The latch of the barracks door dropped into its housing with a flat, metallic *click* that sounded less like a lock turning and more like a quarantine gate sealing shut.
Inside, the air was cold, smelling of stale lye and the damp mist leaking through the floorboards. The room was standard Academy issue—ten bunks and wide, bare timber meant to withstand active vanguard recruits. But with only five of them standing in the center of the space, the empty upper bunks loomed overhead like open, unused shelves.
Nobody spoke. The public exposure of the courtyard was over, but the silence they had dragged back with them was heavier than the whispers.
Drake moved toward the corner bunk, his boots dragging heavy and uneven on the timber. The massive tower shield descended with a dull, echoing *thud* against the frame. He stood there, his back to the room, his right hand reaching across his chest to catch the top buckle of his breastplate. He tugged. The salt-crusted leather didn't budge. He tried again, bracing his dead left forearm awkwardly against his hip to stabilize himself, but his fingers slipped.
A low, sharp curse slipped through his teeth—blunt, frustrated, and entirely unpolished. He didn't ask for help. The sheer humiliation of being defeated by a leather strap kept his jaw locked tight as he kept fumbling in stubborn, silent isolation.
Across from him, Kara sat heavily on a lower mattress. She instinctively reached down to yank the heavy woolen blanket over her lap, but her fingers froze an inch from the fabric. She looked at her bare forearms, tracing the dark, webbed paths of her scarred veins where a pale, brittle blue was creeping under the skin. Her breath rose in a faint, distinct plume of white vapor. Slowly, deliberately, she pulled her hands back and tucked them deep under her armpits, clamping her elbows to her ribs.
"If anyone touches my boots, I'll kill you," she muttered into her collar. Her voice was dry, cracking slightly at the edge, trying to weaponize her usual biting sarcasm to hide the fact that her entire body was shivering in tiny, uncontrollable increments.
Xander sat on an upturned equipment crate near the cold hearth, his hands resting empty on his knees. His leather tool kit sat on the floor, its brass rivets melted shut from the crisis. Without his diagnostic slates or copper lenses, his thumbs twitched in a rhythmic, phantom loop. His eyes were wide, fixed entirely on a long, irregular hairline fracture in the wall plaster.
"Xander," Luna said softly, stepping closer to him. Her eyes didn't look at his hands; they tracked the tight, exhausted strain around his mouth. "Xander, breathe."
Xander didn't blink. "The load distribution is leaning four degrees north-northwest. If the moisture in the outer timber drops another three percent, the lintel over the hearth will drop half an inch."
"Xander." Luna reached out, her hand hovering near his shoulder, hesitating because she didn't know if a physical touch would snap him out of it or push him over the edge. "Stop calculating. There's no slate."
Xander blinked suddenly, his head jerking back as if he'd just been struck. He looked up at her, his eyes blank for a fraction of a second before the focus rushed back into them. "What? Oh... right. Sorry. I was... never mind." He looked down at his empty knees, his fingers finally forcing themselves to stay still.
Near the door, James remained pinned against the heavy frame. He was only twelve, smaller than the rest, and as he sat back against the low bench by the entrance, his boots didn't quite flatly clear the floorboards—the heels dangled, dragging slightly. But he wasn't paying attention to his feet. Behind his closed eyelids, the world was white-hot. The 90Hz pressure was a physical, rhythmic pulse in the marrow of his jaw, and his right eye was burning.
He pressed the heel of his fused, glass-scarred hand hard into his right socket, grinding the bone to force the architectural lines out of his head.
"It's..." James started, his voice compressed, almost physically unwilling to release the words. He swallowed hard. "...the nail."
Everyone in the room went perfectly still. Drake's hand dropped from his armor buckle.
"What nail, James?" Luna asked, her voice dropping into that quiet, careful register she used when a beast was cornered in the brush.
"Under... Kara's left heel," James muttered, his teeth clamped tight against a cracked molar. "It's rusted through. Three millimeters of iron left before the board shears. It's too loud. Everything is... it's just too loud."
Luna moved instinctively toward the frosted glass pane at the end of the room, her hand reaching out to part the heavy canvas curtain to check the gravel path outside, desperate for anything that looked like normal reality.
"Don't look at the windows," Drake said.
His voice wasn't a tactical command. It was flat, worn down to the absolute bone, carrying the paranoid certainty of someone who had spent too much time watching the Board's ledgers operate.
Luna's hand froze an inch from the canvas. After everything they had survived—the reclassifications, the black fluid, the casual bureaucratic betrayals—she couldn't find a single shred of certainty left in her head to tell him he was wrong. She didn't argue. She simply pulled her hand back fast, as if the canvas had burned her, and stepped back into the safety of the shadows between the bunks.
"Xander says those arrays are just weather metrics," Drake muttered, his thumb digging into his non-responsive left shoulder muscle as he stared at the floor. "But after what they did to the lower wards... why assume those windows are just glass? Maybe they're logging how many steps we take. Maybe they're counting James's pulse through the pane. They aren't going to leave five broken assets in a room without a ledger open somewhere."
The silence returned, but it wasn't a clean, poetic silence anymore. It was jagged, awkward, and distinctly young. They were five children trapped inside bodies that were malfunctioning in ways the Academy's textbooks didn't even have names for yet, hiding from an institution that was currently calculating their operational lifespan through the walls.
Then, three sharp, clinical raps struck the thick oak of the barracks door.