The voice of nineteen

Turn 26 of 26

You slide the donut bun through the donut bun and secure it with the elastic band. You take the left over hair and braided it so that you can wrap it around the bun. You grab the fully bottle of spray and use the whole thing to keep it permanent and shiny like yours. You do the same for 10, 15 and 20. The intakes now fully look the same as you. They could be you, 86, 81 or anyone that works here.

Your hands know the work without being taught it, because they were the work once. You take the cinched ponytail and thread it through the donut form, and the elastic band goes on hard, cinching the base until the structure sits high and tight against Five's crown. Her scalp pulls taut under the band the way yours did, and she does not flinch, because flinching is not something the standard does. The leftover black hair falls in a foot-long sheet and you braid it — three strands, over and under, fast hard strokes, the same strokes that were done to you — and wrap the braid around the base until the form disappears underneath it, pinning it all down with the long pin driven through the whole structure. Then the spray. You coat the entire head crown to forehead, sweeping clouds of it until the bun shines like lacquered furniture, the whole canister spent, nothing left loose, nothing left to ever move. 'DRESS SHAPE: CORRECT,' you hear yourself announce, flat, in the officers' voice, and Five rises and falls in and walks to the wall, and she is you. The identical bun, the identical shine, the identical squared body in the identical uniform with the identical fixed face. Ten hours ago she came through the intake doors out of step. Now she could stand in the officers' formation and no one would count her twice.

You work the next ones as they come. Ten sits, and the hands move; fifteen sits, and the hands move; twenty sits, and the hands move. Band, braid, wrap, pin, spray, announce. Each head comes out identical to the one before it, identical to the four the twin officers are finishing at the adjacent chairs, identical to yours. By the time Twenty stands and falls in, the styling floor holds a new block of women who could be Eighty-Six, could be Eighty-One, could be any officer on the compound — and down the line of finished intakes not one of them looks at another, because there is nothing in another's face that is not already in their own.

The twin officer at the next chair finishes her last intake and sets her spray canister down at the same moment you set yours down, the two steel bottoms striking the table in unison without either of you meaning it or meaning not to mean it. The hall is quiet except for the recitation beyond the far doors.

Then the intake doors open again. Not for recruits. A figure comes through them alone — a uniform you have never seen on the compound, a gray so pale it is nearly white, cut close to the body, no badge, no bun, hair cropped short and unpinned. She stops inside the doors and stands there, wrong in every line, and her eyes move across the finished intakes, across the five of you at station two, and settle somewhere near the back of the hall.

The four twin officers at your station do not turn their heads. But their chins lift again — that same fraction of a degree, five faces including your own — and behind you, faint under the recitation, you hear a door open somewhere in the building, and the reciting voices falter, mid-word, for the first time since you arrived.