Making themselves at home.

The doors did not close on their own. That was worse in a way, the fact that privacy did not come pre-installed.

The rooms stood open behind the girls like steel traps with no bait, just the certainty that the animal would crawl inside eventually. The corridor beyond remained softly lit, the central lounge fireplace giving off a warm amber glow despite the lack of chill. Somewhere far down the dormitory wing, Van’s footsteps and Verena’s had already faded.

For the first time since arrival, the women were out of the same room. Not free, just separated. That was enough to let things start to take shape.

Room One

Claire Mercer stood at the foot of the single bed like it had personally betrayed her.

“I would just like the record to show,” she said to no one in particular, “that this is insane.”

Evelyn Cross seemed like a creature designed to haunt boardrooms and retain counsel—stood near the desk at the window. She did not answer immediately. She had begun, with the unnerving economy of an executive triaging disaster, to inventory the room.

Two wardrobes. Two drawers in each desk. One pitcher of water. A tray of folded towels.

A display panel beside the door, currently dark but almost certainly not inactive. No visible cameras. Which meant very little. And the bed.

Claire was still looking at it. Evelyn crossed to the nearest wardrobe and opened it. Inside hung two sets of neatly arranged sleepwear in neutral tones, soft robes, fresh undergarments in sealed packets, and three changes of casual clothes in sizes that could only have been guessed in advance. That was perhaps the most offensive detail yet.

“They prepared for us,” Claire said quietly, having followed her gaze.

“Yes,” Evelyn said.

Claire’s face tightened. “I hate that.”

“As do I.”

It seemed to genuinely surprise Claire that Evelyn admitted it so simply. For a second she looked very young.

Then, as though remembering she was being watched even in private and perhaps especially in private, she recovered into motion—crossing to the desk, touching nothing twice, glancing into the bathroom and then away again when the open shower confirmed itself to still be there.

“This place is a nightmare,” she muttered. “A really expensive nightmare, but still.”

Evelyn opened the second wardrobe. Similar contents. Different sizing.

“Sit down,” she said.

Claire blinked. “What?”

“You are vibrating,” it wasn’t unkind, not exactly.

Claire was defensive, “I am not vibrating.”

“You are one breath away from either crying or picking a fight with a wall,” Evelyn met her gaze. Sit.”

Claire stared at her for a beat as if deciding whether this counted as an order, and whether resisting it would preserve dignity or simply waste energy she no longer had. At last she dropped onto the edge of the bed. It bounced once under her weight. The intimacy of that tiny motion made her go rigid all over again.

Evelyn pretended not to notice and crossed to the window instead. Outside, the grounds glowed in the long afternoon. Too serene and too still. Somewhere beyond the gardens and walking paths lay a perimeter none of them could see and none of them could cross.

“You knew,” Claire said after a moment.

Evelyn looked at the glass, not at her reflection. “I suspected.”

“That we were losing?”

“Yes,” Claire could tell there was a tired sadness in Evelyn’s answer.

Claire swallowed. “And you just… kept going?”

Evelyn turned then, one hand resting lightly against the window frame. Her white-gold hair caught the light in a way that would have looked glamorous in any other context. Here it just made her seem colder.

“What was the alternative?” she asked.

Claire looked down at her own hands. That, Evelyn thought, was the real fracture line. Not fear, not yet. The moment a young woman discovered that courage and momentum had not, in fact, guaranteed that the adults above her had a plan.

Claire laughed once, softly and without humor.

“I always thought,” she said, “if I worked hard enough, if I stayed calm enough, if I got strong enough…” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I thought there’d be a point where grown-ups stopped improvising.”

Evelyn’s expression shifted by half a degree. Not softness exactly. Recognition.

“There isn’t,” she said.

Claire looked up. For the first time since arriving, the performance slipped cleanly. No bright posture. No command voice. Just an eighteen-year-old girl in a stolen room sitting on a bed she had not chosen.

“That’s not funny.”

“No,” Evelyn said. “It isn’t.”

The room went quiet.

Then Claire, because she was Claire and silence made her feel like she was failing someone, blew out a breath and straightened.

“Okay,” she said. “Fine. Great. So. Ground rules?”

Evelyn arched one brow.

Claire pointed toward the bathroom without looking at it. “If I shower first, I am not doing weird territorial dominance. If you shower first, I’m not being deferential. We are both just being practical.”

“That is acceptable.”

“And if I say something stupid later because I’m tired and furious and this place is… all of this…” Claire gestured vaguely at the room, the bed, the very existence of polished ****. “You shouldn’t assume it’s because I’m stupid.”

“I would not make that mistake.”

Claire eyed her. “That almost sounded nice.”

“It was not intended to.”

For the first time since the room assignments, Claire smiled for real.

Small and fast, almost unwilling. Still real.

Room Two

Naomi Hale did not cross fully into the room until Katherine Wren had already moved to the desk nearest the window and set down her things there with the calm precision of a woman establishing a perimeter without making it look defensive.

It was, Naomi realized, an act of mercy.

Katherine could have claimed the bed side nearest the bathroom. Could have taken the closer wardrobe, the more private desk, the place furthest from the door. Instead she had simply occupied one side of the room so clearly and elegantly that Naomi was left the other by default, spared the humiliation of negotiating like a nervous child over territory.

Naomi hated being grateful for that.

“I’ll take this side,” Katherine said, not looking at her. “Unless you object.”

Naomi’s gloved fingers tightened around each other. “No.”

“Excellent. We have avoided our first domestic tragedy.”

Naomi almost smiled. It hurt too much, so she didn’t.

The bathroom sat open beyond the arch like an accusation.

Katherine looked at it once, then at Naomi’s gloves, then back at the desk where a neat stack of folded clothing had been left for each of them.

“Before we begin the long and humiliating process of pretending this is normal,” Katherine said, “is there anything practical I should know besides the obvious?”

Naomi hesitated. Everyone always thought they wanted the answer until they got it. Then came the pause. The recalculation and the new carefulness.

But Katherine waited without pressing, one hand resting lightly on the back of the desk chair. Her face was composed, not cold. Just… professional, almost. As if she were asking about allergies before a journey.

Naomi looked away first.

“My power’s always on,” she said. “If I touch an Empowered person skin to skin, I drain their ability and their stamina. If I touch an unpowered person, I drain their stamina.” She swallowed. “It happens fast.”

Katherine nodded once. No flinch or pity. No step back. Naomi hated how much that mattered immediately. She was hating a lot of things right now.

“So,” Naomi said, trying to recover control through sarcasm and not quite getting there, “ideally we don’t braid each other’s hair or wrestle for blankets.”

“An easy standard,” Katherine said. “I dislike touching strangers under most circumstances. It complicates the illusion of civilization.”

That got a startled, breath-thin laugh out of Naomi before she could stop it.

Katherine heard it. Let it exist, and did not look too pleased with herself for having caused it. Good. That would have been unbearable. Naomi moved to the wardrobe and opened it.

Inside hung soft sleepwear in cream and grey, a robe she would never have chosen for herself because she dislike wearing beautiful things. There were also sealed packets of underthings that made the whole arrangement feel even more invasive than the single bed had.

“They know our sizes,” she said quietly.

Katherine crossed to the second wardrobe and opened it as well. “Apparently they know our lives.”

Naomi looked at her properly then. Katherine had changed. Not fully. Nothing dramatic enough to count as transformation. But something in her face had shifted since the lounge. The cheekbones were a little softer. Mouth slightly less severe. A version of herself turned one careful degree closer to approachable.

Naomi felt the question before she asked it. “You can just… do that?”

Katherine glanced at the mirror above the dresser and touched one fingertip lightly to her jawline. “Yes.” There was no pride in the answer. No flourish.

Naomi looked at her own reflection in the same mirror—brown hair, too-bright eyes, gloves like a warning label dressed as fashion—and felt a quick ugly twist of envy before she could stop it.

Katherine saw that too. Of course she did. “It helps less than you’d think,” she said.

Naomi looked down. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t need to.”

That should have annoyed her. Instead Naomi found herself blurting, “Do you ever get tired of not having to stay yourself?”

The room went very still. Katherine leaned one shoulder against the wardrobe door.

“My dear,” she said, and now there was something older in the voice, something less polished and more true, “that is almost exactly the wrong question.”

Naomi’s face heated. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s simply that the tiring part isn’t changing.” Katherine looked at the mirror again, and for one brief second the surface seemed to hold three or four versions of her at once—older, younger, harder, ****—before settling back into the one Naomi had been speaking to. “It’s wondering whether you ever learned how to stop.”

Naomi stood very still. For the first time since being taken, someone else had said something broken aloud without first having it dragged out of them by Verena.

It changed the room. Not into trust. But into the possibility of not performing quite so hard.

Naomi sat carefully on the edge of the bed, leaving as much neutral fabric space as possible between herself and the other half.

“I can take the floor,” she said.

Katherine looked offended on principle.

“Absolutely not. We discussed this already and if it comes to one of us taking the floor, it will be the one with the least compelling spine. We can adjudicate that later.”

Naomi blinked. “You don’t have to—”

“I know,” Katherine’s tone remained light. Her eyes did not.

That, more than anything else, made Naomi stop arguing.

Room Three

Lizzy had never before been so aware of how much sound embarrassment made in the human body.

It had a pulse and a temperature. It lived in her stiffened knees.

She stood just inside the room with both hands wrapped around the strap of the small bag the facility had apparently decided she ought to have, staring at the single queen bed and the open bathroom beyond it like a person trying to do math during a fire.

Mara Ellison crossed the room more slowly, as if giving Lizzy time to stop feeling cornered.

“Well,” Mara said gently, “it has windows.”

Lizzy made a helpless sound that was almost a laugh. “I’m sorry,” she blurted immediately.

Mara turned. “For what?”

“For being weird.” The answer came too fast, too sincere, too completely from the center of her. Lizzy wanted to die on the spot.

Instead Mara smiled with the tired softness of a woman who had met far too many frightened people to mistake an apology for nuisance.

“Eliza,” she said, and the use of her full name made something in Lizzy sit up in surprise, “I was kidnapped into a prison school by a woman dressed like an expensive punishment. You are not currently the weirdest part of my evening.”

That did it. Lizzy laughed once and then slapped a hand over her mouth like she had broken some invisible rule of composure.

Mara leaned against the desk nearest the bed, careful not to crowd her. “There. Better.”

Lizzy shook her head. “No, I just…” She looked toward the bathroom and then away so fast it almost hurt. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t exactly easy for you either.”

“Oh, good,” Mara said. “Then we agree the architecture is malicious.”

Lizzy gave another weak laugh and then, because the room was too private and the day had been too long and Mara felt too safe too quickly in a way that ought to be suspicious, said the one true thing in reach.

“I don’t know how to do this.”

Mara’s expression gentled.

“The room?”

Lizzy looked down. “All of it.”

That hung there between them.

Mara pushed away from the desk and, after the smallest pause to make sure the gesture would not startle, sat on the farthest corner of the bed.

“Then don’t,” she said.

Lizzy frowned. “What?”

“Don’t do all of it. Do one thing.” Mara gestured lightly toward the room. “Claim a drawer. Sit down. Drink water. Decide who gets first use of the bathroom. Human beings survive monstrous systems by reducing them to the next practical indignity.”

Lizzy stared at her. Then, against all internal evidence, it helped. She moved to the dresser and pulled open the top drawer. Empty except for folded socks and a little gold card that read:

WELCOME TO GENESIS RESPONSE

Lizzy shut it again immediately. Mara snorted softly.

“That one may not count as progress,” she said.

“No,” Lizzy whispered, and now she was smiling for real despite the heat still burning in her face. “Probably not.”

She crossed to the little water pitcher and poured herself a glass with hands that shook only a little. Mara watched the trembling and did not comment on it.

After a minute Lizzy said, “You can call me Lizzy if you want.”

Mara looked at her over the rim of her own untouched glass.

“Do you want that?”

Lizzy hesitated. That was the problem with the name. It felt like home. It felt like brothers in the next room and coaches with kind voices and adults who meant well and all the ways the world had kept her soft around the edges even while insisting she be brave. It also made her feel younger than she wanted to be. Smaller.

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

Mara nodded as if that were a complete answer. “Then I’ll start with Eliza.”

Something in Lizzy’s throat tightened unexpectedly. No one had ever asked the question like it mattered.

Mara looked toward the open bathroom and winced theatrically. “As for the rest of it, I propose a rule of mutual discretion. We are strangers in a nightmare. We can at least be courteous strangers.”

Lizzy let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Okay.”

“Good,” A pause, then Mara added, “Also, if you need to cry later, I am professionally willing to pretend not to notice until afterward.”

Lizzy looked at her in horror. “I’m not going to cry.”

“Of course not,” Mara said with saintly seriousness. “Neither am I.”

That made them both laugh.

Softly. Briefly. Enough.

Room Four

Fiona Kavanagh stood in the middle of the room like she had been challenged to a duel by interior design.

Cassie Lin kicked the bathroom threshold with one sneaker and said, “Nope.”

“Nope to which part?” Fiona asked. “The one bed, the open shower, or the fact that the towels are folded like they expect us to appreciate effort?”

“All of it,” came Cassie’s snapped response.

“Good.”

Cassie leaned against the dresser and folded her arms. “Just to be clear, I was planning to hate this room no matter who I got paired with.”

Fiona tossed her jacket over the back of one desk chair. “And yet somehow I still feel singled out.”

Cassie eyed her. “You do have very pairable fight energy.”

Fiona barked a laugh despite herself. “That’s the worst compliment I’ve ever gotten.”

“Wasn’t a compliment.”

“Still accurate.”

For a second the room almost became easy. Then both of them looked at the bed again and remembered what building they were standing in.

Fiona dragged a hand through her red hair. “I’ll take the floor.”

Cassie’s expression changed immediately. Suspicious and offended on principle.

“No.”

Fiona blinked. “No?”

“No pity floor martyrdom. That’s how this place tries to feel noble.”

Fiona stared at her. Then smiled, sharp and mean and not entirely unfriendly.

“You really are eighteen.”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “And you’re old enough to know better than making a symbolic sacrifice over bed linens.”

“It’s not symbolic.”

“It is if you announce it first.”

That stopped Fiona for one beat.

Cassie pushed off the dresser and crossed to the bed, pressing one hand flat against the mattress as if checking whether the softness itself was part of the manipulation. Maybe it was.

“We split it,” she said. “No weirdness. No assumptions. Pillow border like civilized prisoners.”

Fiona considered that.

Then: “You snore?”

“Only when men are disappointing.”

“So nightly, then.”

Cassie pointed at her. “You are very close to making me like you, and I need you to stop.”

Fiona laughed outright this time.

Good, Cassie thought unwillingly. Better this than trembling.

She opened the nearest wardrobe and found the prepared clothes, the robe, the soft little display of anticipated female need laid out with infuriating elegance.

“God,” she muttered. “I hate how much money captivity has.”

Fiona stepped up beside her and looked in. “At least they guessed my size right.”

Cassie turned to stare at her.

Fiona shrugged. “If we’re doing inventory, I’m going to do it honestly.”

That was fair. Cassie glanced toward the bathroom. “You can shower first.”

Fiona looked surprised. “Why?”

Cassie kept her tone flat. “Because if I go in there first, I’ll spend the whole time wondering whether you think I’m stalling or hiding or making some point. If you go first, then I just get to be annoyed in private, which is healthier.”

Fiona absorbed that for a second.

Then she nodded once.

“That,” she said, “is the most reasonable thing anyone’s said since we got here.”

Cassie pointed toward the door. “Don’t spread it around. I have a brand.”

Fiona was still smiling when the room quieted again.

She sat on the far side of the bed, elbows on knees, staring at the floorboards like she wanted to set the grain on fire through willpower alone.

Cassie leaned back against the wardrobe and watched her for a moment. “You really think he’s enjoying this?” she asked.

Fiona didn’t look up. “You mean Van.”

“Who else in this room gets a giant glowing title?”

Fiona’s jaw flexed. “I think men with power like pretending they’re trapped by the power they’re keeping.”

Cassie considered that, seeing her father’s face rise and vanish behind her eyes.

“Yeah,” she said. “Usually.”

Fiona looked up then, sharp enough to catch the word. “Usually?”

Cassie shrugged. “He doesn’t look smug enough.”

“That doesn’t clear him.”

“No.” Cassie glanced toward the hall where Van had disappeared with Verena. “It just makes him annoying.”

For the first time since the pairing display had lit up, Fiona’s expression shifted from combat-ready to something closer to respect.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Maybe I like you a little.”

Cassie made a face. “Tragic.”

The tone sounded before any of them could decide whether the first private conversations had made things better or merely less lonely.

It began as a single clear bell somewhere in the walls.

Then a second note joined it, lower and longer, and gold light bloomed softly at the edge of each room’s doorway.

A voice followed—Verena’s, of course, because even the architecture seemed unwilling to speak without borrowing her mouth.

“Contestants,” it said, smooth as polished glass, “the intake transformation poll has opened. Please proceed to the assembly hall.”

In Room One, Claire looked at Evelyn with the hard fear of someone trying not to ask permission to be afraid.

In Room Two, Naomi’s gloved hands tightened around her own wrists while Katherine rose with the calm of a woman dressing for weather she had already decided to hate.

In Room Three, Lizzy went pale and Mara set her untouched water glass down very carefully before either of them could pretend the word transformation meant anything gentler than it did.

In Room Four, Fiona stood at once and Cassie pushed off the wardrobe with all her loose, volatile defiance snapping back into place like a knife folding open.

All through the dormitory wing, doors opened.

And one by one, the girls stepped back into the corridor, carrying with them the first raw outlines of how they might survive one another—just in time to be reminded that survival in Genesis Response was never going to be a private act.