Turn 4 of 26

Answer alone, loud and perfect: 'Yes ma'am'. You or anyone else doesn’t notice how your voice now sounds like the women yelling at you. The voice of the other 19 women doing the same drill one by one and not noticing their voices have turned into the same voice that the officers now have. The drill then ends as the women get back to yelling at all of you as you all yell back in the same voice

"YES MA'AM." It comes out of you loud and clean, and it doesn't come out alone. It comes out in her voice. Not similar — hers. The same clipped warmth, the same hard bottom edge, the same gray-flat certainty, as if your throat has been borrowing sound from her chest. You don't notice. Neither does anyone. The Lead Instructor only nods once, satisfied, and moves down the row.

"Eighteen." "YES MA'AM." "Seventeen." "YES MA'AM." She works through them one by one, and each answer lands in the hall with the same voice — not twenty women answering, but one woman answering twenty times, slightly out of sync. Number Six says it and her tremble doesn't reach her mouth at all; the voice that comes out of her small pale body is tall and square-shouldered and sure. Nobody flinches. Nobody compares. The officers stand in their line and the recruits answer from the benches and the two sounds are one sound wearing twenty pairs of lungs.

"That," the Lead Instructor says, "is a team. Drill complete." The officers fan out through the rows, and the yelling starts again from all directions at once — "ON YOUR FEET!" "BENCHES! SQUARE YOUR BENCHES!" "EYES FRONT, RECRUITS!" — and the twenty of you come up off the bolted benches and answer it, all of you, and what answers is the same voice: "YES MA'AM." "YES MA'AM." Twenty mouths, one voice, no one noticing, no one left to notice.

You square your bench with your hands flat on its edge, and your hands know the exact pressure to use, and you don't ask where the knowledge came from. Number Six squares hers beside you, and when she glances sideways — a flicker, half a second, the longest any of you has looked at anyone — the face she finds looking back is still yours, dark-haired and sharp-faced and ordinary, but the voice sitting behind your teeth is not.

"SOUND OFF, RECRUITS!" the Lead Instructor bellows from the front, and the whole hall — you, Six, the eighteen behind you — roars it back at her in perfect unison, one voice made of twenty, and she smiles. It's the first smile you've seen on her face. It looks exactly like the smile on every other face in the building, including, soon, yours.