Chapter Text
All ten fingers.
All ten toes.
All ten fingers.
All ten toes.
It has been Helena’s inner mantra for so long that sometimes she wonders if Helly can hear it. If it echoes in her skull as the elevator doors open. When Helena blinks out of existence after “all ten fingers,” does Helly finish with “all ten toes”?
Does she hear it in her mother’s voice? See her mother’s face? Tears in her eyes, never daring to look at the welts on the back of Helena’s legs. “You’re okay, Helly. You’ve still got all ten fingers and all ten toes.”
As if that made up for everything else her father took from her. As if that made up for the fact that even her fingers and toes weren’t hers. She was born an Eagan, raised to serve Kier, molded and shaped into something she no longer recognized when she looked in the mirror.
As if it made up for the fact that her mother did nothing to stop it. There was only one way out, and her mother had taken it alone.
Of course, Helly doesn’t know any of this because that’s not how severance works. And even though Helena was forced into this whole thing, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that for nine hours, she doesn’t have to exist anymore. That Helly rises like a phoenix from the ashes and lives a life without the name. Without the memories.
Helena has a basic idea of what each of the departments on the severed floor does. Optics & Design creates promotional materials for Lumon and items to stock the severed floor; Mammalians Nuturable raises livestock for animal testing; Choreography & Merriment puts on performances to boost morale on the severed floor; Health & Wellness monitors and attends to severed employees physical and mental wellness; Research & Development performs testing related to potential chip upgrades; Macrodata Refinement organizes numerical datasets to optimize the chip’s performance.
Her role at Lumon has always been firmly above ground, until her father declared that Kier himself had spoken through him and had decreed that one of his lineage—Helena in particular—should undergo the procedure. What Helena thinks about that is uncharitable, turns into anger that fuels doubt. Curious that Kier has made such a statement shortly before the House is set to vote on the Severance Reform Bill. Had Kier also suggested a publicity gala to celebrate his progeny’s severed status?
Still, she obeys. After all, there is no higher privilege than to serve Kier.
She gets no choice of department, no choice of anything at all, right down to the wardrobe she yanks on like a second skin in the morning. All blues and teals and dresses and feminine heels, arranged neatly in her closet on the day the decision was made for her, before she’d returned to her room.
Helena tries not to think about it. Tries to let it just be a relief. For a few hours, she doesn’t exist. It’s what she’d so often wished for when she was bent over her father’s knee, skirt yanked up, and angry welts blooming on the backs of her thighs as the ruler came down again and again.
To just disappear.
And sometimes she did it, transported her mind to another place entirely, where she no longer felt the pain, the numbness, the papery skin of her father’s fingers as he brushed over the welts that he’d created and between her thighs and—
You’re okay. You’ve still got all ten fingers and all ten toes.
Until the moment she could come back. The moment he held her in his arms, tucked her under his chin, and rocked her while together they recited the compunction statement, his voice a soft mutter that overlapped her own.
It stopped as she grew older. The beating. The touching. The closeness of it. Replaced by weekly obligement sessions, hours-long appointments to balance her tempers.
And somehow, that was worse.
There was a period of time when she sought that closeness out, would drive miles outside of Kier to seedy hotels when men who similarly didn’t give a shit about her, like her father. Would let her mind leave her, let her body be used—would imagine, sometimes, that it meant something.
There was something broken in her, and for as long as she could remember, she’d known it. Some seed of doubt, maybe, left untouched and unnourished but still taking root in her foundation, splitting and cracking everything she thought she knew. The more apparent it became, the more she tried to push it away. Tried to be the perfect daughter, heir, follower. But it never went away, the broken part.
Helena knows because Helly keeps trying to get out.
All ten—
Her fingers clutch tighter against the plastic casing of an item in her hand. A disc.
The elevator door opens. Natalie Kahlen stands on the other side, lips pursed but the corners of her mouth raised, the type of smile that comes right before an apology.
“Your innie threatened to cut off your fingers,” Natalie says, head cocked. “Severed floor management thought it best to comply with her demands. She wished to send you a video resignation request. Please follow me.”
Her fucking fingers.
Natalie turns, curly ponytail bouncing at the crown of her head. And Helena follows, as she’s always been taught to do.
In a room on the sixth floor, she watches the video, transfixed by Helly’s wide, imploring eyes. Please, let me out. Please, stop this. Please, they’re torturing us down here. When she looks at Natalie, the other woman smiles.
“You’ll record your response now.” She shuffles forward and offers Helena a notecard, Natalie’s own familiar scrawl across it. “We’ve prepared your statement. Take a few moments to memorize it before you speak so that you can address the camera.”
As she reads, bile rises in her throat. She’s going to look right into those pleading eyes—her own—and tell her she’s not a person. And until this moment, Helena might’ve believed it. But the woman in the video had been a person. The woman in the video had been her.
Helena pushes back the complicated feelings that swirl in her mind, clears her throat, and looks over the camera’s lens at Natalie. “I’m ready.”
It’s not the first time she’ll do something like this, nor will it be the last.
There’s a man down there.
Helly had tried to kill herself; Helly tried to kill Helena. She still isn’t sure if there’s a difference. But Helly had left Helena suspended in the elevator cab while the doors closed and she descended again. She was going to die, and though she hadn’t been capable of actual thought, she might’ve welcomed it. She’d become more and more convinced that she’d never truly be granted the power she’d been promised by her father, her name, and her obedience. Perhaps there was nothing to live for.
But a man named Mark Scout saved her. And she’d seen him, his face among the pinpricks of light and shadow that obscured her vision. Pale skin, wide, dark eyes. Mouth agape, chest heaving.
It had been so long since someone looked at her like she mattered.
The next time she’s conscious, she’s in a hospital bed at the main branch’s clinic, where she’d been taken for recovery. She wakes alone, which is a funny thing to be when you’ve just tried to kill yourself. But it wasn’t her; she hadn’t been the one who wanted to—
All ten fingers. All ten toes.
You’re okay.
“Because of the restricted airflow, it seems the chip may not have initiated properly upon your descent,” Seth Milchick explains, her first and only visitor. She suspected he wasn’t there to check in on her; instead, he was there to clean up the mess that severed floor management had made. “Do you remember anything you saw down there?”
The image of the man swims behind her eyes. He’s familiar, a face she’s seen before, but can’t quite place where. He’s being pushed back into the elevator cab. She can’t hear what he’s saying, but she thinks that if Doug had let him, he would’ve stayed to make sure she was okay. She thinks that if it were possible, he might even be here now. The idea of it makes her stomach slightly queasy.
But in response to Seth’s question, she simply shakes her head. He looks down his nose at her like he doesn’t quite believe her.
“We plan to enact a barrage of new safety protocols, and we’ll also mandate that Helly R. receive extensive mental wellness counseling. Nothing like this will ever happen again.”
Her innie had threatened to cut off her fingers. Her innie had rammed her forearm through glass. Her innie had left her hanging from the elevator crosshead.
She’s the future CEO of this company, and a middle manager is speaking to her as if after all this, she’ll dare to go back down there.
“I should have you fired,” she rasps. “I should have you all fired.”
Seth’s voice is soft when he replies, “Respectfully, Miss Eagan, I’m afraid you don’t have the authority to do that.”
After the OTC, she watches security footage under the guise of trying to figure out how something like this could’ve happened. The answer, of course, is clear: it happened because they’d had no reason to believe the innies were committed or driven or unified enough to come up with such a plan. It happened because everyone had underestimated them, had believed that they’d remain compliant.
Helena watches herself interact with the others—the people she now knows as Mark Scout, Irving Bailiff, and Dylan George. She goes as far back as to watch herself running through the hallways, a desperate note clutched in her hands, a plea to anyone who would listen. Never come back here.
Oh, if Helly only knew. For Helena, there is nothing else. Here is all there is; all she has ever been allowed to have and all she has ever been allowed to want. Even her mother’s way out was forbidden: Kier does not accept those who refuse to continue to serve him in life to sit with him in death.
In the marathon obligement sessions after her mother’s funeral, she remembers fidgeting in her seat, the backs of her legs too bruised to bear the slight weight of her body, and being asked, Before your mother’s death, did you say or do anything you think might have upset her?
No.
Think hard now, Helena. Kier would want you to repent.
The cycle repeated again and again until her eyes were dry, her throat parched, until words spilled from her mouth, a laundry list of everything she might have ever done to make her mother decide to kill herself. I didn’t clean my room. I snuck a chocolate after dinner. I lied. I had impure thoughts. I disobeyed Father. I questioned Kier. On and on and one until she was sure it was her fault, sure that if she stepped out of line again, she’d lose someone else.
So, she repented by never loving anyone again.
But Helly didn’t know the promise she’d made to herself. Down there, she’s forged bonds. Down there, she’s part of something. If it had been the same out here, if Helena had friends, had confidants, could she have escaped the person she’s become? If she knew there was more than this, would she have fought for it?
Drummond slips in through the conference room door, and Helena hits pause on the footage. It freezes on a shot of the four of them, deep in conversation in MDR’s kitchenette.
“How did this happen?” he asks.
A loaded question. It happened because no one thought it would. It happened because they’d been locked away from the world. It happened because they’d gotten a taste of the outside. It happened because they had only each other. It happened because they knew each other, because they trusted each other, because they experienced love and they didn’t hide from it. They fought for it.
It's pathetic that she sees herself in them, sees what, perhaps, she could’ve been.
“Poor management,” she says stiffly. “Too much downtime. Too much fraternization.”
“And how do we prevent it from happening again?”
She jabs her finger against the remote’s power button, glancing up as the four MDR team members disappear from the screen in a flash.
“Break them apart,” she says.
Mark Scout is the most important person on the severed floor. Everyone else is expendable.
To Lumon, that is. But apparently not to Mark Scout himself.
Helena fights to keep the satisfied smile off her face when she hears the recording of his call to the Board, the way he insists on having his team back. Helena’s never been a part of a team before. The idea of being needed, being wanted…it makes her chest tight.
She watches him leave that day, his hunched shoulders, slow gait. World heavy, weary. She wonders if it’s because of her, the absence of her, maybe. Even if the outie doesn’t realize why he feels that way. (She knows it’s silly to wonder if she’s the cause, when so clearly it’s something else. She’s read his file and knows his wife died two years prior, just months before he severed.)
He looks back over his shoulder, just long enough for her to see him in profile, the slope of his nose, his chin. He doesn’t seem so different from the man she’d seen down there.
The day of the OTC, she’d woken up in the elevator with a hot flush across her sternum and her heart pounding in her ears. Somehow, it felt more like peace than panic. It wasn’t until she watched the security footage that she realized the catalyst. But she’d felt it, in her body, the way that kissing him made her feel—the rush of excitement, the tingle of possibility.
Which means that he can feel it too.
Back in her office, she digs through all the files relating to MDR that she can find, trying to find the real reason that Mark Scout is so special. She knows by now that she’s been fed a bullshit line about his prolific refining ability: Dylan George’s output is much more impressive.
She knows that Lumon is currently testing a version of the severance chip that would trigger through changes in one’s tempers rather than through geolocation, effectively allowing someone to turn themselves off when experiencing a negative feeling. It’s genius, really; it’s the way that the severance chips—should the bill attempting to make the procedure illegal be shut down—will become mainstream.
Though, admittedly, she’d thought relatively little about the reality of this—innies that only felt pain? Despair? Fear? Her innie had already tried to hurt her, kill her, and all she was doing was working a 9-5 job.
Her eyes are almost crossed by the time she comes up with anything unique about Mark Scout, but even this is a stretch. But in his file, she finds frequent mentions of his work in connection to Test Subject 02-103733. However, when she looks at both Irving and Dylan’s files, there are a variety of different test subject numbers. Helena’s own file also only reflects a single test subject, but given she’s been working in MDR for only a month, this doesn’t seem notable.
When she searches the database for other mentions of that ID number, she finds nothing. She’s not particularly surprised that Lumon isn’t keeping extensive records of livestock anyway.
Helena sorts through file after file until her security clearance can only take her so far. She doesn’t get an answer to her question of why Mark Scout is so important, only that he is.
And he wants his team back.
And there’s an ever-growing part of her—the part of her who’d gotten a taste of connection and wants more— that hopes he gets it.
“The Board has determined that we cannot risk returning Helly R. to the severed floor,” Drummond says, his fingers laced together on the slick marble tabletop. “Instead, we will enact the Glasgow Block to allow you to descend to the floor and perform her tasks.”
The idea of going to the severed floor as herself makes her stomach drop. She can’t—doesn’t know how. This part of her has never existed without the weight of her name, without the destructive force of it. This part of her hasn’t earned the relationships that Helly has.
“It won’t work,” she says. “They’ll know.”
Drummond hums something between a laugh and an admonishment. “Their thinking is not quite so sophisticated.”
Helena isn’t sure this is true. She’s watched hours of footage of the severed floor, and despite what she’s been told about the innies, she’s sure that she’d been watching people down there. People who had become united through their shared situation; people who cared about each other.
So different than her and the man who sits across from her at the table. They are both trapped, are they not? Drummond doesn’t have the Eagan name, but he’s been entrusted with information. He knows, perhaps, more than she knows, especially as he’s meant to usher the transition between her father and herself, when the time comes.
Like Helena, he’ll die serving Lumon because there is nothing else beyond this. Shouldn’t they be united by this shared truth? Shouldn’t they, like the innies, want to band together, to use the information they have to bring down the company so that they could live freely?
Her throat goes dry at the thought. Her mind has never gotten quite so far before, so far as to suggest she could leverage her position to bring down Lumon. To free herself. But to think this way is a dangerous betrayal.
“We’ve removed visible cameras,” Drummond continues. “We must give them the illusion of privacy. But you will be our eyes and our ears.”
Helena makes note of the use of the word visible, of Drummond’s slight emphasis on the word illusion. There might’ve been a time when she would’ve overlooked it, when she’d have been thrilled to be entrusted with such a responsibility. But with Lumon, everything’s become an illusion.
“And if I decline?” she asks.
Drummond’s expression hardens. “There is no alternative.”
So, she must comply.
And perhaps that is why Helena feels more kinship with the innies than with any of the people who surround her. Like her, the innies know they’re trapped.
The night before she’s to fill Helly R.’s role on the severed floor, Helena lies awake and watches the shadows move on the ceiling of the room she’s slept in since Grandfather Pip died and she and her father had come to live here with Aunt Leonora. When she’d arrived, she’d thought perhaps things would change, that Aunt Leonora’s presence would take away some of her father’s attention. But Aunt Leonora was much like her mother, willing to look away when necessary.
Kier’s will be done.
The room is no longer pink wallpapered and juvenile, but it’s still made up of the same four walls. And tonight, they feel like they’re caving in, like time is running out, though Helena’s not even sure for what.
Something has sparked in her, in the past week, a distant and persistent echo that had perhaps always been there. Something that told her this wasn’t natural. That this life wasn’t normal. That Eagan was nothing more than a last name, that Kier Eagan didn’t speak through her father or any other CEO, and that even if he did, he had no more power than anyone else. That her whole life was a lie.
It's her innie’s fault that she feels this way. Or maybe it’s her fault that as soon as she woke up down there, all she wanted to do was to get out. Maybe that’s all she’s ever wanted.
But what she’d lacked, what she’d always lacked, was solidarity. She couldn’t do this alone. Like Mark Scout, she needed a team—or at least a confidant. Someone she could trust. Someone with a common enemy, a common goal.
Someone who looked at her like she mattered.
Apprehension sits like a stone in Helena’s stomach as she inserts her badge into the elevator access panel and steps into the cab. Usually, she’d almost yearn for the moment the elevator doors closed behind her, the descent that signaled she’d no longer have to carry whatever she was feeling. But today, she’s taking everything with her, and whatever happens on the severed floor, she’s bringing it back up.
A restless night has made her even more uncertain about what she’ll do when she’s down there. She was kidding herself if she thought that the innies would be capable of helping her do anything, to make any actual change in her outside situation. There’s still a part of her, though, that just seeks…companionship, solace, the few seconds of fluttery excitement that she felt when she exited the elevator on the day of the OTC.
The doors close. The elevator descends.
Maybe it’s enough just to be Helly for a little while.
Maybe it’s enough.
All ten fingers.
All ten toes.
All ten fingers.
All ten toes.