“Morning, Pablo,” grunted Hank.

Pablo nodded. The fluorescent lights reflected off the fuzz of his shaved scalp as he rolled his sleeves up and got to work. The clock ticked over, and the cookhouse started to fill up with soldiers. His dull, mud-coloured eyes flicked back and forth as he moved crate after crate into the kitchen. Once he’d opened the crates, Hank inspected their contents, nodding to himself. “This’ll do,” he rumbled.

Pablo nodded. He and Hank did this every day. As Hank got to work on the beef, Pablo hefted a sack of rice up on his shoulder and began to empty it into a nearby pot as the others started to file in. Switch on the power, stir the pot, et cetera, et cetera… he had it down to a science. He’d been at the Centre for almost a decade, and in all that time, none of the processes had changed.

He was on duty at the counter today, replacing trays of food as they ran dry, and it was there that he saw Tiffany Burton for the first time.

The kids were usually separated from the rest of the population, and as sullen-faced teenagers filed past him, Pablo noticed a new face at the back of the line. She was being prodded forwards by a pair of older boys, the both of them visibly holding back mirth. Her hair had been cut in an unflattering bob that only served to emphasize the roundness of her face. In fact, she was just flat-out round, period. Pablo glanced at her breast-pocket and saw “T. BURTON” inscribed there.

“Hey! Cut that out.”

The boys cut it out, their faces going blank, and snatched up their own meal-trays. T. Burton shuffled forwards, taking more and more food until Pablo began to have serious doubts about her ability to carry such a heavily laden tray back to her table. He decided to intervene.

“You know, you can come back for seconds.”

T. Burton looked up at him. She’d obviously been crying, and Pablo was catapulted back into the past. He’d cried on his first night at the Centre, too. They’d separated him from his parents at the border, and he’d never seen them again. Sure, he missed them, but there was nothing he could do. The Centre was too powerful. He’d lost count of how many would-be escapees had faced the firing squad.

She came back for seconds. And thirds.

*

Pablo saw her once or twice over the next few weeks outside of the cookhouse. (He always saw her at the cookhouse, though. She never missed a meal.) Sergeant Hartman was putting the new “recruits” through their paces, and as Pablo looked on from where he was stationed at the designated smoking corner, Hartman stalked over to a round, red-faced silhouette and began to harangue her mercilessly. Pablo could visualize the spittle flying from the older man’s mouth. He’d been on the receiving end of it often enough himself.

“Heard they had to have her clothes tailor-made,” Snyder sniggered, and Pablo shrugged.

A few months later, T. Burton stopped showing up at the cookhouse. Pablo didn’t wonder too much about what had happened. She’d clearly failed to shape up and was being punished for her laziness. Solitary confinement, maybe, or a diet. As he’d been half-expecting, she reappeared after one or two weeks, but her rations had to be specially prepared, and Pablo was detailed to deliver them to her quarters.

She looked up as he opened the door. Her chest was rising and falling shallowly as she sprawled on her bed, dark hair splayed across her pillow, and Pablo set her rations on her desk, clearing some of the papers as he did. It was a very messy desk.

“I’m wasting away here,” she whined.

Pablo made a snap decision. He wasn’t sure why he did it. Perhaps he simply wished to impart some of the lessons that he’d learnt to this clearly miserable girl. Perhaps he saw a little of himself in her. Perhaps he was just in a queer mood that day.

“This place,” he said, “works on the same principles as the outside. If you behave, you’ll be rewarded. If you don’t, you won’t.”

He shut the door behind him and returned to the cookhouse.

*

A few more months passed. Pablo kept delivering rations to T. Burton’s quarters. They talked, from time to time. It wasn’t much of a conversation. She’d complain about the lifestyle. Pablo would listen and shrug. The boys back in the kitchen would tease him, asking if she’d offered him anything in exchange for more food, and Pablo would always laugh it off.

Her weight did not measurably change. She stuck around as a new batch of “recruits” appeared in the parade square, always the slowest and widest silhouette on the running track, and at some point, Pablo figured that the top brass must have just given up, because she reappeared at the cookhouse, and no one stopped her when she came back for seconds, then thirds, then fourths. Her back straightened, and she stopped hiding. She went up one size, and then another. Time passed.

At some point, T. Burton became just another face at the cookhouse. Pablo felt the years slip by. He gained a new colleague, Sierra Alpha; the kitchen called her Sally. Hank got baited into a cook-off with one of the most terrifying teenagers at the Centre, and Pablo stared at his own reflection for a few long minutes after it was all over, wondering when he’d started going grey. He wasn’t even thirty.

One day, he decided to leave. He couldn’t have pinpointed the exact thing that triggered this decision; it may have been any number of factors. Pablo didn’t tell anyone of his plans, if they were indeed plans. It must have been fifteen years since he’d entered the Centre. He’d spent more than two-thirds of his life behind its fences of barbed wire, stuck in the same routine. How were his parents? Was his little sister all grown up? These questions kept him up at night.

One day, he woke up on the floor. His hands had been tied. There was a bag over his head. He could hear someone talking in the distance. Pablo struggled to his knees, every muscle in his body straining, and swallowed. He lunged forwards like a worm, bashing his head against the floor until he’d shed the bag, and saw T. Burton staring at him, a gun in her hand. There was a grey-haired man behind her in full dress uniform. Pablo didn’t recognize him. He was in a dimly-lit room, and he was going to die.

The general sighed.

“Pull the trigger, Burton.”

Pablo wriggled backwards, eyes darting around for a door. He wanted to escape. He wanted to wear something that wasn’t a uniform. He wanted to know if his parents were dead or alive. He wanted a lot of things.

“My name isn’t Pablo,” he croaked. “My name is Miguel. They called me Pablo when I first came in, and that became my name.”

T. Burton swallowed and raised the gun.

“My name is Miguel,” Pablo said, and then he knew nothing more.