“Of course.” The skinny blond boy smiled, and the smile had an uncanny edge. The fix to his jaw had been too perfect. He blinked, eyes closing over tinker-made spheres. With the faintest of machine sounds, metal whisking against metal, only audible to the Overseer because she had an ear right next to his eye, the irises switched colors from blue to yellow.

They were a part of oversight. The powerhouses, the ones who made more complex engineering possible. Fine tuning the teams, taking away the bad.

Teacher walked over to Cell One, and held the board with the magnetic dust. She wrote out particulars from her last three hours of work. Tracking those who had collapsed or broken down. Tracking the little things around the facility, her creation.

William to grant any free will. Teacher considered it a generosity, and a tool to ensure that there really were multiple perspectives on every problem, not just his own, with his thralls serving as only his hands, rather than his eyes and ears. Everyone started out with the opportunity to retain everything about themselves. From that point, it was a steep way down, but climbing was possible.

The managers that hadn’t been hand-picked for their backgrounds and skills had been selected from the best of the original batches. Those who understood how cells worked and those who had few compunctions on the subject.

“Join me?” Teacher asked. Some eyes raised, heads turned. He tapped the board with the iron dust.

I ALREADY HAD A BREAK, was her response, etched into the dust with touches in the same way someone might try to spell out words with assault rifle fire.

“It should be fine. Soon we go red. There won’t be much time to rest for a little while after that. Let’s enjoy the quiet before the storm.”

She was, she wanted to say.

She hesitated. She would do her rounds.

“Two hundred and thirty-five individuals are on the clock as we speak,” Teacher told her. “Nine individuals suspect something is amiss. Our facility here is perfectly fine.”

The Overseer could see people watching Teacher carry on the one-sided conversation.

“We’ll step up all security measures and alerts if that makes you feel better,” he told her.

She scratched out her message on the board.

MAX.

He moved his head with a small jerk. “Follow me?”

She brushed past him. Past bald head, past longer beard, through clothing.

When they were alone, he said, “If we shutter all the windows and put possible measure into effect, our enemies will know when you’re here. It makes us weaker.”

She wrote her message.

DRILL.

“Yes. Absolutely. We can put it into effect at random. If you join me.”

WHY.

“Because I think you need this, my dear. In so many ways, you need this.”

WHERE. She wrote it, but she’d seen what Teacher wore. She suspected. She felt trepidation.

“Home,” he said. “Yours, to be specific.”

Home.