The first assessment was announced on the morning of the second day, delivered by a woman who introduced herself as Assessor Maren with the efficiency of someone who considered the introduction a formality to be completed before the real work could begin. She was perhaps forty, with the particular physical quality of someone whose rank was high enough that it had stopped being visible in the conventional ways and had become instead a kind of absolute economy of movement, nothing wasted, nothing performed.
She told them what the assessment would involve in three sentences. Structured problem solving under aura suppression. Individual and group components. Beginning at the ninth hour.
Someone in the cohort asked why aura suppression. Maren looked at them with the patience of someone who had heard that question many times and considered it, each time, a useful data point. "Because we need to know what you are," she said, "not what your core currently outputs."
