He likes mealtimes best.

With their abilities they can talk to each other anytime they want. But nothing beats being able to do it while in the same room, having the same things to talk about. For a moment, that almost makes them feel like normal people, having a normal conversation.

Look at what Ivan’s doing, she says.

Which one is Ivan?

Let me count. Two rows up from you, fourth from your right. Blonde, short hair.

He looks up, counts, zooms in on the golden head of hair bent over the table, intent on the job of stacking green peas into a glistening pyramid. One jostle from the child next to him later, the pyramid is in shambles, shaken to its knobbly green foundations. Undaunted, the boy picks up his fork and starts pushing the peas back into formation.

He’s weird. Has he always been this weird?

He catches sight of her head as it bobs, with its distinctive crown of hair, from across the room. The shrug is probably involuntarily; if they keep trying to look at each other the handlers might suspect something. He’s new to my block. I think they’ve done something to his head.

They’ve done something to all our heads.

And their eyes meet briefly across the canteen as they share a private, secret laugh, in the midst of the hundred faceless, nameless children of the program. Then the moment passes, and they’re back to being indistinguishable, on the surface.

Have you found the other one yet? She asks.

He shakes his head, involuntarily, then remembers she isn’t looking. No. I can’t pin him down. He comes and goes. Sometimes I wonder if he’s a hallucination...

No, it can’t be, I hear him too.

Maybe you’re just hearing what I hear when I think I hear him.

...are you trying to make my head hurt on purpose?

He laughs, a tiny, discreet little thing, partly because he can feel her trying to drill her stare into him from across the room. I’m sorry. You’re right. There’s two hundred of us here and he could be any one of them.

There are times where he thinks, very quietly so that she won’t hear, that maybe it’s better not to find this other child, who scares him sometimes with the things he says. But she wants to find him, and he doesn’t want to fight with her. In his drab and tiny little world she is the sun, the giver of life, who warms the barren plains of his existence and brings forth the green buds of hope.

We’ll find him together, she says, and he imagines her nodding and squeezing his hand, like playhouse best friends. He nods back.

We’ll find him.

Back pressed to cold metal he closes his eyes and blanks his mind, imagining it a white canvas, imagining it a black void where thoughts were sucked in never to reemerge. He breathes slowly in and out, keenly aware of his body, keenly aware of his own existence. He fills his empty mind with his weight of his corporeal presence.

Ready or not, here I come.

Across the universe he can feel her concentrating, feel her yearning, reaching her senses through the vast body of the colony searching for any sign of him. She listens through the white noise of it all: people walking and talking and eating and laughing and discussing their latest experiment. She seeks the sound of his breath, the beat of his heart.

She smiles.

Maintenance duct in sector nine. Right above the institute.

Hey, this isn't how the game is played.

You're right. You're supposed to say "You found me."

He looks down at the grille between his feet, the yawning space of the colony waiting, free of gravity, free of constraints. He smiles.

You haven't found me yet.

And with that he launches himself out, drifting away, floating in white space, knowing it's only a matter of time before the men find them both and pack them back to their rooms. He revels in the temporary sensation of freedom.

Come find me, he says to her, and he knows she's out there, somewhere, listening.

Come find me.