What Remains of Rebecca Palmer Chapter Eight

 

I stood out on the open deck when the ferry rounded the last shoulder of the Isle of Jura, off the rugged eastern coast of Scotland. The wind came at us sideways, sharp and wet, driving the rain in needling sheets that found every gap in my coat. It tasted bitterly of salt and iron. The sea below was slate-dark and restless, slamming against the hull with a rhythm that felt less like travel and more like warning. I gripped the rail with both hands, knuckles already numb, my short hair plastered to my face as I gazed out at the bleak coastline.

 

No one else stayed out on deck for long. We were all women, all with similar haircuts, wearing the same drab overcoats, and underneath those coats, we wore the same utilitarian, knee-length grey dresses with long sleeves and fold down collars. We had all been processed. 

 

Most of the women had retreated indoors, leaving the deck sparsely populated by the stubborn and the foolish. I told myself I wanted air. I told myself I needed to see where we were going. After having been locked up in a security installation for a couple of months I wanted to breathe clean, fresh air again. 

 

The island rose out of the water ahead of us, bleak and treeless, its hills flattened by cloud. Rain blurred the edges of everything, collapsing distance so that land and sea seemed pressed together, indistinct and hostile. For a moment, I thought the rumours had been exaggerated — that Chastity Reach would be hidden somewhere inland, modest, easily missed.

 

Then I saw it. The complex did not emerge gradually. Rather, it announced itself. A cluster of tall, angular structures clung to the shoreline like a deliberate wound, all concrete and steel, their surfaces darkened by constant exposure to weather. Nothing decorative. Nothing accidental. The buildings were laid out with a cold precision that made the surrounding landscape feel irrelevant, as if the land itself had been pressed into service and stripped of choice. Lights glowed behind narrow windows — white, unwavering, indifferent to the storm. Even from the ferry, they looked clinical. Watchful. I felt something tighten low in my stomach.

 

As the ferry drew closer, details sharpened. Fences traced the perimeter in clean, unbroken lines, their tops bristling faintly. Towers rose at measured intervals, not tall enough to dominate the skyline, but tall enough to be unmistakable. Doors faced inward. Everything turned its back on the sea.

 

The wind tore a gasp from me, rain soaking through my sleeves, but I didn’t move.

 

Chastity Reach didn’t look temporary. It didn’t look newly built, either. It looked established — settled into the island as if it had grown there, as if it had been waiting for me to arrive. I thought of Ravenscourt school then, though I didn’t know why at first. It shared the same refusal of softness, and the same insistence on order over comfort. it was a place designed to shape behaviour in girls simply by existing.

 

The ferry’s horn sounded, low and mournful, and for a brief, foolish moment I wondered if it was warning me. I imagined walking through those doors, being measured, watched, recorded, becoming legible to whatever system operated inside those walls. I touched my left wrist instinctively, where the barcode marked me for life. I was branded. Yes – that’s what it seemed like to me. I knew about branding, of course. On Gor they branded women, but those women were slaves, not Free Women, like me. And slaves were branded on the left thigh. And it was not done with a hi-tech laser. On Gor, women were branded with white hot irons. I shivered at the thought. Father had always admired the process.

 

“You have to understand, Rebecca, that the women taken to Gor – they are not like you. They are worlds apart – practically a different gender to you. You share basic biological similarities, of course – breasts, hips, reproductive organs - but nothing more. They are natural slaves. They are bred here on Earth, farmed in the wild, so to speak. Most of them live their lives barely comprehending that they are grazing in urban pastures, until it comes time for them to be rounded up and transported to the slave markets on the far side of our sun. It is the natural order of nature. Nature is never wrong, Rebecca. Nature simply IS.” 

 

Rain streamed down my face, indistinguishable from tears if anyone had been close enough to look. The complex loomed larger now, details resolving into certainty. There was no mistaking what it was meant to do.

 

Not shelter.

 

Containment.

 

As the ferry angled toward the dock, the wind shifted, carrying the smell of wet concrete and machinery. I felt very small standing there, soaked through, my breath shallow and fast, watching the place that would soon know my name — or whatever stood in for it.

 

I didn’t turn away. Instead, I watched until the island filled my vision, until Chastity Reach stopped being a shape on the horizon and became inevitable. I touched the barcode on my wrist again. It was a brand. What else could it be? But crucially, it wasn’t a slave band. I wasn’t a slave.  

 

I had once moved naively through halls of power as if they were my own, courtesy of my father’s standing within the Steel Worlds. The Inner Party had afforded me a certainty I had taken for granted: the right to look, to touch, to speak - and to be invisible in the ways that mattered. But all of that had slipped through my fingers like sand. My father detained, my mother entangled in questions I could not even imagine, and I, now relegated to Outer Party status, was arriving at Chastity Reach with nothing but the coat on my back and the quiet hum of my own unease.

 

“I think we were in the same class…” The voice shook me out of my trance state. A lone woman stood further down the length of the barge and I realised she had been watching me for several minutes. “I’m Jessica-6,” she said, by way of greeting. No surname, of course. We had been warned against using our surnames.  

 

“Rebecca-3,” I said as I regarded her through the sea mist. 

 

There was a soft smile on her face. we knew better than to enquire as to our backgrounds. We had simply been Processed. 

 

“Praise the Steel Worlds,” she said.

 

“Praise the Steel Worlds,” I agreed. Did either of us mean those words as anything other than an automatic greeting? 

 

“I was hoping… we might be friends,” said Jessica-6. “It would be nice if we were roomed together.”

 

“I don’t know how they’re going to allocate us in the dormitories,” I said. “Just because we were in class together doesn’t mean we’ll even see each other in Chastity Reach.”

 

“We could ask to be roomed together? I think that’s allowed. I’m…” I could see she swallowed a lump in her throat, “very scared.”

 

I think we were all very scared as we approached this monstrous edifice. 

 

The ferry shuddered as it nudged the pier, metal groaning in protest against the waves. A few women shifted nervously, clutching the lapels of their coats, as if they could hold themselves together that way. The officials waiting at the dock were precise and still, clipboards in hand, their eyes flicking over the boarding papers, over the women’s faces, and back again. I felt their gaze on me like a measuring rod, an invisible hand weighing what I had once been against what I was now allowed to be.

I stepped onto the dock, shoes clanging against the metal ramp. The air thickened immediately into a cold, wet pressure that pressed against my chest. The wind carried questions I could not answer: Who are you? What will your life be here? I tried to ignore them, tried to remember my old life - the laughter, the quiet certainty of privileges no one could touch - but the memories felt thin, distant, fragile. Here, they had no power. Here, I had no power.

 

A sign facing us read ‘Maritime Intake Facility — Region J-3’.

 

A smaller sign, beneath it, read: ‘Idle conversation introduces inconsistency.’

 

Behind me, the ferry receded with a hollow groan, leaving a thin mist curling along the pier, and I noticed the cliffs beyond the buildings, black and jagged against the pale sky. 

 

Some of the women carried luggage, presumably containing personal items. Uniformed men scanned the barcodes on the wrists of the women, printed out luggage tags and secured the tags to the handles before they were then placed on the back of a flatbed truck. Jessica-6, like me, didn’t have the luxury of personal things. We simply walked off the ferry with our hands empty.

 

We walked in single file along a metal ramp which zig-zagged up the side of the cliff towards the Chastity Reach complex, and as I took each of the steep steps in turn I tried to remember what I knew about Jura, though the name felt wrong now. No one called it that anymore. Chastity Reach, the signs said. Administrative Region J-3. The old name sounded almost indecent in my head, like something personal you weren’t supposed to say aloud.

 

I remembered that it had always been remote. One of the Hebridean islands off the west coast of Scotland. Hard to reach even before the changes. You had to cross from the mainland to Islay first, and then take another ferry across the narrow sound. I remembered reading once that there were more deer than people there. Thousands of them, moving across the hills like shadows. The population had been barely two hundred. That fact stayed with me now, as we climbed the steel ramps in silence — how a place so empty could become so full.

 

The air smelled of salt and diesel. The wind came straight off the Atlantic, sharp enough to sting the skin. I tried to look past the women in front of me, past the backs of identical dresses moving in slow, obedient lines, and see the island itself.

 

The mountains were still there. I recognised them from photographs, even through the haze — the three steep peaks they used to call the Paps of Jura, rising abruptly from the land like teeth. I remembered reading that sailors used them for navigation, that you could see them from miles away. Now they felt less like landmarks and more like warnings. The instructors had said the island was chosen for its purity. Its isolation. Its natural boundaries.

 

Someone ahead of me stumbled on the ramp. The steel rang under her bare feet. A guard told her to keep moving without raising his voice.

 

I remembered that George Orwell had written part of Nineteen Eighty-Four here, in a remote house at the north end of the island. That detail surfaced suddenly and wouldn’t go away. I wondered if that had been erased yet, or corrected. Perhaps it had become a cautionary story now — a man who misunderstood order, who feared stability because he mistook freedom for chaos.

 

The ramp turned again, zig-zagging upward. The building revealed itself slowly as we climbed.

 

It didn’t belong to the island. Everything else was rock and grass and wind, but this was steel and concrete, tiered and windowed and immense, spreading across the hillside like something that had landed there rather than been built. Floodlights hung from tall pylons even though it was daylight. Cameras turned in slow, patient arcs. This, I thought, was the centrepiece. The place they had meant when they spoke about alignment.

 

I tried to remember what else I knew about Jura. The whisky distillery in the one village. The long empty roads. The stories about winters when the ferry couldn’t sail and people were cut off for days. Isolation had once meant hardship. Now, of course, it meant control.

 

The women around me walked without speaking. Our dresses moved in the wind, identical grey folds lifting and falling together. For a moment I saw us as someone else might have seen us — orderly, calm, purposeful. The kind of image the broadcasts liked. I caught myself thinking that way and felt a flicker of fear. The building grew larger with every step. The ramps narrowed as they rose, funnelling us toward a single entrance cut into the concrete face. Above it, the words were carved in clean white lettering: HAPPINESS BEGINS AT HOME.

 

Jessica-6 walked in front of me. I vaguely remembered her from class, where we were taught the fundamental knowledge of New Feminism in a way we’d never appreciated before. In the past it had been… I don’t know… somewhere in the background of our daily lives. But now the teachings stood front and centre, framing our lives going forwards. I didn’t know what to make of that. Though I’d never dare voice my doubts aloud, it was clear that many of the beliefs were extreme by European standards. My father had mocked some of the more radical philosophies.

 

“If they had their way, you wouldn’t even be taught sex education,” he had said, one later October evening as I sat in the parlour listening to him put the world to rights as soft rain pattered against the window panes. “How are you supposed to be prepared for your first companionship if you don’t know anything? They haven’t thought this through properly.”

 

“Yes, Father,” was my reply. I was expected to say, yes, father, when he told me things. My future seemed set in place – another year of school, then a year of Finishing school, then a year or two of relative freedom, and then a companionship with one of the Great Families, arranged by my mother. Had I been a man, I might even have visited Gor for a year. But I wasn’t a man. There were only two ways a woman ever set foot on the sacred planet – as a trained agent of the Steel Worlds, or as a slave. It all seemed simple and straightforward. My future was set. I would permit a man to make use of me, and I would be pregnant. The family line would continue, and through my companionship another valuable alliance would be forged.  

 

I was a precious commodity that could be contracted out at a significant price. 

 

“Have you…” My father had coughed slightly, uncomfortable with the question, “been taught anything at school? Sexual education, I mean?”

 

Of course I had. I knew in scientific terms how a man and a woman would… well… come together for sex, and how the woman would be impregnated. But I knew nothing of how I might give a man pleasure through the union of our flesh. I assumed the man’s pleasure just happened and didn’t require any particular encouragement from me. Why should it? I had always been told, or rather warned, by Father, that men were lustful beasts and would ‘put me to use’ if I so much as smiled at them. It was one of the principle reasons why I attended a single sex school until I was 18, and then a single sex Finishing School the year after. With little opportunity to actually meet boys of my own age, men were mostly an alien species until I graduated. 

 

“Do you think we’ll be ravaged?” asked Julia the night before we set off to France on holiday. “I mean, if we didn’t have our bodyguards watching over us all the time?”

 

“Possibly,” I had replied. “Father says we must be careful to never stray from the men’s sight while we’re in France. The men we meet would put us to use if they could.”

And yet… the French boys and men we’d encountered had seemed polite and respectful for the most part. I had actually felt safe, despite father’s dire warnings. No one had tried to ‘ravage’ me. 

 

Julia seemed almost disappointed by the fact. 

 

The entrance to building that marked the administrative centre rose abruptly from the end of the steel ramp. It resembled a block of grey concrete and glass that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Its doors were heavy, sliding open with a mechanical hiss that sounded more like a warning than a welcome. I hesitated for a moment at the threshold, noticing the camera-like devices tucked into the ceiling corners, small and black, yet aware. Every movement I made felt magnified, catalogued, and held against some unseen standard. Jesssica-6 had already passed through the doorway and, seeing my hesitation, a uniformed guard barked at me.

 

“Move!”

 

Inside, the air smelled of disinfectant and paper, sharp and sterile. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, harsh and relentless, and the walls were adorned with the usual slogans of diligence, loyalty, and obedience. Your duty is your honour. Compliance ensures safety. The words were meant to reassure, but to me they were threats dressed in ink and paint. I realized, with a sinking familiarity, that here, every glance, every gesture, every hesitation would be interpreted in some fashion based on New Feminist teachings. 

 

A clerk looked up from her desk, eyes flicking over my papers. She did not speak, not yet, but the slight narrowing of her brow made it clear she was measuring me against something invisible. I forced my shoulders back and smiled politely - an act of submission I had never needed to perform before. She nodded once, curtly, and gestured for me to follow Jessica-6 down a narrow corridor lined with doors.

 

As I walked, I noticed the subtle cues: the floors polished to a mirror-like shine, reflecting not just our feet but our postures; the soft but constant murmur of voices behind closed doors, each one a reminder that private thought was optional, not guaranteed. I kept my head down, counted my steps, and reminded myself to breathe evenly. I could not afford a misstep on my first day on the island.

 

At the end of the corridor, another door opened, and we were led into a small office where our barcode wrists were scanned by a machine and we were then processed one at a time. A uniformed officer sat behind a desk, posture rigid, eyes sharp. He did not smile. He did not offer any pleasantries. Instead, he tapped some keys on his keyboard, scrutinised the details in my file, and finally looked at me as if seeing me for the first time - or perhaps, seeing what I had once been and no longer was.

 

“Rebecca-3,” he said, voice flat, precise. “Outer Party. Assignment: Chastity Reach. You will report immediately to your housing sector and familiarize yourself with local regulations. Failure to comply is noted and escalated. Strength Through Purity.”

 

“Purity Through Faith.” I nodded. The words felt heavy in my mouth, a formal sentence delivered as both instruction and warning. I could sense the edge beneath the official language, the implication that everything here would be monitored - not just my actions, but my reactions, my hesitations, my thoughts if they could reach them.

 

“Sector 12. Room 7. Your quarters are modest. Personal items are limited. Compliance is mandatory. Your bar code will open doors that are permitted to you. Welcome home.”

 

Yes, the laser etched barcode burned into my wrist represented control, containment, and the invisible chains of Outer Party life. Everything anyone. needed to know about me was linked to that barcode, and I would wear it for the rest of my life. 

 

As I passed through the lobby, the corridor seemed narrower somehow, the fluorescent lights harsher, the cameras more insistent. Outside, the wind still clawed at the building, carrying the scent of the sea, the iron, the mist. And yet inside, the air was thick with surveillance, with the subtle pressure of rules and regulations that would shape every day of my life here.

 

“I’m Sector 12, too,” whispered Jessica-6 as we walked in single file. “If we stay close we might be housed together.”

 

I said nothing as we walked on.

 

The cage lift clanged and shuddered as it carried a small group of us upward, each floor marked with a number and a brief instruction: Observe, Comply, Report. I gripped the railing, trying not to imagine what the small print might demand of me in the hours and days to come. The officer had not accompanied us, but I knew he - or someone like him - was already monitoring our progress. I could feel it in the faint buzz of the hall, in the pattern of lights above that seemed to follow me, in the soft click of my shoes against the metal floor.

 

We stopped outside Room 7, where the door was already open. Inside, five beds were arranged with geometric symmetry — two against each wall, one beneath the narrow window. Each had a folded grey blanket at the foot and a thin pillow aligned exactly in the centre. At the end of every bed stood a small metal locker, identical, matte, numbered. There were no mirrors. The lighting was bright but not warm.

 

Cameras were mounted in the upper corners, small dark domes that reflected nothing back. I counted three before I stopped looking. If there were three visible, there were more concealed. There were always more concealed.

 

Jessica-6 hovered just inside the doorway, scanning the room with careful neutrality. Three other women stood there already. All short-haired in the regulation fashion. All wore the same grey dresses, and the same low heels. They all had the same posture that suggested we were trying not to take up too much space. They all looked as new as we were. One of them gave a small nod — the kind that could pass for politeness rather than recognition.

 

“I’m Anna-2,” she said quietly.

 

“Rebecca-3.” I felt the suffix like a correction appended to my body. I wondered who the other Rebeccas were, and whether they were still here. 

 

“Jessica-6,” Jessica said by way of introduction. Her voice wavered slightly on the number.

 

The other introductions  came next: Mary-8 and Clara-4. Clara looked to be of mixed-race, possibly of Middle Eastern descent. All of us hesitated in saying anything more. The silence stretched just long enough to become dangerous, and so I simply moved toward one of the unclaimed beds. Locker 12-7-4. The numbering system was clean, hierarchical: Sector-Room-Bed. A person reduced to coordinates.

 

I picked up the small issued case on the mattress and opened it. Inside were exactly three approved personal items: toiletries, a folded handbook, and a small notebook. Nothing from my past life. The others were unpacking the same contents. The sound of fabric shifting and metal lockers opening seemed unnaturally loud.

 

“Do you think…” one of the women began, then stopped as she glanced up at the camera. We all followed her gaze automatically. It was impossible not to imagine microphones threaded into the ceiling panels, sensors in the light fixtures, and recording software cataloguing tone as much as content.

 

“I suppose we’ll learn the routines tomorrow,” Jessica-6 said, carefully neutral, careful in her choice of language, all present tense, lacking any speculation.

 

I sat on the edge of my bed and smoothed the blanket, aligning its edge with the mattress seam. It felt important to get that right. From the narrow window, I could see only a slice of the island — a grey hillside and a fragment of sea. The glass didn’t open.

 

“Are we allowed to… talk?” Anna-2 asked finally. Her question felt almost daring. About what, she didn’t specify. We all had past lives, families, arrests and once we all had names without numbers.

 

I thought of my parents. Of the ferry ride. Of the moment they had told me I was Rebecca-3. My mouth opened before I fully decided. “We should probably assume we’re heard,” I said. It must have sounded pragmatic and sensible, for Jessica-6 gave the smallest nod of agreement.

 

One of the women swallowed. “So,” she said after a moment, “I suppose we’ll find out what work we’re assigned.”

 

Work was safe. Work was future-oriented. We began to talk about schedules instead of histories. About rumours from intake. About how many weeks the orientation here might last. No one asked why we were here, and no one dared ask who we had been. But every now and then, someone would glance at another’s face and hold the look a fraction too long, as if searching for something familiar beneath the standardized hair, the grey fabric, the new numbers, as if we were all wondering the same thing: whether the person we used to be was still audible under the version they had renamed.

 

And all the while the cameras watched us silently from the corners.