C H A P T E R T W OA Blinding Hammer Upon the Senses2019 November 13, WednesdayHe wakes in a cold sweat, having envisioned nothing but nightmares about boys and the endless summer. He can’t stop having those nightmares since Stef was taken away from him. That is, when he can get to sleep, of course. Aaron can desperately hope all he likes, but Stef has been taken, and there’s nothing he can do to stop his fate. Why does he ever have any hope, down here? He wonders what Maria has to inform him about, but until he hears any different, he doesn’t think he could treat it any differently than that they killed him. It’s truly isoting, being down here, your only friend seemingly removed from the basement, from the world (but is there a difference anymore?) for no discernable reason.

  Knocking at the door startles him out of his stupor. “Up up up! Breakfast in 15, I need to see you all there!” He gets on his clothes, and steps out to the hall, and moves to the common room.

  Weetabix again. Always Weetabix. Never anything different. No one acts right at breakfast, everyone is teetering on a knife’s edge. No one dares speak, lest the horrors in their mind be put into reality.

  Once they leave the dining room, sponsors begin to flood into the room. Is something about to happen? What could happen that hasn’t already?

  Monica steps up to the front, turns on the TV, and loads up something, though Aaron can’t quite tell what it is, until a distinct ripple effect occurs on the screen, showing the words What is Feminism? on the screen. Everyone just stares bnkly. This is what they have to show? After days of silence on the one thing any of them can think about?

  Monica, sensing the tension in the room, and trying to break it before it gets worse, says, in a commanding school teacher voice: “Alright everyone, pay attention! First, we need to get some concerns out of the way regarding Stefan and Decn. Yes, they are both washed out. Each has washed out for different reasons, and are not getting the same treatment. No, they are not dead, or turned into burger meat, or sold into sexual svery, yes William, we heard your little theories on what happens to washouts, and this is the only time we will acknowledge them. All this means for you is that they are both no longer around, and Decn has gone to a considerably less pleasant pce than the basement of Dorley Hall. If you do not want to share his fate, if you want to live in comfort, I suggest you refrain from assaulting us or your peers.”

  “What about Stef? Where’s he going?” Aaron says, noticing the careful nguage in her speech.

  “Stefan is going somewhere else, we found some information that led us to understand that he would be best suited at a sister facility to this one. He is not getting the same treatment that Decn is getting, or that any of you would get were you to wash out. My advice does not change.”

  Aaron quickly begins before she can move on. “How do we know you’re telling the truth? How do we know you’re not just lying to us to try and make us believe in your competency? Decn I can understand washing out, but Stef? All he’s ever done was punch Decn, and that didn’t even earn him a tasing. But it earned him washing out? What if you’re just pying cover for your decision now that you realize it was a very unpopur one down here?”

  Maria is quick to respond. “None of that was a lie. New information that was previously hidden to us came to light on Saturday, and we took action to transfer Stefan to a pce that can better serve his needs than here. The easiest way for us to do that is to wash them out, though needless to say, we have since checked over all of your files, and none of you meet that criteria, so if you wash out, it will be to where Decn went, a pce which I can assure you, you do not want to go to.”

  Not nearly enough information for him. He will not accept anything less than the full and complete truth, whatever it is. Until then, nothing changes. Maybe they’re telling the truth, but they could have had this story prepared and ready to go. Who knows? They probably coordinate up there. It doesn’t change much, except if he accepts the lie, it gives him false hope they can dash ter. In reality, nothing is stopping any of them from washing out. Just the whims of a random sponsor. It terrifies him to no end.

  The feminism lesson begins and continues, but he’s barely registering it. It’s as if it doesn’t exist. What’s the point in any of this if they’re just all going to be washed out anyway? Why learn about feminism if you’ll never leave to use your new knowledge?

  Eventually, it all washes over him, and he goes over to Will, who’s with Adam. They’re both just as worried as he is. Why trust the sponsors? It always feels like they have something to hide.

  They whisper, because the sponsors and cameras are probably listening. “What can we do?” Will said. “Stef was right about one thing, they have all the power here. What can we even do to reverse that?”

  “Attack at the weakest point? These girls may be skilled, but can they take all of us at once? A full-frontal assault? Would that even work though…” Aaron tapers off. Wasn’t there something about PMC people here, ready to deploy the second they try anything? What even is there to do, though? It all feels hopeless, like he’s about to hit a brick wall and decides to hit it anyway because there’s no other option for him than to break along the stones.

  “We have to try,” Adam says. “Even if we fail, we will know that we showed them how unfair this all is. I didn’t know Stef all that much, but it didn’t seem like he deserved any of this.”

  “Protest through violent outburst? Yeah, it honestly might be our only shot. And that depresses me, but what else can we even do?” Will says.

  And so they decide to attack sometime. They don’t even have a firm pn yet, but that isn’t important right now. Nothing else is more important than the idea. Aaron knows this all too well now. The idea that Stef could be out there getting tortured right now scares him, but it also brings him to want radical change, radical action against the sponsors that did this to him. He can’t let them win.

  He goes back to his room. He needs some time alone to think all of this over more. It’s what makes this so much worse, the fact that nothing is likely to work. Push the boulder up the hill and it just comes back down again. One must imagine Sisyphus happy? No, that’s stupid. He’d be pissed.

  He paces around the room, energy coursing through his veins, but nothing to use it on, until he jumps when he hears a knock on the door. He goes to the bed, breathes in, breathes out. “Come in.”

  The door opens, and in walks Maria. She closes the door, and sits down on the bed next to him. “Hey, Aaron.” She’s calm, but measured. “I know you’ve been wondering what’s happened to Stef, properly. I told you that I would let you know the full picture when I have it. Now I do. Are you ready to hear it?”

  Aaron is intrigued, even if the story probably is a load of bullshit, it is something, and that’s better than nothing. He nods.

  “Now, before I start, I need you to promise me that you will not speak a word of this to any of the other boys. This information is highly confidential, and I am giving it to you because it seems like you need it more than the info needs protecting. Say you understand and agree.”

  “I-I understand and agree.”

  “Okay.” Taking a breath, Maria continues. “This is going to sound hard to believe at first, but you can talk to Pippa, and she will confirm it. When we took Stef, we believed Stef to be just like the rest of you, one of the boys. However, it came to our attention on Saturday, while looking through some footage, that Stef is actually a trans woman. With me so far?”

  What? That doesn’t make any… Wait, honestly, it might. She(?) always seemed distant from the rest of them. Was that why she preferred Stef? It sounds more neutral. It suddenly makes a strange amount of sense to Aaron. Was that why she was so weird around the showers too? Aaron doesn’t know much about dysphoria other than some basics he heard from trans women he followed. Those burns happened before the nurse assaulted them, was that dysphoria? Aaron is suddenly thrown for a loop. Was that what was going on the whole time?

  “I think so?”

  “Perfect. So, we found this out on Saturday. Needless to say, this facility meant for wayward boys is not the pce for a closeted trans girl. We just aren’t equipped to deal with that as an institution. That’s why we have connections to simir facilities that operate off of different criteria. There’s a pce that takes in wayward trans girls, gives them the help they need, surgeries, transition care, the works, and lets them go back into the world free and clear. We contacted them immediately, and as of today, Stef is on the way to this facility. She will be cared for, she will be happier, and she will be ready to take on the world. Washing out is being used as a cover because we are worried about the transphobic reactions from some of your fellow boys. I’m sure you can understand that we are in uncharted waters, and simply doing our best.”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “Once she gets settled in, I think she might like to participate in some controlled video calls. You were her friend down here too, you know? I think she would like to speak with you again. She told us that she would miss you the most, and we want to make sure that you can still see her, even if, for her safety, she can’t be back here until all of you are reformed. I want to assure you that she is out there, and she is being taken care of. Any way I can do that will also be an equal assurance to her that you are being taken care of as well.”

  Huh. They’re promising video calls? Aaron has a feeling that while those could be faked, it would be very difficult to do so. Maybe they are telling the truth? Only way to know is to wait for one of those calls. It might be a little while, but if he can see Stef, that would be enough for him.

  A notification rings from Maria’s phone, she quickly moves it out of his eyeline, but her shocked face is enough to tell him this is probably something big.

  She doesn’t even have the time to tell him bye, as she springs up from the bed, and runs like a cheetah to the door, and leaves him be, in the room where he’ll be stuck for however long it takes to “reform” here.

  ***The first thing he notices is the brightest light he’s ever seen. A blinding hammer upon the senses, it’s almost as if he can hear the light, smell the photons, taste them as they strike his tongue, and feel them sshing against his skin. He is practically forced to wake up, but when he tries to get out of the bed, he is stopped. He is cuffed to the bed, both arms and both legs. He looks around to see a hospital room, mostly simir to those he’s been into in the past.

  Everything seems normal, except two people are staring at him. One, a man in his thirties, a soldier, perhaps? His build suggests that kind of background. The other, an older woman, maybe in her seventies, who looks at him with a smile that Stefan could only describe as hunger. Why are they here? Are they the staff of this pce? It certainly seems to be that way, but then why the cuffs? They know why he’s here, right? Beatrice informed them why she was sending him here, right?

  “Who are you?”

  Silence.

  They just stare.

  They seem almost like statues.

  Finally, they begin to move, but they go toward the exit of the room. Before they leave, the old woman makes direct eye contact, seeming to stare into his soul, “Welcome to your new life.”

  The door shuts, and Stefan is left alone with his thoughts. The silence, which seemed impossible those few minutes ago, is now all around. Beeps from machines are the only thing that seem to evoke a sound here. That is, until the TV turns on, and a random movie begins to py. It’s seemingly in the middle of some 60’s musical. Stefan lies back down, and seems to find sleep retively soon, because when he opens his eyes, it's a different movie, Bolt, by the looks of it. He lets time wash over him. If they’re going to be providing his care, he’d appreciate it if they started soon.

  ***2019 November 15, FridayEveryone heard the scream. Either they were close enough or they heard about it through Consensus, but everyone heard its echoes. It has been talk of the Hall the past few days, but no answers have been given. No one has any clue why it happened. But everyone wants to know. They’ve never heard Bea scream like that before. It seemed impossible.

  Christine has been looking for answers. She wants to have them, given how everyone’s been moving around like headless chickens. No one knows what exactly to do. The basement has been a madhouse ever since it was announced that Stef was washed out. Seemingly only Aaron has been told a version of the truth, with everyone else getting a story that most refuse to believe. The sponsors are filing, because nothing like this has happened before. They don’t have notes from previous years to guide them here, because no year has had a washout that every boy universally considers to be unfair. The 2019 intake continues to be full of firsts.

  Over the past few days, Paige, Pippa, and Abby have been bugging her about this. They’re familiar with how she has control over the security systems here, and they know that she’s likely the only one who can actually get some real answers. Pippa in particur has been asking her almost every hour, because she’s been worried about Stef.

  So here she is, lying in her bed, ptop at the ready, with all of them in her room. She’s promised that she’ll get some answers, and she is going to fight for them to the ends of the earth. They all stare at her ptop, enraptured by what she can use it for. What may be normal to her is wizardry to others.

  She accesses the camera feeds for Aunt Bea’s office. While her room doesn’t have cameras, at least her office does. She scrubs through the 13th, until she comes in. She seems to be there for most of the day, so she just fast forwards through some of it. Maria comes in, they seem to have a nice conversation, before she leaves to deal with Aaron. Bea seems confused for a few minutes for no notable reason, but then she calls someone, seemingly with no answer on the other end.

  Christine fast-forwards through most of it, checking some of these phone interactions, but it quickly becomes clear that Bea is calling every 15 minutes. Is she checking something? Moving through the footage, she seems to get more and more stressed, her affect disappearing more and more with each call. What happened?

  Eventually, she gets a call through, though it seems like it’s to someone different. She asks for a helicopter to check a road near Sudbury for a van, and then hangs up.

  Wait, is Bea checking for the location of the transport van that Stef and Decn were on? If that’s the case, then…

  She continues through the footage, and eventually she gets a call back, though she doesn’t speak a word. Despite that, you would still be able to read Bea’s mind through her expression. Then, she hears the scream.

  She continues through the footage, though she knows in the back of her mind what happened, she needs to see if she can get anything more concrete. Maria bursts open the door in the footage, and Bea says the words that put confirmation to Christine’s worst fears that until now she wouldn’t let into the front of her mind.

  “The van is gone, Stef is missing.”

  She can’t do anything except stare. Stef, the girl she tried to stop from being down here, was now lost to the wind. It’s her fault. If she wasn’t so quick to throw that kid in the basement, none of this would have happened. If she had fought harder to get him out, if she had argued correctly to convince him to stay, if she was better at hiding Stef’s little secret, then he wouldn’t be missing right now.

  The world spirals. It fractures, it breaks, it shatters. Why did it have to be him? Why is the world cruel? Christine cannot know. There is nothing to gain from new knowledge of the depths of human misery.

  Paige’s voice eventually rings through the shattered space. It commands her to come back. Though she feels like she can’t, like the darkness is better company, she knows she needs to surface eventually, and so she sees Paige.

  “Woah, you were out of it! What is it? What did you find?” Paige, worry in her eyes, implores. Christine simply cries. Lets loose the dam that had been breaking since she heard those fateful words.

  They all come over to her, and surround her in their sisterly embrace. “What happened, Christine?” Abby whispers, barely audible.

  Christine, through her tears, fights to speak. “The van that Stef was transported in went missing. She called a bunch of times, and then did some check of a road, and nothing was there.”

  Everyone freezes. They’re probably going through the same reaction that she had. “What d-do we do?” Pippa says. She stutters, eyes betraying a sheer terror.

  “I-I don’t know yet,” Christine utters. “We need to tell people though, right?”

  “Oh god, what will Melissa say?” Abby says, mortified.

  “We shouldn’t tell her yet, imagine telling her your surrogate brother was kept here, but also is your surrogate sister, but she washed out, but not like that, and then tell her that she got kidnapped! We don’t have any information on the culprits yet, how on earth are we going to break it to her without something more concrete?” Christine says.

  “Could you try and track them?” Paige says.

  “What? I don’t know, I’d need the official information. I can certainly try though.”

  “Well, I think I know what needs to be done. We need to take this to Aunt Bea now. I am not letting her hide this from the rest of us, but we need concrete information, and she probably has it.” Abby says.

  Christine gets off of the bed, and the four of them make their way to Aunt Bea’s office. They go through the hallways to make it down to the first floor, and then move past second years who are seemingly more scared of their own shadows than normal. It really has affected everyone. Bea has been in her ft/office for the past two days, not making a single appearance, and everyone can feel the ck of her presence.

  They make it to the door, and she knocks. She knocks again. She continues to knock for 15 minutes when the door finally opens. Aunt Bea looks frazzled and broken. Everything that Christine knows to be fact about her affect and appearance is thrown to the wayside. Mascara drips down her face from fresh tears. Aunt Bea beckons them all in, and closes the door.

  “I assume you want the truth?” Aunt Bea says, dejectedly.

  “I think we already know, but I want to hear it in your words, please,” Christine says, levelly.

  Bea looks on, then slowly moves over to a couch in the office. It seems she doesn’t feel she deserves the desk right now. Christine agrees with that wholeheartedly. They all sit in chairs nearby, Paige sitting in Christine’s p. She cuddles against Paige, desperate for any comfort she can get from the storm barrelling down on their lives.

  “I tasked myself with keeping track of the transport, I wanted to personally make sure that Stef was safe in her journey. I never wanted to put her in any danger, or allow her to be thrown into the hands of some unknown. I had the location tracker up the whole time, and I got a call on the hour. I then talked with Maria, and after a while, she left. I called them back after they missed their next call. I didn’t get an answer for three hours. The location tracker was still going, but extremely slowly. I had gathered they hit traffic in an area with no phone reception, but in reality, they were likely never even there. I had someone check the area, but there was no van. They spoofed the location to throw us off. To throw me off.” Bea is bawling, her head in her hands. “I don’t know where they actually are, but whoever did it was skilled enough to get into the backend of a powerful PMC, so they most likely hid their tracks pretty well. Dear god, I sent her away! I let them take her! I wasn’t quick enough to notice we were pyed. It’s all on me, girls. I don’t deserve forgiveness, I deserve the fires of hell.” At this point, Bea is lying down on the couch, nearly in a fetal position.

  None of them rush over to comfort her. They’re simply shocked. No one has seen Aunt Bea like this in probably over a decade. Reacting to stimuli seems impossible. And then Abby comes over and begins to comfort her. “You may not deserve forgiveness, but you do deserve some compassion. You didn’t want her to be kidnapped, that much is obvious.”

  “Have I ever told you all about Val?” Bea says, weakly. Christine isn’t sure, the name might be familiar, but only in passing. Abby looks on with a slight recognition, but Pippa and Paige look on, curious, but unaware. “Once, in the bad old days, I had a friend, who helped me through the horror show. Her name was Valerie. She helped me to be a woman, to realize who I could be after the mutition of my body. She even gave me my name. One horrible night, she was taken from me by whoever bought her, and we only got a minute or two to say goodbye. I never saw her again. I search for her every year around December, in the vain hope that she’s still alive. I’m all too familiar with losing someone you care about dearly.”

  “And that’s why you haven’t left your room for days?” Abby says to her.

  “Of course! I can’t face myself right now, let alone anyone else. I’ve done the very thing I swore would never happen again. I told myself I would never lose another girl, and here I am, having lost Stef! I deserve whatever’s coming to me,” Bea sits up, looking at us.

  Christine decides to pipe up. “We’re going to tell them all, and what happens, happens. But we understand. I don’t know if any of us will ever forgive you, but I think we can at least work together to try and save Stef. If…” Screw it, just use it, not like she’s around to contradict you. “...If she can be saved, we are going to save her, come hell or high water.”

  “Fine, tell the Hall. Let the dust fall where it may. At this point, I understand.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell them. And please, Aunt Bea, don’t beat yourself up too hard from now on. Spend that effort trying to find her,” Christine adds.

  She sends out a long Consensus message that lets the sisters, aside from the second years for now, know what’s been happening. The dust begins to fall.

  Christine doesn’t want to focus on that now. “Hey, Aunt Bea, could you give me access to your computer? I want to see if whatever program that gave you the van’s location logged something about where that information came from. It might give me a clue where to start looking.”

  Aunt Bea helps her log in. She probably could have gotten the information without her approval, but Bea has been more receptive to her help. She’ll probably be hired in an official capacity soon, once the shitshow ceases. She goes into the logs of the ptop, and of the network, and of the program she was using. The information is nearly useless, but there’s just enough to where she might be able to figure out a way to reverse-engineer where it came from. If she can do that, that could give them a big hint on where to focus the search. And focus she shall. If there’s one thing that these fuckers didn’t realize when messing with her sisters, it’s this: Christine Hale does not forget, and she does not rest. She will not abandon Stef. If that means war, then she will wage a holy war upon them to rescue her.