come up with. Beatrice purses her lips but doesn’t interrupt.
“See, Steph is trans,” Aurora says. “So she figured Melissa was too; she knew Melissa well enough to make that guess once she’d figured herself out. And so she thought Dorley Hall was a secret program to help girls like her.”
That gets a more interesting reaction from Beatrice, however minor; Aurora grins at Beatrice’s raised eyebrow and continues. “Steph came to Saints with one purpose: to get your attention. It took years, but eventually she managed to get herself kidnapped. That’s how I met her.”
“That’s the explanation, then?” Maria seems amused. “We gave you a feminine role model to follow and you couldn’t resist?”
Aurora snorts. If there’s one thing that seems universal in the makeshift little family of Dorley Hall, it’s women who’re very happy that they were dragged, kicking and screaming, into womanhood. Even Steph, in her own way, fits that pattern. Will fit. Whatever.
“Nobody knew, Maria. Sure, it was a little suspicious how compliant she was, but… you didn’t know she was a girl either. None of the sponsors did, none of us in the basement did. I didn’t find out until after—” Aurora shuts her eyes and gives her head a quick little shake. Maria’s fine, and will continue to be fine. “After Maria was attacked.”
Predictably, Maria startles at this news. Equally predictably, Beatrice is obviously unamused. Her eyes narrow and she leans forward a little. She lifts one hand, palm open, as if to say get on with it.
“So! Our lovely intake had me, of course, and Steph was a latecomer. There was Adam, who had the misfortune to be born into some kind of cult; Martin, who drank, drove, killed someone, and didn’t seem like he was going to learn anything from it; and then Will, Ollie, Raph, and Declan, who were all generally the sort of violent that ruins other people’s lives long before it ruins their own. Of course, Declan also turned out to be the sort of guy who thinks boasting about rape is funny, so we were none of us terribly upset when he washed out.” She gives Beatrice a look. “You might want to do something with that knowledge sooner rather than later, by the way.” Aurora might not be overly conflicted about the programme anymore, but she’s glad that at least this decision won’t be her responsibility.
“About a month after the first ‘vitamin shot’, we all figured out something was happening that we couldn’t blame on the Goserelin. Declan was gone by then, so Ollie and Raph were following Will’s lead instead, and Will thought that maybe this time they could fight their way out. They didn’t know about the soldiers — and believe me I am still curious about that arrangement; do they seriously not care what goes on? —”
“Aurora,” Beatrice said. “The attack?”
“Sorry. They caught you off guard, ran you down, and your head hit the floor.” She tries to avoid thinking about it. Hard to do, when you’re explaining it to someone. “It happened so fast, and there was a lot of blood, but after, even though I knew you were in the hospital, all I could think was ‘what if it had worked?’”
“Oh, Aurora,” Maria starts, then falls silent.
“That’s entirely understandable,” Beatrice tells her. “Leaving aside the issue of whether we were right to take you — an issue about which I think you are no longer conflicted — you were, at the time, held prisoner against your will. It is normal to hope for an escape.”
She knows, sort of abstractly, that Beatrice is speaking from experience; that she spent a long time hoping for and then carrying out an escape from something a lot more hellish than having to eat Weetabix and listen to lectures about toxic masculinity. But that’s also kind of her own point; she doesn’t actually object anymore to what Dorley Hall did for her and to her. Aside, of course, from the Weetabix.
“Agree to disagree,” she says, and quickly moves on. “Anyway, I think I’m messing up the timeline a little bit. You lot figured out who Steph really was, maybe a week after the medical exams and the first estrogen shot? Not sure. I think you caught her knowing something she wasn’t supposed to know.”
“You ‘think’?” Beatrice presses.
Aurora scowls. “I didn’t exactly run an interrogation on my— my best friend,” she snaps. “We talked about some things, but the when and where was never the important bit.” She presses a palm against the table, breathes in, breathes out. “You told her she had to keep up the act, to be a ‘goat’ or something. And she tried but it was getting harder, especially after our tits started coming in. So once things calmed back down a little and we knew Maria was going to get better, you sat us all down and told us the good news. ‘Yes, boys, you all still have the chance to one day leave here, but not as boys, if you get my drift.’”
Maria laughs. “Worded just like that?”
The laugh is good. Aurora finds conversations harder to manage when things get too serious. She waves her hand in a so-so gesture. “There were a few more details. A slideshow and some NHS brochures, but that’s the heart of it, right? Of course Steph had to hide that she loved the idea, come up with some new reason why she still wanted to cooperate. But at least she didn’t have to play ignorant anymore.”
She pauses. Beatrice seems inclined to wait her out, eyes attentive, hands folded. So she takes a sip of tea. “I couldn’t see it. The future you wanted to give me, the reinvention. I could see who I’d be if I escaped somehow, and I didn’t want that. But I didn’t know how to want anything else either. And Steph couldn’t help me with that. She tried and that was nice, but…” She shrugs her shoulders.
“So we return at last to our original topic,” Beatrice says. Her voice carries a little humor, though Aurora suspects it’s just masking impatience. “You must somehow have learned to want what we offer or you wouldn’t be here. What happened to make such a change in you, so quickly?”
“Maria happened,” Aurora says simply. She reaches a hand across the table, and again, Maria is there for her. “She came back down and she did the craziest thing, Aunt Bea. She started trusting me. She’d just got back from the hospital and she sat with me and turned off the cameras and held me, and you know what I’d done to deserve that? Not a single fucking thing.”
“It’s not about what you deserve, Aurora.” Maria squeezes her hand. “You don’t have to deserve kindness. If you need it and I can give it, that’s what matters.”
“But—”
“No,” Maria interrupts. “I’m your sponsor. That means I’ll be there for you when you need me.”
“I asked you to help me die,” Aurora whispers. “I told you I couldn’t make it. And you said no. You told me how you knew I’d find a way.”
“That’s when I told you about my past?”
Aurora nods. “There was a lot of arguing. Some yelling. Some crying. A lot of crying, really. Steph helped too, but it was mostly you. And at the end, I decided yeah. Yeah, it’s fine, everything you promised you were going to do to me. It’s all right.” She brushes away a tear with her free hand, but more keep coming.
“Acceptance,” Beatrice says. “A necessary stage, and one I’m pleased you reached so early.” She picks up the voice recorder and clicks it off and tucks it back in her pocket. “However, I have one more question, if you will indulge me, Aurora.”
Aurora nods again, quick and perfunctory. She is exhausted, she’s beginning to realize.
“In order for you to have come back here, there must have been something beyond mere acceptance. Something you hoped for, something you dreamed of having. What is that reason? Why have you come back when you know what we will expect of you?”
Beatrice’s gaze is magnetic. Aurora doesn’t feel like she can look away, doesn’t feel like she can do anything but answer. “It’s Maria’s fault again. She said she would love me like a sister. She let me come upstairs for the Christmas party, so I could see how things work here when you’re not stuck in a basement. She helped me see all the ways people were hoping for me to change. That’s what I want, and if I have to be a girl to get that, then…” She manages one more smile. “Then that’s what I’ll be.”
“Very well.” Beatrice returns the smile. “Welcome to Dorley Hall.”
Stefan perches on a stool in someone’s living room, trying carefully to get just a little bit drunk. Just enough to put his anxieties to rest for one more night. He’s one term into his university degree with not much to show for it, but he can’t let himself think about that right now. Besides, the spring term doesn’t even start for another week.
That’s when he spots the girl. She’s weaving slowly through the crowd, never really stopping to talk to anyone. Then she turns in his direction. She runs one hand through her chin-length brown hair, tucking it behind one ear, then apparently thinking better of it and brushing it back where it was before. She starts coming closer, and Stefan leans back in his stool so he won’t be in her way, but she stops right in front of him. “There you are,” she says brightly. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” Her voice sounds a little rough, and also a little amused, like this is some kind of private joke. He’s certain he’s never seen her before in his life.
The girl is a bit shorter than him. She’s wearing a dark v-neck shirt with a leather jacket over it. She kicks one foot up and rests it on the stool’s footrest. “Why me?” he asks. She’s standing really close to him.
“Because,” she says, deliberately, but still with that amusement in her tone, “you’ve been looking for us, haven’t you, Stef?” She winks.
“And you are?”
“My name’s Aurora and I know an old friend of yours. I’m with Dorley Hall.” She sticks out one hand. He takes it, and she kicks off of the footrest and pulls him to his feet. “You’ve been trying to get our attention for some time now, Stef. Don’t you think we ought to go outside and talk about it?”