For two years, Alex had stared at the East Wall Annex from a tram window.
On Friday morning, two days after the intake, he walked up to its front door for his medical review. The door was glass, and in front of it lay a welcome mat, like it was somebody's house.
Inside, it smelled of floor wax and pink hand gel. The Clinical Wing was to the left, past a desk with a plant on it.
To the right were two doors with a keypad and a sign.
OBSERVATION. FAMILIES PLEASE REPORT TO RECEPTION.
Under the sign, families sat on a row of chairs. A boy of about ten was swinging his feet. Behind the keypad doors, Alex could hear a cart with one squeaky wheel.
The boy's eyes settled on Alex's mouth.
Alex had his upper lip pulled down over his teeth. His canines had grown longer in the last two weeks, and he'd gotten good at hiding them.
'Don't smile. Do NOT smile at anybody!'
He went left. He'd been awake since four. Arthur Kessler's card was in his sock.
***
"Mr. Walker. You're early. That's either a very good sign or a very bad one. Come in. Sit. No, not that one, that's mine."
Alex had pictured a final boss behind a big desk. Dr. Ward was Alex's height, silver-haired, nearer sixty than fifty, with his shirtsleeves rolled up. He had one pair of reading glasses pushed up into his hair and a second pair hanging from his collar, forgotten.
He sat on the corner of the desk and read a folder for what felt like a week.
"You've been frightened of this building for two weeks," Dr. Ward said, still reading. "You've practiced your answers on the tram. I'd have done the same at your age, and I work here."
He turned a page. "Your blood work is unusual. It isn't alarming. You can stop holding your breath."
The exam was quick. A light in each eye. A finger, moving left and right.
"When did you stop needing the glasses?"
Alex went cold.
'He knows. How does he know?'
The nurse at the intake had written that Alex kept peering over the top of them, Dr. Ward said mildly. It was a good note. She was too sharp to spend her days taking blood, he added.
"When?"
"About two and a half weeks ago."
"Hearing?"
"Better."
"Appetite?"
Alex didn't answer. He was hungry right then. Dr. Ward had a shaving nick under his jaw, a day old, and Alex could smell it from the chair. One tiny line of dried blood, and he couldn't stop smelling it.
"We'll come back to that one," Dr. Ward said. "Open up."
He had a small mirror on a stick, and he was gentle with it. The steel clicked on the tip of the left canine, and Alex felt it all the way up in the root. He spent ages on both teeth and never made the noises Alex had been bracing for.
Finally he sat back, took the glasses off his head, and cleaned them on his shirt.
"Well, they're your own teeth. They've come through further, that's all. Nobody's added anything."
He wrote a line. "Any registered lineage in the family?"
"I don't know. My parents left when I was seven. I grew up at the Residence."
"I'm sorry. Their names, for the form?"
"Daniel Walker. Layla Walker."
Dr. Ward wrote them down. He had small, upright handwriting, and he gave the second name the same care as the first. His face showed nothing at all. He put a period at the end and blotted it with the side of his hand.
"Walker isn't a Qasra name," he said. "They'll have come for the rebuilding, I expect. A lot of good people did."
"Here's what I think this is. We see it maybe twice a year. Nearly always a young man who was underfed at the age when the body should be finishing itself. So it doesn't finish. It waits. At nineteen or twenty, a fever or a growth spurt tips it over the edge, and it does five years of work in a month."
He counted the rest off on his fingers. The eyes corrected, muscle came in, and the jaw finished, teeth and all. And the young man decided he was presenting a lineage, and hid for two weeks, and made himself ill with worry.
"Have you made yourself ill with worry?"
"...Yes."
"Good. Stop." He tapped the form. "It isn't a lineage. It has a long name. On here, it's late constitutional variance, benign. Benign is the word you want, Mr. Walker. It means boring."
Alex had been waiting seventeen days to get caught.
He couldn't feel his hands.
"So I'm not..."
"You're a twenty-year-old who has been allowed to grow up, a little suddenly."
He took a second vial of blood himself, from Alex's other arm, and he was faster at it than the nurse had been.
"That one's mine," he said. "I like to follow them up."
Alex pressed his tongue hard against the backs of his teeth until it was over.
"You'll want to eat a great deal," Dr. Ward said. "The intake mess does zone game on Thursdays."
Zone game was monster meat, from the things the Hunters killed outside the wall.
Dr. Ward tried three pens before one worked. He signed, tore off the bottom copy, and held it out.
FIT FOR PROVISIONAL SERVICE. E. Ward.
"Go and be a Hunter, Mr. Walker," he said. "Try not to be a brave one."
***
Alex didn't breathe until he was outside on the mat.
The boy from the chairs was watching him through the glass.
Alex lifted his lip at him for one second.
The boy grinned.
***
That night, Alex couldn't sleep. At two in the morning, he walked out onto an empty Wall Road.
He'd spent the whole day holding everything in.
A drainpipe ran up beside the pharmacy, three floors to the roof. He pocketed his glasses and went up it on his hands alone, feet hanging free. The green cross blinked across his knuckles as he passed it.
At the top he stepped onto the parapet. It was as wide as his shoe, with the street three floors down on one side.
He shut his eyes and walked it to the corner and back. He could hear the wind coming up from the street, so he knew where the edge was. He never wobbled.
Seventeen days ago, eleven pull-ups on the fire escape had felt like a miracle.
He sat on the parapet with his feet over the street and started to grin.
Across the road, on the walkway along the top of the East Wall, a night-shift guard was pacing between two red lights. Alex could hear the man's heart from here, slow and bored. He could hear the blood moving with it.
Under that, he could still smell the nick under Dr. Ward's jaw. He'd smelled it at nine this morning, and it had followed him home.
His mouth was wet. The grin went away on its own.
'Turn it off. Come on... turn it OFF!'
He sat very still until the guard's heart was only a sound again. Then he climbed down the drainpipe the slow way, using his feet.
***
The Hunter card came on Monday.
Alex picked it up from the window at the east gate depot. The clerk didn't raise his head. The card had a gray stripe, and Alex's face was on it. The new face, with the jaw that had finished itself.
PROVISIONAL.
Under that was a ration number. The clerk pushed a little book of coupons through the window after it. Two packs of Grade C zone meat a week from the store, he said. Sign for them. Don't sell them. They checked.
Alex stood there holding the book. His mouth had gone wet just from the words.
"That's legal? I can just... have it?"
That got the clerk's head up.
"It's meat, son. Every Hunter on the wall eats it. Where've you been?"
'Hiding. Eating it raw in Sam's back room!'
He took the card to the shop and showed Sam.
Sam held it at arm's length. He held it up close. He turned it over and read the back.
He didn't say a word. He went and put the kettle on.
***
On Tuesday, Alex called the number on Arthur's card from the back room of the shop. It rang six times.
"Kessler."
"It's Alex Walker. From the intake. You gave me a card."
"Are you ill?"
"No. I passed the medical. There was a review at the Annex. Dr. Ward did it."
The line went silent so long that Alex checked the call hadn't dropped. He could hear Arthur breathing, and a kettle behind him.
"What did he call it?"
"Late constitutional variance. Benign."
"Did he."
Arthur breathed out through his nose. There was a ranked trial for Alex's intake on Thursday, he said. The sheds, six o'clock. Alex would be on the mat with someone.
"I know. It's on the card."
"I'll be there. Don't be clever."
"What does that mean?"
"It means don't show them what you can do. You've let it slip twice in front of me," Arthur said, "and that's the reason I'm on the phone."
He hung up.