I stopped drawing. It hurt too much to witness a stranger's hand make mistakes and stumble. But it hurt even more to consider losing Kali, so in the times I used to draw, I wrote whole letters to her.

We worked through the library together. I loved the children's books in the Cultural Education section, which so often had illustrations that whisked me into some human's life in their ink lines and splashes of watercolour. Kali picked military histories. There was nothing from the past century, of course. But it seems that wars have remained the same for as long as humans have organised themselves to have weapons and enemies. Kali saw things beneath the hard facts we were permitted to read and watch. In failed battle plans: the stubbornness of men allowed to play with lives like dice. The never agains: forgotten before even a generation had passed. And the perpetual race for a trump card, a weapon that would put some country or dictator or alliance on top... until the enemy copied.

I could fight the serum enough by this point that I didn't need Kali to point out that we, the saviours of Aotearoa, were just another trump card. And now all the world had clone technology, the experiments in Block A were the search for something new.

When we weren't discussing books or films from the library, we talked of nurses and counsellors and doctors and teachers. The more time passed, the less shocked I was by her abrasive comments, and the more open I became in my own criticism. The staff were safe to talk of. Other clones—their tears, their procedures, their unending obedience—were taboo, even for Kali. It was too close to our own realities.

Why did you send the first aeroplane through my window? Why not someone else's?

Because you always looked outside. Left and right and up and down, like you were searching. No one else ever looked outside like you did.

I just want to see what it's like out there. I wish we could go out for one day before deployment. See what we're meant to be saving, the humans we're saving. Pretend to be human for a day.

We are human. Do not let them make you think otherwise. We are skin and blood and spirit. They make us harder to break, and better at killing, and mind-numbed with serum, but that does not take our humanity. That is their greatest lie. Never believe it. If they let us out, New Zealand would have to face the lie it already knows. They couldn't deny it then.

I ripped that aeroplane into shreds of confetti. They floated around my room as I collected fistfuls and pushed them out of my window into the twilight. Wind whirled them away into the oblivion of the wastes that surrounded us. My chest burned with guilt and fear—those emotions, so human-like—as I watched for Kali at her windows, and battled her words in my soul.

It couldn't be true.

If we were human—

I folded a new aeroplane with trembling fingers, metal and skin and bone and blood and wires. Had she seen me destroy her message?

If we were human—

How's the view from the other side of Block A?

I do not know. That side of the building consists only of staff offices.

Shorter than usual. More abrupt. She'd seen me throw away her words. I plunged down the path of pretending nothing was different.

If I got into Block A we could sneak into one of the offices. My new hand is crazy strong, I could break the lock. Then we could find out what it looks like outside the compound together.

I'd dreamed of it the night before, halfway between sleep and waking. Looking out of a window at the vast wastes, Kali's fingers brushing mine. Goosebumps rose on the skin of my hand—my human hand, untainted by the compound—as I inked the last word. Switching the pen to my human hand, I added a tiny drawing. It was the first one I'd finished since the procedure. Two figures, one tall, leaning into each other as they watched the sun. Ungainly, disproportioned, but it held an echo of my old drawings. She was upset I'd ripped up her letter, but maybe this would help. Maybe she'd been imagining the same.

Do not joke.

The second abrupt message punched me square in the heart. That human heart, a duplicate of my donor's. They hadn't done any procedures there.

I'm not joking. No one from Block A ever gets transferred to Block B, so you can't come here. But if someone goes off the rails they can get transferred into Block A. It's the only way we'd get to meet in person. Just for a while, before deployment.

You are being foolish. You do not want to be here. You do not understand what they do to us here. You are safer in Block B.

I don't care about extra procedures. I'm tired of talking through paper. I want to have a real conversation with you. And you said there's no serum in Block A, so it'll be the real Tui you talk to, not serum-controlled-Tui. Deployment is coming. I can't lose you and never have even heard your voice.

No, Tui. I forbid it. Whatever you're planning, my voice is certain as hellfire not worth it.

I fell asleep hugging that aeroplane, imagining Kali's voice saying those words in my ear. She was wrong.

I had made my decision to leave Block B long before telling Kali.