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I liked that.

COUNSEL ASSISTING: You said things changed when you turned eight.

CASSIAN CALYX: When I presented. I was eight. I presented as a male omega, which was — well, everyone was very excited. The Lumineer came to see me himself, which he didn’t do for most children. He said I was a gift from the Light. He said my Receptivity was the rarest kind, since it came in a boy’s body, and that made it sacred, and sacred things needed protecting.

COUNSEL ASSISTING: What did the protecting involve?

CASSIAN CALYX: More sessions. Doctrine sessions, with the senior women, about Receptivity and purity and the proper way to carry yourself when you were a Sacred Vessel. How to sit. How to walk. How to make your voice softer so alphas liked you. I wasn’t allowed to run with the other children any more, because running was aggressive, and aggression was contamination. And the alpha boys I’d grown up with…we’d been in the creek together the week before, catching tadpoles. But all of a sudden, I wasn’t supposed to be alone with them any more. I was a Vessel now, and proximity without supervision was a risk to my purity.

[Pause.]

They were eight. We were all eight. But overnight I was something that needed keeping away from them, or them from me, and I didn’t understand which way round it went. I just knew that the boys I’d shared a sleeping hall with since I could remember were suddenly on the other side of a rule I hadn’t been told about until it was already there.

[TRANSCRIPT CONTINUES]

Chapter Three

Cassian had fallen asleep in his room at Ledbury Road that night, and the compound had been waiting for him behind his eyelids. He’d woken at half two with his heart going so hard he could feel it in his wrists, and for a while he just lay there in the dark, waiting for the compound to let go of him.

Then Tala started up down the hall.

She was making the thin, hiccupping noises that meant she was working up to full-tilt crying. Cassian had learned the difference in the two weeks since he’d returned to London, by watching Colin and listening to him talk about his daughter.

Cassian was out of bed and across the landing before her next hiccup.

Her cloud-shaped nightlight threw a warm circle onto the ceiling that made the whole room look like the inside of an apricot. She was on her back in the cot with her fists clenched beside her ears, her face scrunched up.

“It’s me,” Cassian whispered. He slid one hand under her head and the other under her bottom.

She rooted into his collarbone immediately, her mouth working at the fabric of his T-shirt.

“I know,” he told her. “I’ll get you sorted. Don’t worry.”

He carried her down through the dark house, moving through the hallway carefully so he wouldn’t wake Diwa or Colin.

It still surprised him sometimes, that he actually lived here. That he had a room in a five-bedroom house in Notting Hill belonging to people who wanted him in it, when nine months ago his entire understanding of the outside world had come from a man called Hamish McNally, who made documentaries about things that other people would rather not look at.

Tala’s fist closed around the collar of his T-shirt as he reached the bottom of the stairs, gripping it with a strength improbable in something the size of a loaf of bread.

The kitchen at Ledbury Road was enormous and spotless. Full of machines that Cassian didn’t fully understand. Diwa bought things, because he had more money than he needed. Whenever he identified a problem, he researched every available solution, built a spreadsheet comparing them, and then purchased the most expensive one. Like the coffee machine that had a touch screen and its own Wi-Fi network, and the bin that opened when you waved at it.

But the bottle warmer was Diwa’s pièce de résistance, a phrase that Colin had taught him to say and that he would never in his life be able to spell.

It sat on the counter beside the kettle, all brushed steel and a digital display that cycled through four languages. It circulated steam at a steady temperature through a chamber lined with medical-grade silicone, because Diwa had read a paper about uneven heat distribution in conventional warmers and had decided that his daughter deserved better than that. It had cost two thousand pounds. Colin had looked at the receipt, said “For fuck’s sake, Diwa,” and then used it every single night. It warmed a bottle to thirty-seven degrees in eighty-three seconds, and at two in the morning that was worth every penny.

Cassian had been afraid of it for the first three days. It made a noise when it started, a pressurised hiss followed by a low mechanical hum, like it was about to blow up. Colin had walked him through it twice, standing behind him with Tala in one arm, his free hand guiding Cassian’s to the right buttons. Left dial to the ounce marker. Green button. Wait for the beep. Test a drop on the inside of your wrist before you give it to her.

Now Cassian switched it on while Tala squirmed at his chest, her complaints escalating from hiccups to a proper wail that she directed into the side of his neck. The machine hissed to life, and the digital display read OPTIMAL CYCLE: 83 SECONDS.

“Eighty-three seconds,” he told her. “I can’t make it go faster. I’ve tried.”

She didn’t care and wailed harder. He swayed with her the way Colin did, and opened the fridge to get the donor milk out.

Diwa’s people restocked the fridge twice a week. Cassian didn’t fully understand what Diwa did for a living. It involved artificial intelligence, and training the AI to hold the values and beliefs of different countries, which sounded like a made-up thing, except that Diwa was one of the richest people Cassian had ever met, and the fridge, along with the house, proved it.

The fridge was huge. It always held four kinds of milk, three shelves of fruit and vegetables in colour-coded containers, and a drawer full of cheeses whose names Cassian couldn’t pronounce. There was kombucha in six flavours, and lots of other good things that were always just there for the taking the moment you opened the stainless steel door.

In the compound, you ate when you were told you could, and you had what everyone else had. The Lumineer said that choice was a distraction from the Light. Cassian had eaten the same lentil stew for most of his childhood, served from the same enormous pot by whichever adult happened to be on the roster. He’d been grateful for it. The Lumineer said gratitude was the correct orientation of a Vessel towards sustenance. If you were hungry between meals, you sat with the shame of that hunger, because hunger was the body asking for more than it deserved.