“Do you need to be sick?” Tesla asks.

I think I shake my head. It’s hard to tell. Benjamin takes the kidney-shaped dish and syringe back to the counter, depositing them in the case. He pulls the gloves off and taps the keypad, releasing a drawer in the bottom. He lifts something like a small silver revolver from inside it; a pearl-coloured liquid sloshes in the handle, leaving a milky residue. He checks something on the barrel before resting it back in the drawer, then he turns and assumes the stance of a soldier at ease.

“Given Felicity’s reading,” Tesla says, “I gather you experience precognition?”

I manage a small shrug for yes.

“Vague impressions or specific defensive tactics?”

“Specific,” I heave the word out.

“Rapid Kinetic Learning?”

I blink.

“Regeneration?”

I blink.

“And if you can Harvest, I imagine you can Transfer?”

“No touch.”

Tesla frowns.

“She Harvests and Transfers remotely,” Miriam explains.

His eyebrows rise.

Let it be enough. Let them be satisfied.

“Interim Watcher status would have been granted to your aunt,” Tesla says. “But she is in breach and will likely be taken in for debriefing in the next few days. I will be your Watcher until you have been handed over for Orientation at the completion of our Early Detection Study. I will make contact if we detect any disturbance in your reading. You must keep your phone with you at all times.”

So much for the conditions of my grounding. “Disturbance?”

“Your tracker is a basic locator. It is programmed to recognise keywords relating to the Affinity Project that are considered illegal terminology. This is to discourage careless speech that might threaten the secrecy of the organisation. If you accrue too many demerits, you will hear from me. I suggest you avoid doing so, but the tracker also relays your vitals, blood pressure, core temperature and your brainwave activity. Contact with other Assets, Sparking, sexual intercourse and physical violence will cause fluctuations in your reading. If we detect anything extreme, I will contact you. Your welfare is the chief concern of the Affinity Project and we always protect our Assets.”

He stands up. “Now, you will need to lie down to be Neutralised. You will likely pass out. Is there anything you would like to ask us or tell us before we leave?”

The mud in my brain has slowed all traffic, fear the only remaining vehicle with traction. “What am I supposed to do between now and Orientation?”

“Live.” He turns to Benjamin. “Mr Nelson.”

Benjamin licks his lips. “If she’s pregnant, then someone else will have to perform the procedure.”

Davis rolls his eyes. “What difference does it make?”

“It makes a difference to me,” Benjamin says.

“I’m not.”

Davis snorts.

Tesla takes his phone, flicks through the screens and taps an icon. There is a moment as the page loads. A graph appears and he holds the phone up for Benjamin to read. “Her blood work,” he says. Benjamin leans in and uses his finger and thumb to broaden the image, examining the graph. If my synapses could actually fire, I would blush, but I sit in the same numb fear that gripped me from the beginning.

“All right,” Benjamin says, turning to me. “Can you stand? Your aunt should be present.”

When I first heard them from the bathroom, the sense of doom had been immediate. The end. It rang through me then and it rings through me again. The end. Miriam helps me up, Jamie and Felicity rise too. Now everyone is on their feet, looking at me. I pat Miriam’s hand and pull away. “I’ve got it.” A show of courage. I make my way to the hall, shuffling and slow, and look back. Jamie, as pale as I have ever seen him, blinks desolate eyes.

OVARIES

It’s a long slow walk from the kitchen to my bedroom, some kind of ceremonial procession up wooden stairs before dark rites and the descent into shadows. I pause at my bedroom door and turn to Miriam. “Can you at least wait in the hall?”

She glowers beside Benjamin whose expression appears grimly set. “Protocol requires a female chaperone.”

“She’ll be right outside the door.”

“Evie,” Miriam says.

“Please.” I sigh. “Don’t I get any dignity?”

She folds her arms, her jaw working, then she steps aside. “Fine.”

Benjamin looks uncertain, but we leave her on the landing and I lead him into my room. I close the door, aware of thresholds being crossed and the letting of foreign things into private places. My Lara Croft costume lies in a heap at the foot of the bed like dead skin from a previous life. Benjamin frowns at the grenades and handguns beneath my boots but I don’t bother to explain. He places the equipment on my desk and gestures at the bed. “Remove your pants. Leave your underwear on and lie down.”

Underwear on. Thank God.

I take my time, afraid of losing my balance, of falling, of Miriam pushing into the room, of an audience for my humiliation, my fingers bloodless and fumbling at the button of my jeans. I picture Tesla and Felicity downstairs, Davis and Jamie. Jamie. Benjamin waits. I fight denim from my ankles and almost tumble on the bed, the quilt cool on the back of my bare legs. Hips, thighs, skin. I lie prone, the lump at the base of my skull hard as a golf ball. Jamie’s scent rises from the pillow and I have to close my eyes but tears slip beneath my lashes anyway. A drowning girl’s flailing reach into the bandwidth and I find him immediately, waiting for me. I wrap myself in Jamie’s signal like it’s a life-preserver.

“Jamie is my friend,” Benjamin says, stepping towards the bed, his size and significance eclipsing the room. “So is Helena.”

I release Jamie’s signal and lie empty.

“This Synergist Coding,” he says, flexing his fingers as though recalling what he felt when he touched me in the hall, “it is trouble and they will find out.”

“Can we get on with it?” I say, without malice.

He turns to my desk, again the sound of latex gloves, the whiff of alcohol. He comes back to the bed and folds up the edge of my T-shirt. I clench fistfuls of quilt against the instinct to cover myself.

“And these, down a little, please.” His brow and lips pinch in, a no-nonsense frown. He waves a knuckle at my panties, unwilling to adjust them himself, which I appreciate, though lifting my hands to shunt the fabric puts pressure on my neck and makes me grimace. “That will do.” He sweeps the cotton swab over my skin, making my flesh pucker with goosebumps.

I picture my ovaries, pink and round and unaware. Before this, before Sparking, my imagined future wasn’t much more than formless mist, easily blown into and out of shapes that whim or fancy inspired. I might have been a photographer. I might have gone to Paris. I might have lived by the water, taken up painting and fallen in love. I am in love. But in the before version of my life that might have meant children, maybe, sometime, down the line. I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it. Now, I understand that DNA has blown the mist away and the future is a concrete path between concrete walls, heading in one direction. I bite the inside of my cheek and ignore the slow slip of my tears. “Do they always run?”

He flicks his black eyes at me and then turns away to the desk. “I did.” He returns with the silver revolver thing.

I stare at his remarkable face, his high cheekbones and strong jaw. I try to visualise him with Jamie, sitting, laughing, watching television, playing sport, anything vaguely normal, anything other than what he’s doing right now, alone with me. I wonder how old he is. Older than Jamie, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six? I wonder what his life looked like before extracting terrified young men and women from hiding, drugging them, marking them, stuffing them into the backs of vans, became his job. “If I were pregnant,” I say, “this would …”