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. Brown hair, short.]

He looks up, counts, zooms in on the dark mop 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. [’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.]