The Sect's Spare Parts

Forty-one. That is the number written on his forearm when he wakes up, and the arm is not his. Adrian Voss measured things for a living: tolerances, loads, the gap between what a material promises and what it does. Now he is a spare in a ward of fifty-nine lines, in a building with no windows, where every man is property and the only currency is the reading on his own skin. The rules fit on a wall. Stand on your line at the count. Take your ration. Climb. Reach forty and your body is worth collecting, and the men who never climb are collected anyway, eventually, by paperwork. Nobody in here measures anything. They eat, they hope, and they watch their number go up a point at a time until somebody writes a date beside it. Adrian measures. Inside a week he works out what the ration is actually worth, what the count actually kills, and what the man with the slate is actually writing in the book that no spare is allowed to read. He climbs on purpose, one honest point a day, looking exactly like a man doing what he is told. Because the one thing he cannot afford to be is interesting.