Turn 2 of 26

March in perfect rhythm, matching the chant exactly, becoming the standard from the inside. You 20 now march like the officers who are marching as they keep yelling at you women to fix your posture, anytime the line gets crooked and get into number order based on what number you are. You soon arrive in a hall where the officers yell at you 20 to sit down which you all do with prefect posture

You lock into the chant on the third beat. LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT — your feet find it, your breath finds it, and something in the machine of you clicks into gear. The yelling doesn't stop, but it changes flavor: not corrections now, not yet, just volume, a weather system you march inside. When the line drifts a half-step at the bend by the fence, the officers descend on it like weather made of hands — "STRAIGHTEN THAT LINE!" — and it straightens, and you feel the correction happen through the whole column at once, twenty spines pulled taut by one rope of sound.

"NUMBER ORDER! You are numbers now! Numbers FILE!" They sort you as you march, shrieking your designations down the line — "One at the front! Twenty closes! Nineteen, NINETEEN, second from the rear, MOVE!" — and the twenty of you shuffle and swap and settle into a count that climbs from front to back without a single face turning to check whose face it's passing. Your boots hit the wet concrete in time with a hundred others. Somewhere around the tenth step you stop hearing the chant as something shouted at you and start hearing it as something your feet are saying.

The steel doors swallow the line in clumps. Inside is white — white floor, white walls, white light from panels overhead — and the smell of bleach is so pure it's almost sweet. And under it, from somewhere deeper in the building, a sound arrives that stops your breath for a step: a hundred voices, maybe more, reciting in one cadence. Not words you can catch. Just rhythm. Just agreement.

The hall opens up ahead — rows of narrow benches bolted to the floor, gleaming, empty.

"SIT!" the officers roar, all twenty of them at once, and the twenty of you sit the way you've been drilled for thirty seconds of your whole lives: backs straight, chins level, hands flat on thighs, brochures squared on your knees like orders you're waiting to receive.

The benches are cold through your jeans. The Lead Instructor walks the front of the room slowly, her polished boots the only sound after the yelling cuts off — and the silence, when it comes, is louder than anything outside. She stops, faces you all, and lets her gray eyes travel down the rows.

"Good," she says. "You sat like one woman. That's the last free thing you'll ever do wrong."