-Chapter 19-

Euphoria. I remember watching Trick roll a tablet between his fingers, pale and pink indented with a tiny heart at the centre of it. He called it candy or medicine or happy pills, watching my eyes follow the little round disk before he leaned into kiss me. “These aint for you, girl,” he used to say, used to lightly cup under my chin with a strange tenderness. For a dealer, a criminal and a cheat he could be oddly protective like that. And I would pull away, sullen, wrap my lips around a cigarette and breathe out “I’m not a fucking child.”

He’d laugh. “Don’t I know it? But trust me; you don’t want nothing to do with this shit. Sure it makes you happy, but it doesn’t last. It isn’t real. It isn’t earned.”

There are five others apart from me. I don’t know where they found them or how they got them, but here they are.  

It reminds me a little of a waiting room; there are prints on one of the walls, pictures of brightly coloured flowers.  The carpeting is beige and inoffensive, the walls are coloured neutral and calming while a drooping ficus plant sits in the corner. On the other wall is a large mirror and it must be two way.

The other girls mostly sit, though one red head is standing, twirling her fingers through her hair. They aren’t afraid, and I know what it is. Euphoria. Total calm, total joy and total happiness. It’s a glazed, dead eyed grin, the chemical fizz of serotonin coursing through your system as you sit and stare at a wall. My own smile is large and fixed, my eyes focus on nothing in particular.

Until the door at the far right hand corner is pulled open and three people file in; the scientist with the sleek black bob, another person in a white coat- male this time- and another person that we all know.  The other girls seem to light up even more when he enters the room, their heads turning to face him the way that flowers follow the sun. I can’t help myself, I look too.

I won’t feel a lurch in the pit of my stomach. I won’t feel a stab of pain in my chest at the sight of him. How can I? When all I have is the euphoria. Total calm, total joy and total happiness.

It’s him. I’ve touched that jaw, kissed that mouth, tiptoed my fingers along his collar bone. Only it isn’t him at all; this Harry has perfectly quaffed curls, is clean and fresh and unmarked. This Harry is well dressed and untroubled. This Harry is dead behind the eyes and silent.  I don’t feel anything. I’m just happy.

The scientists take a step back, nodding at the not-Harry. I know his voice, before he even speaks I can imagine it. But it won’t hurt me and it won’t make me miss him. Thanks to the music.

“Stand,” he says to us.

We stand. We can’t help it. We’re happy and we adore him, so why wouldn’t we stand when he asks us to?

“Clap your hands,” the not-Harry commands, and the sounds of palms slapping together fills the room, over and over. “Stop.” We fall silent.

And then the woman with the sleek black bob opens the large box that she'd carried in with her. Quickly, she pulls out a blade and hands it to the man, and then another and another. I count six in total, one for each of us and they are passed out and pressed into our palms. I study the knife; one of those technical pieces with a detachable blade, sharpened and thin like individual razor blades. But I'm not going to panic, because I'm happy. Nothing more, nothing less.

"Cut yourself," he says, "like this," and he holds up his arm. Were it not for the euphoria, this might have made me angry- the deep welts on the soft skin of Harry's under arm is in the shape of a 1. Like this is some kind of joke to them. But we're all obedient.

For a moment my eyes catch the scientist with the sleek bob, the one who'd hooked me up to the music to begin with. There's something  desperate in her eyes. An urging as she looks at me. Do it.

And everyone else is. They roll up their sleeves without a second thought, right up to the groove of the elbow and press the knives into their skin. The hot iron smell of blood fills up the room. Do it. Do it. And I have to...because Harry told me to.

Breathing out, I roll up my own sleeve, where the skin is paper thin and pale. There are veins threading blue and tiny cuts and nicks from various near misses and close escapes, in the woods, by Battersea power station. I've been doing whatever I can not to get hurt, and here I am, rolling my sleeve up of my own volition and mutilating myself, because he's asked me to.

The minute I push down, the tears prick in my eyes of their own accord and I drag the blade across my skin. It's sticky, bright red and messy. My arm burns, my flesh splits and I have to grit my teeth to blot out the pain. Looking around, some girls are cutting deeper, as if trying to outdo one another. But it doesn’t sicken me to my stomach. Because I'm just happy.

I'm shaking when he tells us to stop. I can feel my blood cooling as it runs like tear drops and I wonder what the next command will be. Take this knife and plunge it into your own neck… Plunge it into someone else's neck.

Instead the scientist makes a note, tells us to sit down. "Subject 23b," he says, wiggling his finger at one of the girls and gesturing her forwards. She's nineteen or maybe twenty, very pretty with her black hair knotted into a fishtail plait. Her cut is deep but she doesn't seem to mind, humming a song under her breath as she walks towards them. The woman with the bob follows her but the man and the not Harry stay in the room with the rest of us. They all ignore the blood and simply stare at the not-Harry in total silent adoration, there are no whimpers, no attempts to even stop the bleeding.

One by one they file out; all of them with that same glazed expression on their faces until I’m left alone to stare at the other Harry. For a moment he catches my eye and I look away quickly from such an alien gaze. I don’t know why but I’d half expected him to recognise me, to smile and say something reassuring. But this Harry doesn’t know me at all.

“Subject 28b,” the scientist calls and I’m next to leave the room with the same willing, dead eyed expression

**

Outside of the waiting room is a small hallway, with only one other door in it, so it has to be the one I take. There’s a sign with a name on a card slid in front of it, reading ‘Dr S July’.

Through that door is another sparse white and medical looking room where the woman with the sleek bob is sitting and waiting for me, Dr S July I have to assume. She sighs heavily when I come in and removes her plastic gloves, someone else’s blood still staining the tips.

“Sit down and give me your arm,” she says curtly.  My hand bunches into a fist reluctantly, but I remember that I’m not afraid, not after the music and I force myself to sit on the stool and hold out my arm to her.

Putting on a new pair of gloves, she grasps my wrist in her hand, taking what appears to be a pair of tweezers and pressing them into my wound, lifting up a small amount of peeled flesh and matter, eliciting a sharp his from my throat. After she seals it in a petri dish, she takes a swab and some disinfectant and begins to dab at my arm before looking up at me and whispering,

“You’re not smiling enough. And if you’d really been exposed to the song you wouldn’t have been hissing or crying. The chemical changes would mean that pain would barely register.”

Looking up at her, my mouth drops open and I feel a curl of anger inside of me as I snap, “I had to cut open my flesh with a knife. I thought I’d done fucking well, all things considered.” My cheeks hurt, my palms are still sweaty and I can still feel a shiver coursing all the way through me as I stare at Dr July.

It’s one thing to wear a mask and not to let your emotions show, to put a brave face on it so you look tougher than you actually are, so your kid siblings think everything is going to be okay when you have no idea if it is. But to smile and pretend to be brainwashed when someone puts a knife in your hand and tells you to go to town on your arm? The woman just sniffs and begins to stitch up my arm. “Why are you doing this?” I ask for what feels like the thousandth time since all this began.

But for her my question has many layers. Why are they brainwashing people and making them carve the number 1 into their arms, sure. But what I really want to know is why she’s helping me?

Back in the interrogation room, I’d been sure that they were going to make me like all the other girls. That they would play the song and turn me into a smiling zombie- Harry Styles says jump and I do it, directly onto a sharpened spike. But it hadn’t happened like that; as she had pulled in to fix the head phones to my head I’d heard in the briefest of whispers, breath tickling the loose thin hairs around my ears, “play along”.

She’d pressed play, but there had been nothing but silence for four whole minutes. I don’t know how long I’ve been ‘playing along’ for now. After the interrogation they took me to a makeshift cell, left alone to sit in silence for hours and hours. I didn’t dare let the smile fade from my face in case they were watching, and at some point I must have slept, until wordlessly they took me to the break room.

She just sniffs and ignores my question, so I rephrase it. “Are you one of us?” The woman with the bob shakes her head firmly, looking at me as she chews on her lips.

“No…no…I don’t know. I shouldn’t have….It was stupid,” under her breath she repeats ‘stupid’ over and over like some hysterical echo and I pull my head back from her slightly.

“When you spoke. I…” she shakes her head and looks down at my arm with a soft sigh. “Ian never wanted any of this. I owe him so much…and Harry too.”  My mouth opens a little and I’m just about to ask her what she means by this- what Harry could have possibly done to mean that Dr July owes him, when she continues. “Ian and I were one of the first people to discover the accelerated growth mutation.”

“The xtype thing. I know about that.”

Dr July nods. “He was so excited. He kept talking about how it was going to revolutionise medical science…but we couldn’t get the subjects we needed. We really struggled. Especially since...technically it wasnt legal. Until they came to us. With their silly talent show idea. And we just thought that they were being generous- they’d get their show, their advertising revenue and we’d get an investment  and take swabs without anyone being any the wiser.”

“You wanted to clone people without them knowing. Without, like, forms or anything?”

 “It was unethical,” Doctor July concedes. “But it was supposed to be worth it. Unlimited research potential, organs for people who desperately needed them, stem cell research, everything. And then we realised we’d made a deal with the devil.”

She finishes stitching my arm. It didn’t take too many- I suppose that I wasn’t as committed as some of the other girls, all the same, it stills aches sharply, leaving me slightly dizzy from the blood loss.

“That’s what Ian called it,” she continues, her bottom lip trembling, a strange crack in her voice as she says Dr Roslin’s name. “I’m not a moralist or a philosopher, I’m a scientist….but Ian….he couldn’t do it anymore. Stupid man. He should have known it would get him killed.”

“Who? Everyone keeps saying them and they and talking about this new world order.”

“They call themselves The Spindle. I don’t know much. Just what no one minds me overhearing…they keep themselves hidden. Buried deep in government and the media....they have a leader I'm sure of it, but I've never even heard a name mentioned. Not once and we’ve been testing out the music and the clones for years.

"And no one ever noticed you were doing this?" I ask, because if it really had been years surely it would have been somewhere, in the news, on wikileaks....something. 

"I suppose they picked the perfect subjects,”shrugs Dr July. 

I blink at this, not sure what she’s talking about.

“A few teenage girls go crazy over a boy band and who notices? It’s just what happens isn’t it?”

It happened with the Beatles and Elvis Presley. Where there are popstars and matinee idols, the screaming fans will never be far behind. I wonder if you took any of those poor girls from the waiting room and put them in a crowd, with those smiling, glazed expressions, faces turning towards Harry Styles if anyone would be able to tell that there was anything different about them at all.

“It will already be done by the time anyone gets a chance to see what’s coming,” I whisper. Or at least that was their plan, I tell myself firmly. My right hand, the good hand, tiptoes into the pocket of my jeans as I speak, wrapping around the small, sharp blade of the knife secreted away into it, still wet with my own blood.  “You need to help me get out of here. I need to warn people. My friends…some of the originals. They don’t know about what the music does to people. We can tell people or put it online. Or just do something.”

Okay, so I haven’t actually thought that far ahead to what I’m actually going to do. Turning my eyes to Dr July, I’m try to meet her gaze, to plead with her, but she simply shakes her head.

“It won’t work. I can’t let you do that…they’ll find out….” Her lip trembles and she chokes it out, wrapped up around a sob. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m off my seat and gripping her shoulders.

“Dr Roslin never wanted this,” I say, giving her a slight shake- I never met the man, but it doesn’t stop me using him to guilt Dr July. “You said it yourself. You have to help me. For him.” I suppose it’s a dirty trick, using a dead man to guilt someone into doing something they don’t want to- but what choice do I have?

After a moment, I pause, and as she slowly nods I think about the others. “And those girls as well.”

“No. Just you,” says Dr July vehemently, shaking her head. “Forget about those girls.”

“Why? What’s going to happen to them?”

“There’s no way to reverse that kind of conditioning. Once it’s done…it’s done." 

She looks down at her shoes as she drops this bomb. Forever? I want to whisper. Surely you can uncondition someone? Surely? I feel sick to my stomach knowing that all those girls will be for the rest of their lives is obedient little shadows. 

“You made them cut themselves,” I stress, pointing to my own bandage.

“They were running tests. We need to make sure that the effects are the same for everyone or else….”

“Or else what? They’ve already had everything wiped out of them! What can possibly be worse than that?” I all but shout, disgusted, kicking my chair away and staring at her. How can someone live with themselves knowing that they’ve done that to another person.

“They’re happy,” Dr July tries weakly, pressing her finger to her lips. 

“No. It’s not real. It’s not earned….I’d rather die than end up like that,” I rage, curling my fists into a ball so tightly that they turn white. My anger is interrupted however, by a light wrapping on the door at the other side of the room.

“Hello?” a muffled voice says through the door. “Sarah, are you alright? We’re ready for the next one now.”

“What’s happening?” I whisper, moving my hand automatically to the knife in my pocket once again.

“They’re going to test you for the x-type. That’s how it works. We help them, they let us keep researching. That’s the deal.”

There’s another knock, and I know that I don’t have a choice but to go through the door once again. Smile, I remind myself, moving my lips upwards though I don’t feel like smiling. But then again I’m supposed to be brainwashed. As I move towards it, Dr. July grabs my arm and pushes something into my hands. It’s a rectangular, laminated key card with a metallic strip and Dr July’s face printed onto it.

 “You’ll need a pass to get through the doors. You stole this when I wasn’t looking,” I nod and slip the card into my pocket with the blade. As I try to go again, she wraps her fingers tighter around my arm. “If you see Harry, tell him Sarah July says thank you….more than he can ever possibly know.”

**

I find myself in the centre of a room, smiling like a lunatic. Here, the synthetic surgical lighting could be a spotlight shining directly on me. An Indian man with watery brown eyes pins a microphone to my shirt and in front of me sits three scientists with note pads in front of them. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he tells me in a bored voice. “The tape is going to play three musical notes with a ten second interlude in between. During each interval you will replicate that note to the best of your ability. If you can do that, you will be asked to sing the first verse and chorus of a song of your choosing. Do you understand?”

Nodding, I make sure that I keep up that dead eyed smile as the scientist hits play on another tape recorder. The first note plays, and I can’t name it- but I do my best to sing it, trying not to let my voice wobble. It’s a pretty good match, I think, swallowing a little trying to get some moisture into my mouth as I look down at the scientists. Why are they doing this, I wonder? Do they believe in brain washing, in the New Order or are they like Dr July, making a deal with the devil that has spiralled beyond control.

I’m not able to glean much from their passive expressions. But when I match all the notes, I’m told that I need to sing a song. Nodding, I nervously skate my hands through my hair and accidentally knock the microphone. My breaths are ragged and frightened, so loud and so fast that I’m surprised that no one can hear it, not even the Indian doctor as he gets up out of his chair once again to reset it.

And as his fingers touch my collar once more, that’s when I strike, pulling my knife from my pocket, twisting and holding it to his throat. “Don’t move,” I hiss, “Or this goes straight in his neck.”

I don’t know if it’s his heart or mine that is pounding fit to burst as I hold him against me. I don’t know if it’s my sweat or his rapidly cooling and making me shiver, but I force myself to dig in a little to show that I’m not messing around as I slowly back towards the door and the scientists get up off their feet, arms stretched out, eyes shocked as one of their perceived brain washed little puppets turns on them.

“Give me your coat,” I demand of the bored one, holding my arm out for the lab coat he’s wearing. “Fucking give it to me.”

Grasping the coat in my hand, I use all of my strength to push the Indian scientist against the others, sliding Dr July’s key card into the slot once , and then once again when I’m on the other side to lock them in. I want to collapse against the wall and let out a choked sob, but I’m far from out of the woods yet, slipping on the lab coat.

I’d expected something a little more high tech from a secret research facility, but I don’t have time to admire the bland office décor- plastic laminated floors and offices behind Plexiglas as I lower my head and keep my hand wrapped firmly around the little blade. Walking past one of the rooms, I catch a glimpse of black hair in a fish tail plait.

Sliding the door open, I see that they are unmonitored. But I suppose they don’t need to be; now that they’ve been completely brainwashed.  “You need to come with me,” I say quickly to them. All of them have bandages identical to mine.

One of the girls, dark skinned and slightly overweight tips her head at me, “Why?” she asks in a calm, hollow voice, her face beatific and calm. “We have everything we need here. Harry is here.”

I fight not to scream in frustration. Maybe I should just forget it like Dr July said, chewing on my lip and praying this will work, “I know where we can go to meet the others though. Niall, Zayn, Liam, Louis. All of them.”

They’re listening now. The one who’s always standing and playing with her hair whispers in a low voice, “Oh my god. How amazing.”

“Yeah, it is isn’t?” I try to agree in a hurried voice. “But we gotta go quickly. Don’t want to miss them. This way,” turning however, I realise that my way is blocked and I collide with a body.

“Harry,” the word falls out of my mouth without even thinking. Looking at him for a moment makes me feel as if all my insides have been pulled out. He feels the same, has the same coloured eyes, those same lips, only there’s nothing alive about his face, his mouth set into a hard gash as he draws his eyes away from me and looks at the other girls before issuing them yet another command.

“Kill her.”