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| journal:021_in_transit [2026/03/07 15:39] – created harryh | journal:021_in_transit [2026/03/08 03:13] (current) – harryh | ||
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| - | ====== Entry — In transit, six hours out ====== | + | === PAGE: journal: |
| + | ====== Entry — In transit ====== | ||
| ---- | ---- | ||
| - | I keep starting sentences about this and stopping them. That's not new. The difference is that this time, at the end of the journey, there will be people who remember me and I'll have to be a person they remember. | + | Ten of us. |
| - | I'm going to write them down. All of them. That's what this journal is for. | + | I've been counting them on this train, which is something I haven' |
| + | done in years — run through the full list, all ten, the way you used | ||
| + | to be able to recite | ||
| + | than it should have. Some of them I had to reach for. | ||
| - | ---- | + | We had numbers before we had anything else. Before we had the training |
| + | or the missions or the particular shape of what each of us became, we | ||
| + | had a sequence. An order. I used to think the numbers were neutral — | ||
| + | administrative, | ||
| + | confusion. I don't think that anymore. A number is a position. A | ||
| + | position implies a hierarchy. A hierarchy implies that some positions | ||
| + | are better than others, and children are very good at working out | ||
| + | which ones those are. | ||
| - | **Orvell** | + | I am Five. |
| - | The oven mitts. Even in my head, after all this time, I see the oven mitts first. | + | The middle. Not the failures, not the stars — the exact centre of |
| + | whatever he thought we were. I've spent most of this journey trying | ||
| + | to decide if that's better or worse than I expected, and I keep | ||
| + | arriving at the same place: neither. It's just accurate. Five, with a | ||
| + | note in brackets that I was unstable. As if the number needed a | ||
| + | caveat. As if the position itself wasn't already a verdict and the | ||
| + | qualifier was the part that really needed saying. | ||
| - | I feel something complicated about Orvell that I've never fully sorted out. We were both kept back, but for opposite reasons — him because | + | Here is what Five actually means, if you look at the full sequence: |
| + | he thought | ||
| + | the dragon. Higher than the empath. Higher than the popstar and the | ||
| + | spy and whatever Bayangan was supposed | ||
| + | five of his own children and then spent three years suppressing the | ||
| + | mechanism | ||
| + | the roster entirely, and then wrote *(unstable)* next to my name like | ||
| + | a footnote. | ||
| - | //I wonder if he ever got there. | + | I've been sitting with that for four hours and I still don't have |
| + | clean feelings about it. I'm not sure I'm supposed to. | ||
| - | ---- | + | Five. Harrison Hargreeves. Twenty-four years old on a train back to |
| + | the place that made me, carrying a number I was given before I could | ||
| + | speak and a surname I chose myself, and the gap between those two | ||
| + | facts is basically the whole story. | ||
| - | **Luca** | + | //I keep arriving at myself in this count and not knowing what to |
| + | write. The others I can do — I have observations, | ||
| + | years of thinking about them from a distance. For myself I just have | ||
| + | the number, and the name, and this journal, and whatever I am now | ||
| + | that the house is done with me.// | ||
| - | I watched the unmasking on a television in a pub in Leeds. Didn't know it was about to happen. Nobody did, that was rather the point. | + | //Five. Harrison Hargreeves. That'll have to be enough to start |
| - | + | with.// | |
| - | Luca was made to spy on us. He had notes on me. Years of them. Everything I did that I thought was private — the sessions I didn't perform well in, the arguments, the nights I sat in the corridor because I didn't want to be in my room — Luca was somewhere, writing it down. | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | I don't blame him. He didn't choose the job. But knowing that doesn' | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | //The rock band. The mob. The boy Reginald kept masked so the world couldn' | + | |
| ---- | ---- | ||
| - | **Crystal Nova** | + | //The individual entries on each sibling are linked below for convenience.// |
| - | + | * [[021a_jennifer|Jennifer]] | |
| - | She left at sixteen. I left at seventeen. | + | * [[021c_luca|Luca]] |
| - | + | * [[021d_crystal_nova|Crystal Nova]] | |
| - | She filed for emancipation. Officially, legally, on paper. She didn't slip out through a crack in the rear wall in the middle of the night. There' | + | * [[021e_alexander|Alexander]] |
| - | + | * [[021f_bayangan|Bayangan]] | |
| - | //She rejects contact. I'm not going to be the one who presses. She earned the right to decide who she lets back in. I'll be in the room if she decides to look.// | + | |
| - | + | | |
| - | ---- | + | * [[021i_monarch|Monarch]] |
| - | + | * [[021b_tylon|Tylon]] | |
| - | **Alexander** | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | He sent letters to the mansion after I left. I wasn't at the address anymore. So there were no letters for me. | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | I've thought about this more than is probably sensible. It's not his fault. He was doing the thing he's always done — trying to hold the family together from whatever distance he was at. But there' | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | //Tyrant. The papers called him Tyrant. I remember how people reacted to the transformation and I remember thinking that was deeply unfair and I still think that.// | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | ---- | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | **Bayangan** | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | I don't know Bayangan well. That might be the most honest thing I can write about him. | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | What I do know is the particular quality of someone who has spent years chasing approval that doesn' | + | |
| - | + | ||
| - | //I hope he came through it better than I did or at least as well.// | + | |