Turn 5 of 26

Notice nothing as there is no smile on anyone’s face they has never once been a smile on their face as you 20 keep squaring the bench in perfect rhythm in number order as the officers begin intake. They start with all the Medical stuff like shots with one going first and 20 going last. When it’s your turn, you don’t say or do anything to stop it as you allow lots of needles to enter your arms.

There is no smile. There has never been a smile. The Lead Instructor's face is the same flat gray thing it has been since the tarmac, and so is every other face in the hall, and you square your bench in perfect rhythm with nineteen others, number order, hands flat, the slap of palms on wood arriving as one sound.

'INTAKE!' the officers bellow, and the benches empty in number order. 'ONE! FORWARD!' Number One walks to a white table at the front of the hall where an officer in the same slate-navy uniform waits with a steel tray, and the rest of you sit squared and silent while the needles come out. They are small. They are many. Number One's sleeve goes up and the officer works down her arm without a word — four shots, five, six — and Number One says nothing, because there is nothing to say but the one thing, and no one has asked.

The line moves. Two. Three. The room is very quiet now, only the small clicks of trays and the occasional bark — 'FASTER, RECRUIT' — and somewhere beneath the bleach you can smell alcohol swabs. Number Six goes ahead of you at Eighteen, her pale arm out, her face perfectly calm, and she doesn't look at you as she passes. You watch the needle enter her and watch her not flinch, and your own arm is already bare, sleeve folded back the way the officer beside you ordered it with two fingers and a pointed look.

'NINETEEN. FORWARD.' You walk. You sit where the stool is. You put your arm on the rest without being told twice, and the officer's gloved hands hold it steady, and the first needle goes in — a pinch, a cold push, done. The second. The third. You do not say anything. You do not do anything. You allow it, all of it, six shots, seven, one in each arm, your body taking them the way the benches take bolts: installed, fixed, permanent. The officer presses a cotton pad to the last site and tapes it down with a strip of white.

'TWENTY! FORWARD.' You return to your bench and square it, and your arms ache in a warm spreading way, and the last recruit takes her place on the stool. The doors at the far end of the hall open. Two officers wheel in a rack of folded gray garments, identical, and behind them a cart of small black cases.

'CLOTHING AND STANDARDS,' the Lead Instructor announces to the room. 'The body is prepared. Now the uniform.'