No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
For whom the bell tolls – John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)
One
Nell woke before the daily siren, at 05:45; she knew this from the heads-up-display – the HUD – that was present from the moment she regained consciousness after waking up – it was a simple HUD, only displaying the current time in the style of a 24-hour digital clock in the upper left quadrant of her vision. Her eyes, she noticed, were heavy; she couldn’t remember dreaming anything strange, but she never put much effort into recalling her dreams. Her hand instinctively made to stop the itch that was at her chin, but it felt like she was stroking a pine tree; she needed to shave, and the sensation of touching her face sickened her. She had roughly 870 seconds of isolation before she would be made to undergo her daily labour, but this rare moment of peace would not be spent in the cocooned confines of her sheets and duvets, but with the intensely intimate arrangement of blades that caressed her face more than she did.
Opening her eyes, the lights of Nell’s sleeping unit felt like a million white daggers puncturing holes in her retinas. Covering her eyes, she stretched out her right hand to the dormant console, pressed a small button on the right side, and waited – the console hummed to life, and she then held down a bigger button; her mattress began to glide out of the sleeping unit with a soft whir until she was spared from the daggers of light. The rest of the room was in total blackness, so, carefully feeling her way, she walked to the wall, found the light switch, and flicked it.
All at once, her room had become a greyscale landscape of darker shapes on a dirty-white background, with a pure white stream of light seeping in from between the blinds, courtesy of the rising sun. The furniture – a sofa, coffee table, and sleeping unit – had no life to them, but were functional. The sofa was a two-seater, with the coffee table sat dutifully in front of it, harbouring a thick-dark layer of dust on its surface; the sleeping unit’s technical name was a Magnetic Resonance Imaging Sleeping Unit – MRISU – and was a bulky, hollow, cylindrical vessel containing a mattress and 2 pillows. Behind the MRISU, was the door to the bathroom, so, with the dire need to make herself presentable, Nell began her day.
It was a serviceable space, but sanitary it was not: the shower cubicle had many abyssal spots of mould, the toilet was stained a putrid mid-grey from the mixture of limescale and faeces, the sink looked dishevelled and worn, the cabinet on the wall was loose, and the mirror had cracked down the middle. Nell sat down and relieved herself, and then washed her hands and face; she was a taller girl, and as most people were, she was scarily skinny, with very prominent bones – hers were especially prominent around the eyes and cheeks. Her dad’s skin was darker, and her mum was lighter, so hers was tonally on the darker end. Her hair was black as though kissed by Nyx herself and it curled slightly around her shoulders – the absolute maximum hair length for anyone deemed ‘male’. Standing and properly examining herself in the mirror, it was hard to argue that she had been neglecting herself: her eyes were a bruised grey-black mesh of darkened sockets with irises and pupils that were like beads of onyx; her facial hair had become unkempt, scraggly, and it felt like the sound chalk makes on a blackboard; her lips had scabbed over because she couldn’t seem to stop biting them, and her teeth were very grey with plaque.
She jolted when she processed the omnipresent time on her HUD: 05:52; 8 minutes. She hurriedly grabbed a tub of shaving cream, a brush, and her razor from the cabinet – coating the brush liberally in the cream, she dabbed and covered her entire face in it. She picked up her razor, and with the precision of a painter, guided the razor across her face until she was smooth. Turning the tap on, Nell washed the rest of her cream off her face, then immediately retrieved her toothbrush and paste, and hastily brushed her teeth vigourously. She checked herself over, and she certainly looked better, but she wasn’t sure if she felt that way.
As she left the bathroom, it was 05:58: 2 minutes left. She gathered her labour uniform – a stark white shirt that seemed radiate its own light, black trousers, and accompanying black-laced fragmas. She looked as much as herself as she could, as ‘men’ were prohibited from wearing skirts, but that didn’t stop her feeling like she was merely an imposter posing as a woman.
Standing in front of her door, the siren finally sounded. It was a shrill, piercing caterwaul, with a pitch so high it was almost imperceptible by human hearing – almost. The sound was so viscerally violent, it seemed as though it were coming from inside Nell, as if her blood, organs, tissue, and muscles were rejecting her, demanding her to get out of this terrible body she inhabited. Fighting through the pain, she opened the door and stood at attention in the corridor.
Nell’s room was number 16 of 24 on the ground floor of the Greenwich Military Estate; rooms 1-12 on the left-wing, and 13-24 on the right-wing. Despite being only 5 seconds late to the siren’s song, she was one of the last people present; her neighbour across the corridor, number 15, a boy she hadn’t ever spoken to despite seeing him every morning, had not come out; the siren had been wailing for 10 seconds now.
A spike of anxiety shot through her, and she chanced a sly look down the corridor towards the stairs, to number 11 – to her relief, Grace, her best friend, was at attention. As she recentred herself back to her neutral stare to her parallel neighbour, which had still not opened, the siren finally slept. This silence, however, was soon filled by a unanimous dread, with the entrance of Major Mackie; his boots, steel-toed and heavy, exhumed intimidation as he marked the building as his territory. He took a sharp left, and started towards rooms 1 and 2, his thunderous steps trailing behind him like kite tails. Beginning with room 1 he turned to the boy outside its door.
“Hefford, Fredrick” he proclaimed in a deep basal tone.
“Present, Major” the boy attempted to respond in kind, trying his best not to piss himself. The Major observed him up and down, while Fredrick attempted to maintain a charade of masculinity, as he bored his gaze into the Major’s chin. Satisfied, the Major turned 180 degrees to number 2 and called her name.
“Jenson, Mary” he called.
“Present, Major” and she responded. Just like with Fredrick, Major Mackie observed her as well.
“Your skirt is too short and your collar untidy, Jenson. Do you want people thinking you’re a whore?” he asked plainly. Mary corrected herself dutifully, pulling her skirt down from below her knees to entirely cover her ankles, such that it was barely an inch above the ground, then straightened up her collar.
“No, Sir. Thank you, Sir.” Mackie carried on his inspections all down the left-wing. When he reached number 11 just before the stairs, he turned to Grace and simply called her by her first name, to which she simply nodded, and that was enough.
With each room the Major passed, Nell’s heart ran faster. When he finally reached room 15 and saw that, after 6 minutes since the siren wailed, there was still no one there, he took out a key fob and waved it over the door handle; it unlocked and he entered without a word, slamming the door behind him. Time stalled whilst Nell stiffened her neck to maintain her neutral stare at the door; liked Fredrick before her however, this façade was fast fading, her heart threatening to burst out of her chest. Major Mackie finally left number 15 and spoke in code to his radio: “DRMC-G-G:15”. Without missing a beat, he finally turned to Nell.
The man was immense, standing over 6 feet tall, and with his pitch-black leather trench coat against his pearlescent white skin, he looked more monster than human.
“Clavel, Edward.” The daily use of Nell’s deadname garnered some chuckles from the other residents; her choosing of a new name and identity was of public knowledge amongst the students and staff of the Greenwich Military Estate: bar Grace, Nell was the only person that Mackie ever referred to by their first name.
“Present.” That was all Nell said, no honourifics, no titles, no deference; Mackie did not take kindly to this irreverence, however. The Major grabbed her by the cheeks and forced her eyes to his.
“Present to whom?” he growled
“To you.”
“And what, Edward, am I?”
“A Major.”
“Correct” he snarled. He released her cheeks and then with his left hand backhanded her, and a wrenching ‘crack’ followed. Nell’s mouth filled with the sickly-sweet taste of iron, as she felt a tooth fly out of its socket, and lodge itself in her throat. She doubled over, reaching her fingers down her throat, hacking and spluttering until she vomited out an incisor along with what little food she ate yesterday, alongside a pool of black viscous blood. The air had been knocked out of her, and her breathing was erratic. She had accidentally bitten on her tongue, and the Major’s strike could be felt through her skull, reverberating like an intentionally off-tuned piano.
“Next time, you will remember the rankings of your superiors, Edward. Now: try again”. Nell wiped her mouth, gathered herself, and stood at attention.
“Prebent… Mayvor” she slurred; this induced yet more laughter from the rest of the students. Satisfied, Mackie left Nell to deal with her mouth, imperceptible tears rolling down her grey face.
With registration complete, Mackie returned to the centre of the hallway.
“Labour today is log-chopping. You know the drill: left-wing first, then right. Hurry up.”
“Yes, Major!” the students affirmed. The Major finally left them as he walked up stairs to the upper floor, to register the older students.
Two
Making her way outside, Nell saw Grace standing on the work-yard, waiting for her; she had a three-quarts empty pack of tissues. She offered one to Nell, and she took it, stuffing it up into the new gap Mackie had created in her jaw. The work-yard was an old field, about the size of a football field set in the old Greenwich Park behind the Old Naval Academy, transformed from a luscious green space thriving in the dense concrete jungle of London, to a dead gravel covered plain.
The white sun was sweltering, even in the early morning hours, and working in clothes that fully covered their extremities amplified the heat further. They worked in pairs: Grace would lug log after log over to Nell, who would then bring down a hefty axe onto the log, splitting it in two as though the chopping was an art. They would then take one half each and chuck them onto the back of a car trailer. The monotonous rhythm of gather-chop-dump was sung in vocal silence, but somehow, Nell and Grace always found ways to make it fun: they’d make small gestures to silently race to see who could chuck their half in the fastest, what the heaviest log Grace could carry, and how accurate Nell’s swing could get when the log was smaller.
Morning labours took up 1 hour and 45 minutes every morning on schooldays and started at 06:15: they took up 2 hours on non-school days but started at 07:00 instead; today was Saturday, so they started earlier. After their labours concluded, the students had an hour to wash, dress into clean ones, and eat; this one-hour period of relative freedom was one of the few times Nell and Grace were able to catch-up during the day.
“Fanks for the tifsue” Nell said when they were clear of the work-yard, their tongue not yet fully recovered from the swelling.
“S’fine” Grace mumbled. Grace was a small girl, with off-white hair, and dark-grey eyes, her almost translucent skin stretched taut around her arms and legs; she barely spoke, and when she did, it was in half-baked sentences and mumbles. She was the daughter of Major Mackie, the only reason that she was immune from the laughing and snickering that followed Nell like a bad smell. The pair agreed that they felt closer to sisters than friends, as their birthdays fell on the same day, the 16th of April; today was the 15th.
“How are you, uh… feebing about tomorrow?” Nell asked tentatively, as she followed Grace into her room, which was identical to Nell’s; Grace took herself to behind her MRISU and redressed.
“Bad” she said plainly.
“You’ll be okay” Nell tried to reassure.
“Won’t be if you aren’t there.” Grace was a girl of few emotions, only really getting excited over food – which to her credit was something everyone was excited over – but she also wore her feelings for Nell on her sleeve, which was something Nell cherished about her more than anything; Grace was never embarrassed by her.
Grace came back dressed in her uniform. Nell hugged her, and Grace, with what little strength she had, hugged her back. Nell noticed that Grace had elected to wear trousers for school today, a choice that, if she weren’t the Major’s daughter, would be mockable at best, and a few good beatings at worst.
“Breakfast.” Grace stated
“I need to get dressed first”, Nell replied before leaving to walk down the corridor to her room, trying to ignore the smirking and laughing of her classmates that hung around her, thinking about how, if she had a skirt, and wore it, her punishments would go far beyond beating.
Three
Nell rejoined Grace in the work-yard, and not wanting to miss one more minute of breakfast, Grace led them towards the central school building: a minute walk from their boarding house, the schoolhouse was a large light-grey cube consisting of 3 stories and had all the character of expired milk. For Nell, the schoolhouse was less inviting than the idea of doing hard labour all day.
Checkpoints lined the only entrance to the building, and each was manned by soldiers armed with semi-automatic assault rifles, and along the roofs, several snipers maintained constant vigil through the all-seeing eyes of their scopes. Reaching a checkpoint, the girls were led single file into the Dining Hall: much like the building it resided in, it was a drab space, made up of 5 rows of tables, most with foldable legs and foldable chairs: 3 sat side-by-side in a row – the Lesser Tables –, there was a single horizontal table at the far end of the room that almost joined the 3 Lesser tables – the Upper Table – and 1 other horizontal table on a raised platform above that; this table was ornate and wooden, and it had seats with cushioned chairs: this was the Grand Table and other than it, there was no fanfare in the room, just windows.
Nell and Grace sat on the centre table among the Lesser Tables – these ones were those in secondary education. They watched as the staff sat atop at the Grand Table, and what few students there were in tertiary education sit at the Upper Table. As customary, the staff and teachers received their food first, and simply knowing Nell was in the same room as what they were about to eat made her salivate: plates of fried sausages, bacon, and eggs from the farms in Belfast alongside dishes of fatty salty butter, was accompanied by expertly grown and cultivated loaves of bread from Cardiff, and was to be washed down with the crisp highland nectar that was Edinburgh’s water. Next, the Upper Table received theirs, which, by comparison, was laughable: wheat biscuit cereal, and milk. Whilst this by no means was a legendary meal, as to what Nell and Grace’s lot were given, it was outright divine: for their breakfast, Nell, Grace, and their cohort, each received 2 slices of lightly moulded bread, lumpy milk, and half a carrot, but this didn’t stop them from wolfing all of it down ravenously, despite how sick it would make them.
At the Grand Table, Major Mackie sat near to the centre with other high officers. He sat next to Colonel Walden: despite his age of 68, Walden was a hulking behemoth of a man, standing clear of 6.5 feet, and with arms the width of a baby’s torso and legs to match. At Greenwich Military Estate, Colonel Walden was king, his word law, and his presence divine. Once everyone had eaten, he stood and addressed his subordinates:
“All rise!” he commanded, and hundred odd scraping of chairs and stands of attention was the reply.
“As you know, our morning assembly is conducted every day to both remind and motivate you on the state of our society and modern world.” Nell, despite having heard the same speech every day for 5 years, was always anxious whenever the Colonel spoke of their history.
“50 years ago, on the 16th of April 2025, the world slept. All 8 billion people, be they awake or asleep, would be taken into the most heavenly and brightest of dreams the world ever knew. Long forgotten to the world, this was the last time any of the human populous was to see colour, for when the survivors of the Colourful Dream awoke, they found themselves in this greyscale hell we reside in today. The Dream wiped out 90% of the global populous, and lawlessness took hold. Eventually, through our esteemed military, strong government, and establishment of order, our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was reformed into the United Nation of Integrated Britain. Our UNIB’s ferociousness in this culled world has allowed us to endure as a people, and everyone standing here today, should be honoured to be born into this country! Honour to the United Nation!”
“Honour to the United Nation!” the hall chorused.
“Tomorrow is a momentous day for all our Secondary students. Every year, on the anniversary of the Colourful Dream and the Grey Awakening, all aged 16 and above that have not yet been assigned a future, will be. I look forward to welcoming you into our country’s continued success” and, at that, the Colonel sat.
Grace gave an anxious look to Nell, to which she reciprocated. To be ‘assigned’ meant 1 of 4 things: if your schoolwork was inadequate, you would be sent to one of the 3 labour zones to work indefinitely ‘in service to your country’ – to be sent to Cardiff means to endure the mines, and plough crops, to Edinburgh means you would be aid either in the collecting or purifying of water, and to Belfast meant you would be under harsh surveillance, and forced into gruelling farmwork. Conversely, if you excelled at school, you would graduate to tertiary education to be trained in specific facilities in London.
Nell knew only 1 thing: wherever she would go, and whatever happened to her, she needed Grace by her side.