A hand caught his arm—firm, practiced—and pulled him sideways, breaking his grip from Alice’s before he could react. The motion was quick, efficient, and by the time he turned back, the door between them was already swinging shut.

“What the hell—” Ethan started, his voice rising as confusion snapped into something sharper. “What’s going on?”

The answer came in the form of a sharp slap on his ass, the contact abrupt and corrective rather than aggressive.

“No talking,” a voice said, already moving him forward. “Stand under the showerhead.”

Ethan felt the sting linger where the slap had landed, sharp and immediate, the kind of pain that carried a message with it. It hadn’t just been contact—it had been correction, a punishment for stepping outside a boundary he hadn’t even realized was there.

He didn’t want to be hit again.

So he moved without arguing, stepping under the showerhead as instructed, his body already beginning to follow the rhythm of the place before his thoughts could catch up.

When the water started, it fell over him in a steady, lukewarm stream—comfortable, almost deliberately so, the kind of temperature that kept him from reacting too strongly in either direction.

Then the hands came.

They worked over his body with a sponge, efficient and practiced, spreading soap across his skin without hesitation or pause. There was no awkwardness in the touch, no variation in pressure, just a methodical thoroughness that left nothing untouched, nothing overlooked.

When the woman lifted his ID tag, Ethan tensed, expecting the moment of recognition—expecting her to stop, to read it, to realize.

She didn’t.

She simply cleaned beneath it, moving the tag aside just long enough to reach the skin underneath before letting it fall back into place, her attention already shifting elsewhere.

Ethan swallowed, the thought rising up before he could stop it. He could say something. He could point it out.

He didn’t.

“Bend over,” she said.

The instruction came flat and immediate, leaving no space for explanation. Ethan hesitated for the briefest moment, the question forming and dying just as quickly.

Then he bent.

Her hands returned, continuing their work with the same detached efficiency, moving him as needed, positioning him without asking, accessing areas he would rather not think about, let alone name.

When she was finished, she dried him in the same manner—thorough, consistent, never rough, never lingering. The touch remained clinical throughout, focused entirely on completion rather than comfort, though it never crossed into deliberate pain.

When she reached the area around the tag again, she adjusted her movements slightly, careful this time, working around it with a precision that suggested awareness of the object itself, if not its meaning.

“Good Meatboy,” she said, giving him a light pat before stepping back. “Move on through that door.”

Ethan found himself wondering if Alice was going to come back for him. The thought surfaced suddenly, uninvited, pushing past everything else as the reality of where he was began to settle in. Was she going to pull him out of this? Was anyone?

For a moment, something colder took hold.

Was he going to die? Was this how Animals were prepared—cleaned, processed, moved along without question?

He forced the thought down almost as quickly as it came.

No. That wasn’t right. He had seen the Habitation Zone, knew it existed beyond this place. This wasn’t the end of anything—just a mistake. A misunderstanding in a system that moved too quickly to notice him.

One he would survive.

He stepped into the next room, his body still damp, still carrying the residue of the process he had just been through.

And then he noticed.

The reaction was immediate, undeniable.

His body had responded to the touch—unwanted, unasked for—his member rigid now in a way that made his stomach twist with a sudden, sharp embarrassment.

It didn’t feel like desire.

Just… response.

This space felt different from the others—quieter, more contained. One of many small rooms, Ethan realized, designed to offer brief privacy before the next stage of processing.

“Come, sit,” the man in the white coat said, gesturing to a chair across from him.

As Ethan stepped forward, the man’s gaze dropped briefly, taking in the state of his body, before returning to his face without comment or visible reaction.

Ethan sat, keeping silent, the earlier correction still fresh in his mind. He didn’t trust himself to speak—not yet—and instinctively moved his hands to cover himself, trying to hide the reaction his body had betrayed him with.

“Why bother?” the doctor said, almost idly. “It’s a natural response. Happens all the time.”

Ethan swallowed, the words catching before he forced them out.

“I’m not an Animal,” he said, lifting his wrist to show the green glow of his watch, then gesturing awkwardly toward the tag fixed to his chest.

The doctor leaned forward, peering at it for a moment—then broke into a loud, easy laugh that filled the room.

“Oh, you poor thing,” he said, shaking his head, the amusement clear in his tone. “Looks like you got pulled into sanitization by mistake.”

Ethan frowned, confusion cutting through the lingering tension.

“Why didn’t they notice the tag?”

The doctor leaned back in his chair, still faintly amused.

“We see hundreds of bodies every day,” he said. “No one’s checking that closely at that stage. They’re there to clean, move you along, and keep the line flowing.”

He gave a small shrug, as if the answer was obvious.

“So yeah,” he added. “It happens more than you’d think.”

“Can I go now?” Ethan asked, the question coming out more hopeful than he intended, as if saying it plainly might be enough to make it true.

The doctor shook his head, the answer immediate.

“No. The only way to exit Intake is to pass through it,” he said, as if reciting something long established, something that didn’t require further explanation.

He leaned back slightly, his tone softening just enough to pass for reassurance.

“Don’t worry. All we do now is give you a checkup. It’s free, so you might as well go with it.”

Ethan was then asked a series of questions, the doctor moving through them with the same steady efficiency he had shown from the start. There was no pause for conversation, no room for hesitation—just a measured rhythm, one question following another as if each answer slotted neatly into place before the next was already on its way.

They started simple enough. Basic details. Age. General health. Whether he’d eaten recently, whether he’d been feeling unwell, whether there was anything the staff needed to be aware of before continuing.

Then they shifted, gradually, into something more specific. Questions about his body, about how it responded, about things he wasn’t entirely sure how to answer without overthinking them.

The doctor didn’t react to any of it. He simply noted things down, occasionally glancing up, but never long enough to make it feel like he was truly looking at Ethan as a person.

By the time it was over, Ethan wasn’t entirely sure what he had said—only that he had answered everything.

The doctor made a final note, the scratch of pen against paper the only sound for a moment before he leaned back in his chair, giving Ethan a brief, assessing look that felt more procedural than personal.

“From the sounds of it, you’re a healthy thirteen-year-old boy,” he said, as if summarizing something already decided. “Next, I’ll take a blood sample, and then you can go to Habitation.”

The words landed with a strange sense of finality, as though each step had already been mapped out long before Ethan had walked into the room, and all that remained now was to follow it through to the end.

This needle didn’t hurt like the last one. The doctor worked quickly, drawing the blood with practiced ease, the process over almost before Ethan had time to brace for it.

He watched the vial fill, dark and steady, before it was sealed and set aside with the same casual efficiency as everything else.

“This would usually be sent for testing before Final Processing,” the doctor said, almost conversationally, as if explaining a routine step in a process Ethan was already part of.

He gave a small, dismissive wave of his hand.

“Or it would be, if you weren’t just an unlucky kid,” he added, the reassurance light, almost offhand. “We’ll store the data instead. It only gets used if you ever convert.”

“Conversion isn’t just a label,” he added. “It’s a status change. System-wide. Once it happens, everything about you is processed differently.”

The words lingered longer than they should have.

Not the mention of testing, or even Final Processing—but that quiet assumption buried at the end, delivered without emphasis, without concern.

At no point did he apologize. Not for the mistake, not for the process, not for any part of what had just happened.

To him, it hadn’t been a mistake worth apologizing for.

He stood slowly and turned toward the door, his movements just a fraction more deliberate than before. It had taken less than fifteen minutes—less than fifteen minutes for him to go from feeling in control to being handled, moved through a process he hadn’t understood until he was already inside it.

The thought lingered as he stepped through.

He barely had time to register the space beyond before Alice was there, closing the distance and pulling him into a tight hug.

“Oh my god,” she said, a laugh slipping into her voice as she pulled back just enough to look at him. “That was so funny.”

“Was it?” Ethan said, pushing her away gently, the tension still sitting in his shoulders. “I thought they were gonna slaughter me.”

Alice shrugged, completely unfazed, as if the idea didn’t even warrant consideration.

“Nah,” she said. “It happens all the time. Sanitization’s always been like that.”

He let out a small grunt that almost turned into a laugh, the tension easing just enough for it to slip through.

“This tag didn’t help at all?” he asked, glancing down at it, still half expecting it to mean something more than it had.

“Don’t worry,” Alice said, reaching out and giving it a light, almost playful tug.

The movement sent a sharp sting through him, and he hissed, his hand instinctively coming up as she let it fall back into place.

“Everyone else will see it,” she continued, completely unconcerned. “Intake just… doesn’t really look.”

She tilted her head slightly, studying him for a moment before her expression softened into something more familiar.

“You wanted to come here,” she added. “You can leave whenever you like—but you might as well enjoy yourself, right? You went through all that just to get here.”

She was right. If Ethan had learned anything about Alice over the past year, it was that she never spoke without meaning to. She didn’t fill silence for the sake of it, didn’t offer opinions unless she had already settled on them.

Other people saw that as quietness, or distance—something aloof and hard to read.

Ethan knew better.

She was just… considerate.

The afternoon unfolded easily after that, the tension of Intake fading into something softer, something almost disorienting in how quickly it gave way to normalcy. Alice led him first to the games room, a wide, open space filled with noise and movement, where bodies clustered in loose groups around tables and screens, the atmosphere more social than structured.

At first, it felt almost ordinary. They played a few rounds of something simple, laughing quietly between themselves, Ethan beginning to relax as the familiarity of it settled in.

But there were differences.

People drifted closer than they needed to, their presence lingering at the edges of his awareness. Hands brushed against him in passing—light, almost incidental at first, the kind of contact that could be written off as accidental if it didn’t happen again, and again, and again.

No one apologized.

No one even acknowledged it.

Alice didn’t react either. She just played, as if nothing about it was unusual, as if this was simply part of the space, something that didn’t require comment or correction.

They moved on after a while, stepping out into the Public Garden where the air felt cooler, quieter. The space opened up around them, greenery softening the edges of the facility, pathways winding between small groups of people sitting or walking without urgency.

Here, the attention was different.

A few Citizens stood out immediately—clothed, marked clearly by the glow of their watches—and as Ethan passed them, he caught the way they looked at him. Not with concern, not even curiosity. Just a kind of quiet amusement, small smiles that lingered a moment too long before they looked away.

He caught a Citizen watching him, smiling faintly—not at him, but at the situation. Like they had seen this before.

As if they understood something he didn’t.

The pool was louder.

The moment they stepped inside, the sound hit him—water, voices, movement echoing off tiled walls. Bodies pressed closer here, the space more confined, the interactions less avoidable.

They slipped into the water together, and for a while it was just that—cool relief, the weightlessness of it, the easy distraction of being somewhere different.

Then it changed.

The contact wasn’t incidental anymore.

Hands lingered when they brushed against him, touches that stayed just a fraction too long to be accidental, testing, deliberate in a way the games room hadn’t been. Someone pressed briefly against his back as they passed, another hand trailing along his side before disappearing into the crowd.

Ethan felt it all.

He didn’t react.

He didn’t pull away, didn’t confront it, didn’t even look for who it might have been. He just let it happen, letting the moments pass as they came, waiting for them to end rather than trying to stop them.

Across from him, Alice watched with a faint, knowing expression, but she didn’t step in. She didn’t tell anyone to stop, didn’t move to shield him from it.

She just let it happen.

And, slowly, Ethan began to notice something else.

No one did.

As they messed around in the pool, something warm and soft pressed against his back. It stole his breath. A light giggle sounded behind as a female Animal pressed her breasts against his skin then her arms slipped around him, slow and unhurried.

Fingers traced idly across his stomach, as if they had every right to be there. Then she was gone. A faint giggle lingered in her wake.

They watched the woman as she moved away, slipping back into the crowd as easily as she had appeared, her presence already fading into the noise and motion around them. The contact she’d left behind seemed to mean nothing to her—just another moment, already forgotten.

“I think she liked you,” Alice said, a small smile playing at the corner of her lips.

Ethan let out a short breath, somewhere between disbelief and irritation.

“Is that what you feel every day at school?” he asked, glancing at her, the question landing heavier than he intended.

Alice nodded easily.

“Yep,” she said. “Not so funny when it’s done to you, right?”

Ethan turned fully toward her now, the edge in his expression sharper.

“I’ve never touched you like that,” he said.

“Yeah, but you’ve watched the other boys get handsy,” she said, her tone steady, not accusatory—just stating it plainly. “You could have stopped it.”

Ethan hesitated, the answer catching slightly as he tried to frame it in a way that didn’t sound as weak as it suddenly felt.

“I didn’t think you minded,” he said.

Alice held his gaze for a moment, something quieter settling into her expression now, less teasing, more matter-of-fact.

“Nobody ever does.”

“But I know you’re not like those other boys,” she said, stepping closer and drawing him in before he could react, her arms wrapping around him with an ease that made the movement feel practiced rather than sudden.

She pressed against him, holding him there for a moment as if anchoring the conversation in something physical, something steadier than the words that had come before.

“You’re much nicer than everyone else in class.”

“Yeah… I couldn’t do anything to hurt you,” he said, his voice tightening slightly as the words came out, carrying more weight than he’d intended.

He held her there for a moment longer, the closeness grounding him even as everything else about the day still felt unsettled.

“You’re my best friend.”

Alice leaned in before he could fully process what he’d said, closing the small distance between them and pressing a quick, light kiss to his lips before pulling back just as easily.

The movement was casual, almost matter-of-fact, as if it didn’t carry the weight Ethan immediately felt settle in his chest.

“We’ve been more than that for months,” she said, studying him with that same steady certainty she always seemed to have. “You’re just too polite to act on it.”

Ethan lingered in the pool for a moment after Alice climbed out, watching as she shook the water from her body without bothering to dry herself. Droplets scattered across the tiles as she moved, and no one reacted—not a glance, not a second look. A wet body was still just a body in this place, no more noteworthy than anything else.

He pushed himself out eventually, following after her at a slower pace, the air cooler against his skin now as he made his way toward the dining hall.

The space was already filling when he arrived. Food had been laid out in a long buffet, metal tins lined neatly along the counter, each one filled with simple vegetarian dishes. Tongs and spoons rested inside them, ready to be used, the setup efficient and impersonal in the same way everything else here seemed to be.

He found Alice at the back of the queue and slipped in beside her, the rhythm of the place guiding him into position without needing to think about it.

“Sorry,” he said after a moment, his voice quieter now. “For not noticing.”

Alice glanced at him, her expression softening just slightly before she gave a small shrug.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I like teasing you.”

Dinner was better than he expected. They sat shoulder to shoulder on the long benches as other Animals and Blue Orphans filled in around them, the space closing naturally until there was no real separation between anyone.

It was… comfortable.

Not in the way he was used to, but in something simpler. Everyone was at the same level here. No layers, no barriers, nothing hidden and nothing judged, at least not openly. The usual rules he’d grown up with just didn’t seem to apply in the same way.

At some point, he stopped noticing it. The nudity, the closeness, the constant presence of other bodies—it all faded into the background, losing the edge it had carried when he first arrived.

Conversation took its place instead. Voices, laughter, the rhythm of people talking around him became easier to focus on than anything else.

The attention didn’t stop entirely. People still noticed him, still drifted a little closer than necessary, their curiosity lingering in small, quiet ways.

But it didn’t feel as sharp anymore.

Just… part of being there.

The evening settled into something quieter across the Habitation Zone. The garden, which had felt open and charged during the day, softened as Citizen access closed, the atmosphere shifting into something calmer, more contained. Without that outside presence, the space felt less performative, less reactive—like it had returned to its natural state.

Younger Animals drifted toward the Blues, falling into easy games and quiet companionship, while the adults dispersed into their own routines, moving through the space without hesitation or self-consciousness. Whatever boundaries existed elsewhere didn’t seem to follow them here.

No one reacted.

Somewhere across the garden, a figure passed through the edge of the space. People shifted subtly, not looking directly, but making room all the same. Ethan didn’t understand why—but he noticed it.

No one made a scene.

Eventually, a quiet order passed through the area, subtle but understood. The children were told to follow curfew, their movements shifting as they began to make their way back toward the cells for the night. Ethan and Alice were no exception, and he found himself guided along with them, carried by the same steady rhythm that had shaped everything else that day.

He was given a cell of his own.

It was simple—clean, functional, and mostly empty—but not entirely. On a small shelf sat a single photograph, the only personal thing in the room.

Ethan picked it up, studying the image. A woman he didn’t recognize looked back at him, fully clothed, her watch glowing green. A Citizen.

He remembered what Alice had said earlier—about Blue Orphans living in the spaces left behind.

When the staff member noticed the photograph, she stepped forward and took it from his hands, handling it with a careful, almost practiced gentleness before folding it once, neatly.

“What will you do with it?” Ethan asked, watching her.

“Memorabilia is disposed of,” she said. There was a slight pause, just enough to suggest she understood how that might sound. “The Animal this belonged to was processed this morning.”

Ethan frowned, the image still fresh in his mind.

“Can’t you send it back to the person in the picture?”

The staff member shook her head.

“Not without knowing who it was,” she replied simply. Then, after a brief glance toward the door, her tone shifted back to something more procedural. “Now, in you get. Citizen or not, you’ll be punished if we catch you out after curfew.”

Before the door could close, Alice slipped inside, moving quickly enough that the motion felt almost practiced, like something she’d done before.

The staff member noticed. Her gaze shifted from the doorway to Alice, then to Ethan, the moment stretching just long enough to register as deliberate rather than accidental.

For a second, it felt like something might be said.

It wasn’t.

She turned away instead, letting the door slide shut without comment, the decision made as quietly as everything else in this place.

“Hey,” Ethan said, stepping closer to the bed, his voice quieter now. “You okay?”

Alice didn’t answer the question. She was already moving, already decided.

“On the bed,” she said, simple and direct.

Ethan blinked, caught off guard. “What?”

She reached for his wrist and guided it to the scanner beside the door, pressing it firmly against the panel. The mechanism responded immediately, a heavy clunk echoing through the room as the lock engaged.

The sound seemed louder than it should have been.

Final.

Alice turned back to him, her expression steady, leaving no room for misinterpretation.

“I’m not letting someone else have you first.”

She held his gaze for a moment longer, then repeated it, quieter this time but no less certain.

“On the bed.”