A Bed Built Wrong for Three Alphas

Chapter 1 Intake, 0800

Places poorly. Fourteen keystrokes, if you typed it out; nobody typed it out.

Robyn had put the phrase on about forty-odd people whose bodies she had never seen, which was not the same thing at all as knowing what it sounded like read out about her own — and she had put her own name down anyway, for a week in a room with three men she had never met, in a field the form had a box for and no menu option to explain.

The Placement office was the coldest room in the admin block and she had known that before she opened the door, the way she knew the building’s temperatures: exactly, and without having to think about it.

Three years of carrying files through it.

The radiator under the window ticked and gave off nothing; the blinds were down against the snow-glare and the light that came round their edges was blue-white and hard, and it made the room feel like the inside of a fridge somebody had put a desk in.

She sat on the upright chair with her folder on her knees and her boots planted on the linoleum and waited to be told about her own body in the institution’s words, which she had typed herself, about other people, for three years.

The blue-white light did her no favours and she knew it: it drained what colour she had out of her hands and turned the freckles across the backs of them to grey dots.

She had pushed her hair behind her ears twice already — dark red-brown, cut to the jaw by her own hand at the kitchen mirror, the length chosen precisely so it would stay put, which it did not.

The room smelled of radiator dust and old paper and, faintly, of the last person’s nerves — somebody had sat in this chair not long ago and been afraid, and the fear had gone stale in the cold air the way it never did in a warm room.

Underneath that there was nothing. Whoever was on the other side of the door was a beta or was very well suppressed, and Robyn noted it the way she noted the radiator, without having to decide to.

At two minutes past eight the inner door opened and Marguerite Okonjo came in with a tablet held flat against her chest like a clipboard, the way clinic staff carried files they did not want read over their shoulder, and said, “Ms Bracken? Sorry. The heating in here is a standing ticket.” She was tall and broad through the shoulders, half a head taller than anybody the office furniture had been bought for, her hair in short flat twists going coppery at the ends, and she had a warm carrying voice built for corridors that she had already dropped to something level and smaller.

Beta, then. The nothing-under-the-paper was her.

“It’s fine,” Robyn said, and stood — five foot three of her, small and square-built, forearms she had got from three years of hauling file boxes and not from anything more interesting — and was looked down at, which at that height she was used to, and shook the offered hand, which was big and dry and capable and did not linger.

Okonjo sat behind the desk and set the tablet down and turned it toward herself and for a moment there was only the sound of the radiator and the shuttle going up the hill outside, muffled by the blinds.

“Trial Week intake,” Okonjo said, to the form rather than to her.

“Unit four. Monday the ninth of March, oh-eight-hundred.” She looked up.

“You’re self-nominated. I want to check that’s right, because it usually isn’t. ”

“It’s right.”

“Most candidates are put forward.” Okonjo’s finger rested on the screen without tapping anything. “By a panel member, or a sponsor, or a household with a vacancy. You put your own name down.”

“There was a space on the form for it,” Robyn said. “I typed that form.”

Something moved in Okonjo’s face that was not quite a smile and she looked back at the tablet. “Then you know what this is going to sound like.”

She read the record back. Robyn had known she would, because it was the first field set on the intake sheet, the block the form wanted confirmed before anything else could be signed, but knowing did not make it shorter.

Bracken, Robyn Elspeth. Twenty-nine. Omega, confirmed designation, registered at the Cairn Ridge clinic these three years.

Three completed assessment cycles. Placement outcome, cycle one: deferred.

Cycle two: deferred. Cycle three — and Okonjo’s voice did not change at all, which was its own small courtesy and stung worse for it — places poorly.

Confirmed at twenty-six, which was late enough that the clinic had made her sit through the counselling script twice, and hired into the records post the same spring, which was not the coincidence it looked like on the sheet: Cairn Ridge had wanted somebody who could already read the schema, and she had just spent four months reading it about herself.

That was the only fact in the block that was hers rather than the form’s, and the form had no field for it, so it was not in the block.

Places poorly. It came off a drop-down menu, third option under placement outcome, and the free-text box beside it took two hundred and forty characters and was usually left blank, because the menu had already said the thing.

Robyn had entered it about a beta schoolteacher from Grand Junction whose file she still remembered for no reason she could name, and about a sweet-faced omega boy two years younger than her who had cried in the corridor afterwards, and about the rest of the forty-odd, whose bodies the menu had summed up in the time it took to drink a cup of tea.

She had not been angry about it then. She was not precisely angry now.

She was accurate, which was the thing she had instead, and the accuracy said: the phrase is not a finding, it is a field.

“Next of kin,” Okonjo said, and read that, and Robyn confirmed it. “Employer of record.”

“Cairn Ridge clinic. Records.”

“Yes.” Okonjo glanced up. “That must be interesting, this week.”

“It’s a job,” Robyn said. “Somebody types the forms.”

Then the terms, which Okonjo recited with the care of a woman who had learned that the recitation was the part that got quoted back at her later, and Robyn listened to all of it anyway, because she had typed the terms too and wanted to hear what they sounded like aloud.

Five assessment days, Monday to Friday. An assessor present in the unit daily, entries dated to the hour.

A report compiled through the week and filed with the Placement panel on Friday the thirteenth of March by nine in the morning.

The unit vacated by ten on Sunday the fifteenth, whatever the report said.

A paired-scent exercise scheduled for ten on Tuesday morning, in the assessment room down the corridor from the unit, standard to all intakes.

And the walk-out right, which Okonjo read verbatim off the screen, holding the tablet slightly up, like a woman reading a prayer she had not written: any candidate could vacate the unit before eight in the morning on any day of the week, without prejudice and without a reason given, and a candidate still in the unit at eight was scored for that day.

“Eight is when the day starts counting,” Okonjo said, in her own voice, which was kind within the limits it had been given. “People get that wrong. They think it’s when I arrive. It isn’t. It’s eight.”

“I know,” Robyn said. “The clock’s on the wall in the unit. It’s in the handbook.”

“You’ve read the handbook.”

“I’ve typed most of it.”

Okonjo looked at her for a moment, and whatever she was deciding, she decided it, and turned the tablet around on the desk and pushed it across, and showed her the menus.

That was not in the recitation; Robyn would have sworn it was not in the recitation, that it was Okonjo’s own idea, tired and decent, to let the candidate see the instrument the week would be played on.

The scoring interface sat under a tab labelled daily log.

Every entry was a date and an hour and a drop-down.

Okonjo scrolled the list with one blunt unpainted nail: cohabitation event — routine, cohabitation event — initiated by candidate, scent response — within parameters, conflict — resolved, conflict — unresolved, and on and on, a long grey ladder of the things the panel believed could happen between four people in a room, each one with a little arrow where the world was supposed to fold itself up and fit.

“It’s version nine,” Robyn said.

Okonjo’s finger stopped. “Sorry?”

“The schema. Version nine. The clinic archived six through eight. The free-text box used to be on the first screen; now it’s under the second tab.” She reached out, and waited for Okonjo’s nod, and opened the second tab and showed her. “It’s smaller than it was.”

“You’d know.”

“I typed the migration notes.” Robyn sat back.

The radiator ticked. Outside, a long way up, the charge went off on the ridge that meant avalanche control was shooting the slope before the sun got on it, and the window glass gave back a shiver you felt in your teeth more than heard.

“The box being smaller is in them. There wasn’t a reason given. ”

Okonjo looked at the tablet, and then at Robyn, and for a moment the level voice was nowhere in the room and what was there instead was a tired woman half a head too tall for her job, sitting in a cold office at eight thousand feet with the whole week in front of her.

“I found that out in January,” she said.

“Nobody told me either.” She turned the tablet back.

“Doesn’t change what I have to get signed. ”