The new dormitory was dark except for the pale lights spaced regularly in the halls. Mark darted down the hallway and went inside one of the rooms. There was too little light to make out details; only the shapes of sleeping boys on the white beds could be seen at first. The windows were dark shadows.

Mark stood by the door silently and waited for his eyes to adjust; the shapes emerged from darkness and became dark and light areas—arms, faces, hair. His bare feet made no sound as he approached the first cot, and again he stopped; this time his wait was shorter. The boy on the cot didn’t stir. Slowly Mark opened a small bottle of ink, made from blackberries and walnuts, and dipped a fine brush into it. He had been holding the ink next to his chest; it was warm. Moving very carefully, he leaned over the sleeping boy and quickly painted the numeral 1 on the boy’s cheek. The boy didn’t move.

Mark backed away from the first bed, went to another, and again paused to make certain the boy was sleeping deeply. This time he painted a 2.

Presently he left the room and hurried to the next one. He repeated the procedure there. If the boy was sleeping on his stomach, his face buried in the covers, Mark painted a number on his hand or arm.

Shortly before dawn Mark put the top back on his bottle of ink and crept to his own room, a cubicle large enough to contain only his cot and some shelves above it. He put the ink on a shelf, making no attempt to hide it. Then he sat cross-legged on his bed and waited.

He was a slightly built boy, with dark, abundant hair that made his head seem overlarge, not conspicuously so, but noticeable if one examined him closely. The only startling feature was his eyes, a blue of such intensity and depth that they were unforgettable. He sat patiently, a slight smile playing on his lips, deepening, leaving, forming again. The light outside his window brightened; it was spring and the air had a luminosity that was missing in other seasons.

Now he could hear voices, and his smile deepened, widened his mouth. The voices were loud and angry. He began to laugh, and was weak from laughter when his door opened and five boys entered. There was so little room they had to line up with their legs tight against his cot.

“Good morning, One, Two, Three, Four, Five,” Mark said, choking on the words with new laughter. They flushed angrily and he doubled over, unable to contain himself.

“Where is he?” Miriam asked. She had entered the conference room and was still standing at the door.

Barry was at the head of the table. “Sit down, Miriam,” he said. “You know what he did?”

She sat at the other end of the long table and nodded. “Who doesn’t? It’s all over, that’s all anyone’s talking about.” She glanced at the others. The doctors were there, Lawrence, Thomas, Sara . . . A full council meeting.

“Has he said anything?” she asked.

Thomas shrugged. “He didn’t deny it.”

“Did he say why he did it?”

“So he could tell them apart,” Barry said.

For a brief moment Miriam thought she heard a trace of amusement in his voice, but nothing of it showed on his face. She felt tight with fury, as if somehow she might be held responsible for the boy, for his aberrant behavior. She wouldn’t have it, she thought angrily. She leaned forward, her hands pressed on the tabletop, and demanded, “What are you going to do about him? Why don’t you control him?”

“This meeting has been called to discuss that,” Barry said. “Have you any suggestions?”

She shook her head, still furious, unappeased. She shouldn’t even be there, she thought. The boy was nothing to her; she had avoided contact with him from the beginning. By inviting her to the meeting, they had made a link that in reality didn’t exist. Again she shook her head and now she leaned back in her chair, as if to divorce herself from the proceedings.

“We’ll have to punish him,” Lawrence said after a moment of silence. “The only question is how.”

How? Barry wondered. Not isolation; he thrived on it, sought it out at every turn. Not extra work; he was still working off his last escapade. Only three months ago he had gotten inside the girls’ rooms and mixed up their ribbons and sashes so that no group had anything matching. It had taken hours for them to get everything back in place. And now this, and this time it would take weeks for the ink to wear off.

Lawrence spoke again, his voice thoughtful, a slight frown on his face. “We should admit we made a mistake,” he said. “There is no place for him among us. The boys his age reject him; he has no friends. He is capricious and willful, brilliant and moronic by turns. We made a mistake with him. Now his pranks are only that, childish pranks, but in five years? Ten years? What can we expect from him in the future?” He directed his questions at Barry.

“In five years he will be downriver, as you know. It is during the next few years that we have to find a way to manage him better.”

Sara moved slightly in her chair, and Barry turned to her. “We have found that he is not made repentant by being isolated,” Sara said. “It is his nature to be an isolate, therefore by not allowing him the privacy he craves we will have found the correct punishment for him.”

Barry shook his head. “We discussed that before,” he said. “It would not be fair to the others to force them to accept him, an outsider. He is disruptive among his peers; they should not be punished along with him.”

“Not his peers,” Sara said emphatically. “You and your brothers voted to keep him here in order to study him for clues in how to train others to endure separate existences. It is your responsibility to accept him among yourselves, to let his punishment be to have to ............