Rook

aerobics classes and then a type of yoga that was designed to improve contortion skills.
    The five minutes at the end of our session during which we were allowed to lie on our backs and pretend to be dead was the sweetest period of that day. The two-mile jog we had to run afterward was the worst.
    Throughout the entire ordeal, I was encouraged by Mary, but I could tell that she was keen to rejoin the rest of the group, who had finished the run almost as soon as they began. In the time it took me to complete this little expedition (which took us up a steep hill, over a stretch of sand, and through a creek), we were passed by five higher age groups that had been released at appropriately staggered intervals. This was followed by a long warm-down period, which involved having your limbs pulled on by enthusiastic peers and then putting on a swimsuit and marching in a queue under a long line of showers whose temperatures were calculated to change in exactly the right way to ensure that your muscles didn’t explode.
    After that was chapel, for a mercifully brisk sermon on duty and patriotism, and then we adjourned for breakfast, or at least, breakfast for everyone else. Mary apologetically (but cheerfully) explained that the doctors were going to do some tests on me. As a result, I wasn’t allowed to eat anything yet. Thus, I got to watch as a dining hall full of people wolfed down food that had been specially designed to supply maximum energy, promote healthy growth, provide all the valuable nutrients, produce glossy hair, and ensure good digestion. To make things worse, it looked and smelled delicious. I sat in the middle of a group of girls and boys who chatted nonstop, making references to things I had never heard of and laughing at jokes I didn’t understand (which was unsurprising, considering they were reading at a levelfive years higher than me and were expected to be fluent in two foreign languages). They tried to draw me into the conversation, but I was exhausted, bewildered, and starving.
    At the end of breakfast, the sun was just beginning to rise. I found out later that the rooster crowing that woke us was a recording, presumably of some rooster whose crow had been identified as the most archetypal and whose voice would strike a primitive part of our brains and kick-start them just as it would have our ancestors’.
    That’s the way it was at the Estate. Every aspect of our lives had been carefully designed and coordinated to be as efficient as it could possibly be. And so had we.
    From breakfast we moved to the classroom, where the subjects included the classics, chemistry, and field-stripping three different kinds of assault rifle. Lunch was delicious-looking, but instead of that I was given some pills that I was told would help “flush me out” in preparation for my tests. I had no idea what this involved until the middle of the next class, when I was obliged to leave the room abruptly in the middle of a lecture on observation techniques. I also had to leave the room during my introductory French class (which I was quite relieved to do, since I was surrounded by three-year-olds). And during judo class. And computer skills class. By the end of choir, I was feeling drained—emotionally and intestinally.
    Finally, when everyone else went out to the ranges to work on his or her powers, I was directed to the sanatorium, where a battery of medical staff wearing unthreatening yellow lab coats and latex gloves embarked on a series of tests and examinations that left no part of me unscanned, unscraped, unprobed, or unanalyzed. I was photographed, x-rayed, and interviewed. They took a sample of every fluid in my body, as well as some of its solids. I was fingerprinted, toeprinted, palmprinted, eye-scanned, and voice-scanned, and the content of my exhalations was recorded. I received a new haircut (hair down to shoulders was not acceptable for our “adventures”), had a cavity filled, was given glasses, was scheduled for laser eye surgery and braces as soon as I was old enough, and was assigned a special weightlifting regimen designed to bring me up to the standards of my age group as soon as possible.
    They checked for allergies, and found one for bees. They checked for phobias, and found some for enclosed spaces, the dark, open spaces, snakes,spiders, and speaking in public. I was assigned a psychiatrist and a course of therapy. When I came out of the san, they had enough details on my physical, mental, and