Discussion of enslavement and torture.
I have made a tiny change to the first mention of Littleport House in Chapter 16, making it clear that Summer knows something about the house’s history.
S E V E N T E E N
All Our Lessons Start To Look Like Weapons
2024 January 11
Thursday
Persephone’s first three days at Littleport House had been low-key. Between the guards and the handful of domestics Elle employed there, most of the household tasks like cooking, cleaning, and dragging fifty-year-old fencing practice equipment out of an attic were already being taken care of. That left her with an awful lot of free time, because even a very large house only had so many rooms to explore, and even an very eager trans girl can only do voice training exercises for so long each day.
Once a security expert named Christine had checked her accounts for signs of surveillance, Persephone was able to access her drafts and notes on a brand-new tablet and resume translating Lysistrata. The Lamberts’ private library even turned out to have a couple of useful volumes, although being a stone’s throw away from the collections at Cambridge of all places and yet unable to leave to access them was a subtle torture.
Actually, the enforced idleness was starting to get to her a bit—Persephone had been itching for something active to do. Not Summer, though. The older woman seemed content to curl up in the armchair across from Persephone and read what she vaguely described as “web fiction” all day. In the evenings they watched movies together, and at night she regrettably slept alone.
But two sports bags full of brand-new fencing gear had finally arrived last night, so before breakfast the next morning, Summer showed up in Persephone’s bedroom in a sports bra, tank top, and panties, as instructed.
Persephone did her best to be totally normal about this.
They pulled on first the knee socks, then the breeches, as Persephone explained how to wear them and what they were for. But then she stopped as she pulled out the next piece of gear.
“Next is…boob armor?” Summer said, startling Persephone out of her reverie. She lifted her own version of it, which had much deeper cups molded into it.
“Um, well, basically,” Persephone said as her brain restarted. “It’s properly called a ‘chest protector’; it shields your ribs, sternum, and breasts. It’s, um, it’s mandatory for women; men can wear one, but many don’t. And Uncle Albert didn’t approve of them, so…” Her fingers trembled a little as she turned hers over. “I’ve…never actually worn one before.”
Persephone had known it would be in the bag; she’d ordered it, after all. Since she wasn’t going to be competing for a while, this seemed like a good time to get used to a new piece of equipment. But the reality of holding it in her hands…
She’d spent years seeing other women put them on, take them off, adjust them, complain about how poorly the pre-molded breast shapes fit their actual curves, all the while feeling a strange envy that she’d rationalized away as annoyance that her uncle’s stubborn, pointless machismo was keeping her from taking a sensible precaution. But now, holding her very own example of the genre in her hands, it was blatantly obvious that it’d been gender envy.
She bit her lip and glanced up at Summer, who was giving her an encouraging smile. Summer understood; she always did.
The straps and fasteners were pretty similar to the bras she’d tried on in Summer’s flat. Carefully, Persephone pulled the straps over her shoulders, then reached behind herself to fasten the back. She shifted it around a little, settling her little breast buds in the cups. There was still plenty of space in them; she expected to grow into this piece of gear, and she definitely didn’t want it pinching or compressing anything when she was still so sensitive.
Then she shifted it. And shifted it some more. And tugged on the top underneath. And shifted it back. And looked down at it, at the round plastic cups protruding from her chest.
She looked back up at Summer with a nervous giggle. “Oh my god,” she breathed.
“What is it?” Summer asked.
Persephone giggled more. “The girls—“ the giggle turned to full-blown laughter, “the-the girls were right.”
“Right about what?”
“The—these things f-fit terribly!” And she dissolved into helpless peals of laughter, laughter that had tears streaming down her face, laughter that was at least half euphoria and maybe a little bit about Summer’s confusion.
A few minutes later, with uniforms on, masks down, and weapons in hand, Persephone caught a glimpse of a lady fencer in the mirror. Her heart leapt when she realized it was her. But she had a student to teach—best not dally.
“Follow me,” she said, and she led Summer out of the bedroom, her grin hidden behind her mask.
* * *
Summer had assumed that her first fencing lesson would involve, you know, fencing. Instead, she’d spent barely long enough holding her sword for Persephone to explain its strange grip—“Usually a beginner would start with a basic French grip like mine,” she’d told her, “but the pistol grip was originally designed for fencers with missing fingers, so it seemed a good choice for you”—and then they’d set their weapons aside to discuss safety rules. And after that? Footwork. Over an hour spent shuffling forward and back in an awkward half-sideways stance that Persephone somehow managed to make graceful. By the end of it, Summer was exhausted, but Persephone hopped on a fucking treadmill for “conditioning”. Summer stayed for a minute or two to gawk at Persephone jogging in that bloody stance, occasionally turning around to do it all backwards, before she shook her head and said she was going to hit the showers.
“I’ll meet you at breakfast,” Persephone said, only a little winded. Fucking astonishing.
Summer went back to her bedroom, stripped off the uniform and the sweat-soaked workout clothes underneath, and stepped into the en-suite, hoping the hot water would ease some of her aches. She didn’t even know she had some of the muscles that were hurting now.
When they’d taken their masks off, though, it’d been clear that Persephone was having the time of her life. It reminded Summer of the first time she’d dyed her hair black as a girl—a different color for a different gender but the same routine. Recontextualizing an activity you’d done before, making it a part of your new self.
Speaking of which, she noticed as she blow-dried her hair afterwards that her roots were starting to show. She’d last re-dyed them shortly before the gala, so the usual three weeks was coming up fast. She’d have to ask Trev to get some dye for her.
She pulled on a black cami, a gauzy black blouse, a colorful tartan maxi skirt, and the boots she’d worn out of her flat—the new wardrobe was a bit generic at this stage—and headed out to find them.
God, it was so fucking strange being here of all places.
Summer’s graduation had been delayed more than a year by the fuck-up with her GRC, and during those months she’d had sponsor-level access but far fewer responsibilities than the actual sponsors did. She’d killed some of that time by digging deep into the Hall’s archives. For the most part she’d focused on the histories of girls in the program, trying to learn sponsoring techniques, but occasionally she stumbled upon older files. And it was there that a photograph had caught her eye.
It was one of a series of close-ups, each showing a name scratched into a wooden bedframe. In Grandmother’s day, the occupants of what would become Basement Bedroom 8 had taken to recording their names on the side of the bed that faced away from the surveillance camera. After Aunt Bea freed her, the last woman to scratch her name into that bedframe had carefully photographed every one of them—especially the handful where a girl had crossed out her original name and added a new one beside it. The true names of most of the girls of Grandmother’s era had died with their owners, but these precious few had survived. And one of the names meticulously documented in the photographs was ‘Summer’.
Summer had accidentally named herself after a Sister she didn’t even know she’d had. A Sister she would never meet; a Sister who’d been stolen from her.
Through the crossed-out deadname beside it, after a few sleepless nights of searching, Summer had been able to link her unintended namesake to other documents. In May 1999, she’d been jailed in Hull for violating an ASBO by begging, and a few days after her release she’d been kidnapped off the streets. She’d been sponsored—if you could call what they did in those days ‘sponsoring’—by a woman named Esther. She’d been delivered in August 2000 to a man with the last name ‘Lambert’ at an estate in Cambridgeshire. And as far as anyone could tell, she’d died less than a year later, because that’s when the same man had purchased a replacement.
And now the living Summer was here, in the place where the dead Summer had probably met her end. Had she cooked in the kitchen that was making their meals? Had she served drinks in the parlor the PMCs had taken as their rec room? Had she stared longingly at the woods outside Summer’s bedroom window, dreaming of escape? Summer didn’t know, and she didn’t care to ask the one woman who might have answers. So instead she tried not to dwell on it.
Right. Trev. Hair dye. Do that instead.
She found Trev in the first place she looked: the security room. They were sitting in front of a bank of video screens, control panels, and computer displays not terribly dissimilar to Dorley Hall’s, but that’s where the resemblance ended. Littleport House’s security room was small and utilitarian. No comfy couches, no meeting table, no beanbag chairs or kitschy mugs.
And the images on the monitors were different too. Many of them pointed outside the building; others covered interior hallways and and common spaces—Persephone was visible practicing on one, and a cook could be seen preparing breakfast on another—but there were no images of bedrooms.
And of course there were no Sisters in this security room. Although there was Trev, a trans person who Elle had indicated knew a few things about Dorley Hall. Summer had been wondering what their story was.
“Have a good workout?” the enby in question asked.
Of course they’d known she was coming; they were literally watching the cameras. “It was bloody exhausting,” Summer said. “I don’t know how she does it.”
“Practice,” Trev said. “Lots of practice. Until she can do things like that without wearing herself out.”
Summer took a seat next to Trev and manipulated the controls—they were the same as Dorley’s—pulling up the image of Persephone on the center screen. She was practicing with her sword and a target dummy, striking at the same spot on its shoulder, sometimes slowly, sometimes faster than her eye could follow. Her movements were fluid, natural. Beautiful. “She’s so fast,” Summer breathed.
“And she has great form,” they agreed. “Never off-balance, never overextended. It’s a shame that fencing isn’t a useful combat discipline—too sportified. Bet she’d be a great martial artist, though, if she ever wanted to learn something more practical.”
“I’ve seen her muscles, of course,” Summer said, “but I haven’t seen her in motion like this.”
“I guess you would’ve. You’ve been sponsoring her, right?”
Summer shook her head. “She’s not a Dorley girl; I’m not a sponsor.”
“So?” Trev asked. “I wasn’t a Dorley girl either; doesn’t mean Val didn’t sponsor me.”
Summer didn’t recognize the name—until suddenly she did. “Wait, ‘Val’? Not Aunt Bea’s Valerie?”
”Valérie,” Trev corrected her. “And yes, the very same.”
“We found her?”
“It’s more that she found me.”
And so Trev told her the story. A horror story about a house not unlike this one, haunted by a ghoul Summer was pleased to hear was now dead. But also a story with a few heroes, including Valérie Barbier, the woman who had sponsored Aunt Bea far more than the one who’d been assigned to the job, but perhaps none more than Trev themself, however modest they were about it.
But it was a story that left Summer with an unanswered question. “So after all of that, why didn’t you just return to being a man?”
Trev shrugged. “I did at first. But I kept putting off the facial surgery, and eventually I realized it was because I didn’t want to go all the way back to what I’d been. Being a woman really didn’t work for me—when I saw myself in the mirror, I wanted to rip the flesh off my bones with my bare hands—but…” They hesitated. “I’m not asking for your life story here, but when you were a man, what did people think of how you looked?”
Summer blinked. “I mean, I was maybe a little more ‘cute’ than ‘handsome’, but I was tall and carried myself in a pretty masculine way. I never wanted for attention.” Her jaw tightened a little; the boy she’d been had definitely taken advantage of that.
“Well, I was a pretty boy,” Trev said. “That’s why the old woman didn’t just kill me, right? She said that I had ‘potential’.”
Summer flinched; she’d thought the same about a boy now and again. Occupational hazard.
Trev giggled. “I think everyone I’ve said that to on Dorley staff has pulled the oh-no-I’ve-done-that face,” they said. “Anyway—normal people didn’t quite see it the way you do, but they still saw it. And they’d expect me to be embarrassed about it and to compensate by trying to be more manly. Doubly so as a gay pretty boy. And so I did that, but, like, in my heart of hearts? I liked being pretty; I just hated that everyone else was such a prick about it.”
They held up a finger, flipped a couple switches, checked a screen, spoke quietly into a radio. Summer used the moment to check on Persephone; she was heading back to her bedroom, apparently done practicing for the day.
“But then I got this new face,” Trev continued eventually. “And once the bloody volleyballs were out of my chest, once the T put on a bit of muscle again, I realized that it freed me from all that ‘pretty boy’ shit. Queer men read me as so deep into ‘twink’ that I’ve transcended ‘man’ entirely. Other queers love just seeing me around. And the straights? They’re all so baffled that I can get away with anything I want.” They shrugged. “So Dorothy Marsden and the Silver River body shop—that’s their surgical facility,” he explained at Summer’s confused glance, “—get about negative twenty stars on their Yelp reviews, but I did get something out of it, at least. Besides a dozen self-appointed big sisters in the sponsor corps, that is.” They turned away from the monitors to peer at her. “Honestly, I’m surprised this is all new to you. Been living under a rock since you left?”
Summer shook her head. “I talk to Tabby all the time; she just knows I don’t want to talk shop.”
“Tabby’s your sponsor?” Summer nodded, and Trev smiled. “She’s a good one,” they said. “Took me by the hand the moment I arrived after the escape. Found me some clothes, told me about her boyfriend—you know Levi?”
Summer smiled. “Yeah. Haven’t met in person yet, but he pops in during calls sometimes. Seems like a good bloke.”
“He is,” Trev said. “We hit the pubs together sometimes when I’m in town. Anyway, what’s she like as a sponsor?”
“Wicked smart,” Summer said. “An expert in the interpersonal dynamics in the program, with a gift for designing new interventions. Analytical. A theorist. You should see the reports she writes; they usually have a glossary at the end.”
“No, I mean, what’s it like to be one of her girls?”
“Oh.” She leaned back in her chair, thinking. “Tell the truth, I’m not the best person to ask, because our sponsor bond wasn’t typical. She and I built trust much faster than usual , and so about five months in, I just—“ she gestured as if handing something over, “—put myself completely into her hands. And then she shaped me into exactly the woman she wanted me to be.”
“Shaped you? How?”
Summer leaned against the console. “Okay, so, let’s say you’re a sponsor. It’s October—intake season—and you’ve been handed the keys to a shiny new boy. You interact with him in the cell for about a week, mostly just trying to provoke him into revealing levers. You introduce him to the other boys so you can see how he responds to them. You show him his new bedroom, and then you bring him back to his cell to stew. Right?”
“Sure.” Trev was leaning in too; they hadn’t experienced this themself, she realized.
“And then you go upstairs and write up your intake plan. In it, you define forty ‘endpoints’—long-term goals for the girl you want her to be when she graduates. About half of the endpoints are boilerplate; the other half are specific to the boy’s offenses and their underlying causes, as best you can ascertain them. But you barely know the boy at this point, right? So they’re almost placeholders—you’re expected to revise them every six months until the subject graduates. And some of the endpoints are stretch goals—like, every girl has ‘willing to join the staff’, but maybe a quarter actually hit that endpoint—so you’re really only expected to hit about thirty of your forty endpoints, after revising them.”
“And Tabby did better with you?”
The smile that crossed Summer’s face was maybe a little proud. “Tabby never revised any of my endpoints, and hit thirty-nine of forty. And some of them were incredibly specific. Like, ‘identifies as transgender’ was one of my endpoints. No sponsor had ever attempted to make a girl trans or cis before, but Tabby succeeded with me.”
Trev frowned. “How do you make a Dorley girl be trans?”
“Hundreds of interventions throughout my time in the program, some of them big but most of them small. When my face was sore from electro, she told me that was something lots of trans women experience. When I struggled with voice training, she said it was something many trans women find very difficult. When I started to feel euphoria, I was discovering why trans women on the outside thought it was worth it. Over and over, often several times per day, all aimed at making me see myself in other trans women.” She traced one of the white flowers on her arm. “And, well, here I am.”
“Here you are,” Trev said thoughtfully, fiddling with the controls. “Does it bother you? Knowing that you were made to be like this, instead of choosing it?”
“I did choose,” Summer said. “I chose to trust that Tabby would make me with love and care. And she did well by me—when I left Dorley, I settled into Edinburgh’s trans community and it became my whole world. I wouldn’t have had that if she hadn’t made me trans.” She chuckled. “Besides, it’s one more thing that makes me like other trans girls, right? They don’t generally choose to be trans or cis; they just choose whether or not to hide it.”
“Looks like your girl’s heading to breakfast,” Trev said, speaking a few more words into a radio before they turned back to her. “It all still seems a little…disquieting.”
“Things that happen in torture basements probably ought to,” Summer said. “In any case—what was it like to be sponsored by Tabby? She played me like a violin and I loved her for it. Still do. When I was a boy, the people around me were resources to exploit; now they’re friends to cherish. She gave me this life, and I can never thank her enough for it.” Summer slid them a note. “I should get to breakfast. Can you order this hair dye for me?”
“Sure,” Trev said, picking it up and reaching for a laptop. Summer headed for the door.
“Miss Nesbitt?”
She paused, her hand on the knob. “Summer’s fine.”
“Summer, then. You said you hit thirty-nine of forty endpoints. If you don’t mind me asking…what’s the one you missed?”
A hesitation. “I hit most of the reform endpoints,” she said. “Feeling regret and choosing to change; being safe for people similar to my victims; being unlikely to relapse even in similar circumstances. But I never forgave myself for what I did, and I don’t imagine I ever will.”
* * *
