Rook

two changing / shower rooms that were clearly designed to afford the bathers no privacy whatsoever. No barriers, no cubicles, just a row of showerheads. And the fact that there were cameras in there gave me the absolute creeps. These were for the students? At the Estate we’d each only shared a bathroom with one roommate. It doesn’t pay to deprive adolescents of their privacy, especially the genetically variant types. And these chambers were completely spartan. No tiles, no paint, just cement. The closest they came to ornaments was a line of hooks along the wall. At least they kept the genders separate, unless it was a matter of kids with bizarre physical features in one room, and those without in the other.
    Then I found the dormitories. Two rooms, with six beds lined up in one and eight in the other. The lights were glaring down on them, but the occupants seemed to be sleeping relatively peacefully. There were no real amenities in these rooms either. No chests of drawers for their clothes, no curtains around the beds to give them any privacy. This was like a prison. I thanked God I hadn’t been sent here as a child.
    Now, this was all fairly informative, but I needed to know more. There had to be offices, classrooms. Apparently, only the students and the grounds were monitored, but the compound included several other buildings. Theyhad to be keeping the records somewhere. There was a map panel up on the wall, with little glowing bulbs that I realized were cameras and alarm sensors. After a bit of basic orientation, I figured out that I was in what the map coyly referred to as Admin. The other buildings were, variously, Living Quarters, Instruction, and Physical Plant—but the biggest by far was Medical. Since I didn’t have the time to check out the other three, I went for a little walk around Admin. Plus, I’m a bureaucrat, so I’ll always head for the filing cabinets.
    My exploration yielded some storage rooms, a little kitchenette, and finally the offices. I was surprised to find that although their surveillance was primitive, they actually bothered to lock the doors. Maybe they worried that the students would wander around. Not that a locked door made a difference to me, since we’d all been rigorously trained in “the ladylike arts of breaking and entering,” as my teacher had insisted on referring to them. I peeled off my fingertipless woolen gloves and pulled on a pair of latex ones. Fingerprints, you know. A little twiddling with some picks, and I was in an office like any other. Computers, coffee machine, dying plants. I carefully locked the door behind me—I didn’t want one of Gus’s friends wandering in.
    Some memoranda on one of the desks identified this installation as Camp Caius, which to me sounded simultaneously military and recreational. Like a place you might send a fat Roman legionary for his summer holidays. The filing cabinets looked like they had the greatest potential for yielding useful information. Computers are all very well, but I can’t pick their locks as easily as I can those on doors. So I let my gloved fingers do some walking. And I came up with quite a few interesting facts, although they seemed to be limited to the topics of finances and the students. The rest of the information must be kept in the archives or in a different office.
    The earliest records I could find for this Camp Caius dated back twenty years. I skimmed the financial statements. All I was really looking for was confirmation that this was where those missing funds were going. And it was. I only had to look for those damn account numbers (which I’d memorized by that point, I’d looked over the records so often). I was also curious to see what they were spending their money on, since it was clearly not going toward any luxuries. It turned out that a sizable portion of the funds wasbeing blown on training fees and surgical facilities. I don’t know who they were hiring as teachers at Camp Caius, but they were paying them more than the staff at the true Estate makes, and we get the best. The surgeons were making even more. I jotted down some names of instructors and doctors and then checked my watch.
    I figured I had another half hour before I needed to get out.
    What next? I turned to the students’ files. This school seemed to hold on to its kids for a while longer than the Estate. Students didn’t leave until they were twenty-three, and then they all seemed to be forwarded on to some place