I’ve been lying since I was four years old.
My mother told me at the kitchen table, after dinner, on a Tuesday. She used the clinical word. Hollowed. She said it the way you’d say “asthmatic” or “colorblind.” Just a thing I was. A condition to manage.
She explained that the screeners would come, that they came every three years, and that I needed to be ready. She told me to watch people and copy what they did. She told me I could never tell anyone, not a single person, not a teacher, not a friend, not whoever I ended up loving. Not ever.
Then she pulled me into her arms and held me while I cried for a long time.
I’m thirty-four now. I run a screening station in Harwick.
The specific cruelty of that is not lost on me.
The station processes about forty people a week. Routine screenings, flagged referrals, voluntary assessments, which there are always a few of because some people genuinely want the peace of mind.
I have two staff, a government contract, and a converted storefront that still smells faintly of the bakery it used to be. Warm and yeasty underneath the disinfectant. It does something unsettling to the atmosphere that I have stopped noticing most days.
My job is to identify the Hollowed.
The soulless. The ones born without something essential, who move through the world looking human, performing humanity so precisely that you’d never know. Dangerous, the literature says. Unknowable. Not capable of genuine connection or genuine feeling, and therefore not safe to leave among the general population.
In eight years I have identified sixty-two of them.
I know exactly what they feel when I do it. The same thing I feel every three years when I sit across from my own screener and work very hard to perform something I actually am.
—-
The woman flagged for Thursday’s session was a referral, not routine. Her coworker had submitted the form.
This happens more than people realize. Someone watches a colleague a little too carefully over a long enough stretch of time and eventually the wrong thing happens. A missed laugh. Eyes that move in the wrong direction during a sad story.
There’s a form for it. People fill it out more readily than you’d think.
Her name was Vera Callum. Forty-one years old. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and answered every question the way you’re supposed to. The right amount of uncertainty. The right amount of dry humor about the situation. The right degree of visible discomfort at being here at all.
She was good. Really good.
Too good.
I know the difference. I’ve been performing long enough to recognize the performance.
Most people don’t sit in a screening room thinking carefully about how to seem appropriately nervous. They just are nervous. Their hands fidget in ways they don’t plan. They look at the wrong things.
Vera looked at exactly the right things, for exactly the right amount of time, with exactly the right expression shifting across her face at each moment. It was flawless in the specific way that real things are never flawless.
I marked the form. Flagged for collection. Tried to feel nothing.
I mostly succeeded.
My staff member Brian took the form and went to arrange the paperwork. Vera was asked to wait, which she did, hands still folded, face doing everything required of it. Twenty minutes later the collection team arrived and she stood up and gathered her bag and walked with them toward the door.
She passed my desk.
Her bag slipped. She bent to pick it up, right next to where I was sitting, and without looking at me she said it quietly: “You’re one of us.”
Then she straightened up and walked out.
I kept writing. Kept my face professional. Waited until Brian was in the filing room and the street door had settled shut before I let myself sit very still for a moment.
No Hollowed person should be able to recognize another. That’s the entire architecture of how we survive. We’re invisible to everyone, including each other.
I have sat in this room for eight years and I have never once looked across the desk and felt anything like recognition. I identify them the way I was taught, through the mechanics of the performance, the technical precision of a face that’s working too hard.
Vera hadn’t spotted me through resemblance. She’d spotted me through knowledge. Through proximity to enough of us that she’d developed an eye for the specific quality of our hiding.
She hadn’t been alone.
I went home. Made dinner. Watched something forgettable. Did everything correctly. Went to bed at the right time and lay in the dark and thought about the word she’d used.
Us.
Vera Callum’s home address was in her file. I’d read it the way I read all of them. Part of the job.
I told myself I wasn’t going to go.