I dress. I make my bed. I pick soil from under my nails with a sterile pick and think about how very kind it is to grant me a greenhouse and then staff it with men who think I’m a story they’ve already read. Doctor Callaway says structure is healing. She believes in the architecture of change: the right corridorslead to the right outcomes. I believe in the ductwork. The unseen vents and power lines that make a room breathe or choke. The road less travelled is the one I’ll always opt for.
She comes on schedule, clipboard balanced just so, hair in a knot that says serious woman, serious work. We exchange our daily liturgy.
“How are we feeling today, Kayla?”
“Grateful.”
“Sleeping?”
“Deliciously.”
“Any urges to harm yourself or others?”
“Always. Isn’t that part of being alive?”
Her pen pauses on the paper, then continues. She has learned to translate me into boxes. She sits a little closer now. Leaves the door open. Touches the rim of her cup with the tip of one finger when she is thinking. Shows her throat without realising when she is tired. I watch, and I file, and when she asks me if I have thoughts about remorse, I give her the same one I’ve given for days.
“Every day,” I say. “I regret not finishing the job.”
She looks up fast, as she always does, and I give her the little laugh we have silently agreed means I’m joking. It wanders around the room for a moment like an obedient pet and then goes to its mat.
I’m not joking. I had a list and I was so damn close to finishing it. My biggest regret is getting caught three kills too soon.
We do our hour in the greenhouse. The roses are doing better since I corrected their soil pH – thanks to the soup – and stopped the bored one from overwatering them like a tactless beast. I tend them in long strokes that look like care and listen to the building’s belly: the generator’s thrum through the concrete, the change of shift on the west stair, the second guardwho counts under his breath as he walks. Eight guards: two competent, four lazy, two who long ago mistook aggression for competence. They carry their telltales on their belt loops – extra zip ties for the jumpy one, a flashlight with failing batteries for the one who never charges it before his round. The night orderly now works around the clock. No nights off for him since his colleague croaked it. Poor guy.
Poor Ray, too. He learned very quickly that nothing in here is immune. Least of all a small-dicked man on a power trip.
“Lovely,” Doctor Callaway says. “You’ve a natural hand.”
I raise a brow at the thorns. “I always have.”
Afternoons are paperwork. She lets me help now – small, manageable tasks, little on-ramps to responsibility. I correct typos and reorder forms and, occasionally, place her badge exactly two inches to the left of where she dropped it. She pockets it without noticing the difference. She tells me about her Director in the careful voice of a person navigating a narrow ledge in a high wind. There are calls she takes with the door closed, and when she emerges, she is always two degrees more fragile and two degrees more determined.Keep the subject alive at all costshums beneath every word she utters. She believes this is medical. The Director believes this is asset management.
I am the asset. Or rather, the spawn growing inside of me is, according to the file stamped SUBJECT VIABILITY – PRIORITY.
I believe the world rewards honest thieves.
I think back to the day the slower guard brushed my arm in the greenhouse; I let the shears kiss the blue vein at his wrist and watched him jump like the metal had teeth. Doctor Callaway’s voice pulled taut as a wire: “Kayla, put those down.” I did, open-handed, patient, a goddess of compliance. She dismissed him to the infirmary and did not log the incident. That was the day I was sure: she understands what would happen if her Directorsuspects she can’t keep the exhibit upright on its pedestal. The orders flow down through her like a current; she keeps me alive and calls it ethics because it lets her sleep.
We have tea in the office, porcelain cups with hairline cracks that make the light look like it’s thinking. She asks me to talk about before. I give her the shapes without the edges, and when she says, “You’ve made so much progress,” I let my face soften like I care about that word. She believes language is a harness. I show her with my eyes that it is an invitation.
Tonight the air tastes like rain and metal. There’s a faint pulling deep inside me when I move too fast – annoying, nothing more, but enough to remind me that if anyone gets to decide what happens to this thing, it’s me. The building is quieter than usual, as if something heavy has been lifted from it; it takes a second to realise the generator changed its rhythm and the night shift hasn’t noticed the monitor loop hitching every seventeen minutes. Control is in the joints. Loosen the wrong bolt and the whole gate swings.
Dusk finds me in the kitchen, stirring soup in a pan with a wooden spoon. The staff break room beyond the swinging door is full of noise – plastic laughter, chips cracking, a radio murmuring chart hits through static. Austin comes in to steal a spoonful, flinches when he realises I’m at the stove, then pretends he didn’t.
“Evening,” he says to the tiles. “You’re getting good at this.”
I smile and taste the soup and say, “Practice.”
When he leaves, I add a measured half-inch of syrup into the pot from a brown bottle labelled with nothing useful, stir, and ladle the result into six bowls. Tea is easier: the thermos is communal, the mugs are careless, the sugar is free. I stand for a moment with the spoon suspended over the steam and think about how often love and murder share a kitchen.
The first pair of guards wander through before their round, grabbing bowls with absent gratitude.
“Bless you,” one says, and I almost laugh. That’s a new one. I don’t think I’ve ever been blessed before. Normally I’m cursed and with good reason. They carry their dinner to the cameras like offerings to a bored god. The night orderly comes in with the clipboard hugged to his chest.
“Miss Kingfisher,” he says, splitting my name into syllables like it’s something you could choke on. “Smells nice.”
“It does,” I agree. His coffee already has its lullaby in it.
