Turn 6 of 26

You all get into the single file line by number and one by one, they leave for uniforms. When it’s your time, Let the officers take your clothes off and throw them out as they dress you in the dark navy uniform like the others. It’s a simple long sleeve dark navy police uniform shirt, dark navy police uniform trousers and black leather duty shoes, The same outfit that all the officers are wearing

The line forms by number, one through twenty, and the officers begin calling you forward to a curtained bay at the side of the hall. One goes in. You stand squared in the line and listen to the small sounds behind the curtain — hangers, boot heels, the flat voice of an officer saying 'ARMS UP' — and then One comes out the far side wearing the uniform. Slate-navy shirt, slate-navy trousers, black leather shoes. She looks like the women who took her clothes. The line moves.

Two. Three. The rack behind the bay must be deep, because every recruit comes out the same, and the room fills with the sight of it happening — your own jacket folded on the bench where Six left it, her cardigan beside it, twenty ordinary wardrobes accumulating like evidence at a crime scene. Nobody is given their clothes back. A cart stands near the doors with a plastic bin in it, and the officers drop the old garments in without checking pockets.

'EIGHTEEN. FORWARD.' Six goes in. The curtain rings scrape. A pause, then the officer's voice, not loud, just absolute: 'ARMS.' You hear her complying. She comes out squared and gray-navy, her pale face the only thing left of her, and even that looks more ordinary now, framed by the same collar everyone else wears.

'NINETEEN. FORWARD.' You step through the curtain. Two officers, gloved, unhurried. 'GARMENTS OFF. STAND.' Your hands move and their hands help, and your jacket, jeans, everything you walked in wearing is lifted away and dropped into the waiting bin without a word spent on it — the archive of Mara Vance, filed for disposal. The shirt goes over your head, stiff and new, the collar settling against your neck like a measurement being taken. The trousers. The duty shoes, black leather, laced by their hands while you stand with your arms slightly out. The cotton pads on your arms are smoothed flat under the sleeves and disappear.

'HALF-TURN.' You turn. The officer behind you tugs the shirt hem straight, cinches nothing, adjusts nothing, because nothing needs adjusting — the uniform fits the way the benches fit the floor. 'FACE FRONT. You are dressed,' she says, and it's true. In the mirror bolted to the bay's side wall is a woman in slate-navy with her sleeves creased and no name tape, and it takes you a full second to find what's still yours: the dark brown hair, loose to the shoulders, the one wrong thing on the whole figure.

The officer sees it too. 'Hair will be addressed at standards,' she says, and steers you out through the curtain into the hall of uniforms.