The first thing he noticed was the light.
It came from strips along the ceiling, a pale, slightly blue-tinted glow that reminded him of something clinical. Hospital lighting. The kind designed to make everything look slightly worse than it was.
He had a moment, brief, almost dreamlike, of complete disorientation, the way you feel when you wake up in an unfamiliar room and your brain takes three seconds to catch up with your eyes.
Except the three seconds passed and the catching up didn't happen, because nothing around him was familiar, and the body he was sitting in was not a body he recognized, and there were chains on his wrists.
He looked at the chains first. Practical. They were thick, a dark grey metal with a faint shimmer to them, the kind that suggested they were more than just iron. He tested them once, a small precise movement of both wrists, and felt the weight and the resistance and catalogued it. Not going anywhere. Not immediately.
He looked up.
A courtroom. High ceilings, stone walls that had been polished to a shine, tiered seating on both sides filled with people watching him with the particular quality of attention that crowds give to spectacle.
A raised bench at the front where three officials sat in formal dark clothing, the center one currently speaking. To his left, a long table with men he didn't recognize in expensive-looking robes. His defense, presumably, from the way they weren't looking at him.
To his right, another table, and men in different expensive robes who were looking at him with the professionally neutral expression of people who had already won.
He understood, with the rapid comprehensive intake of someone whose entire working life had been built on reading rooms, that the trial was over. Whatever had happened here, it was done. The man at the center bench was not deliberating. He was delivering.
He focused on the words.
"-in the matter of the Crown's case against Varek Kael Mourne, third son of the Kelvari Clan, on charges of sexual assault against Her Highness Princess Selira Voss of the Voss Sovereign House, this court finds the defendant-"
He let the rest of it wash over him while he kept looking around the room. Not panicking. Panic had never been particularly useful and he saw no reason to start now. The tiered seating.
The official robes. The architecture, stone, heavily formal, with what looked like inlaid Rimforce lighting along the edges of the bench, a detail that placed him firmly in a world with cultivated technology. He had been briefed on none of this.
He had no briefing. He had woken up here seventeen seconds ago with no memory of how, in a body that felt simultaneously like his and not at all like his, and a courtroom full of people watching what they clearly expected to be the end of something.
He looked at the gallery.
There was a section to the far right, slightly elevated, where a group of perhaps twelve people sat in formal clothing that was clearly coordinated. Same color family. Same posture.
The posture of people performing composed dignity for an audience. He studied their faces with the particular attention he had always given to groups with shared stakes, and found what he was looking for quickly, not grief, not outrage, not even particularly convincing regret.
Calculation. The specific blankness of people who had made a decision and were now waiting for it to conclude.
His family, then. Or the family belonging to the body he was in.
One of them, an older man, broad across the shoulders, grey at the temples, carrying himself with the particular weight of someone accustomed to being the most powerful person in most rooms, caught him looking. There was a fraction of a second where something moved behind the man's eyes. Not guilt. Something more complicated than guilt and less honest. The man looked away first.
"-guilty on all counts. The sentence to be carried out immediately, in accordance with Compact Law Article 7, Section 3, permanent Collaring at Grade Zero, assignment to correctional labor, with no provision for appeal or review."
The man at the center bench set down his document with the small satisfied click of someone closing a completed task, and the room made a sound, not quite applause, not quite murmuring, somewhere between them. He sat through it.
Grade Zero. Permanent Collaring. He didn't know the precise mechanics of this world yet but he understood hierarchies, and Grade Zero was not the kind of classification that invited ambiguity. The word permanent was doing a lot of work in that sentence. He filed it.
Two guards came up from behind him and he let them take his arms without resistance, standing when they gestured for him to stand, walking when they walked. Not because he had no objection.
Because objecting here served no function he could identify, and he was more interested in the corridor they walked him into than in demonstrating feelings he would need to quantify later.
The corridor was long, stone, lit by the same blue-tinted strips. Doors on either side, all closed. One guard ahead of him, one behind, and to the left at his shoulder a smaller man in a different uniform carrying a metal case. Medical adjacent, maybe. Something in the way he held it.
He took inventory of the body while he walked.
Young. That was the first thing and it kept being the first thing every time he checked. The gait was athletic, the muscles conditioned in the specific way of someone who trained regularly and technically, not a fighter exactly, but someone who had been building toward something.
The hands had calluses in the right places for cultivation forms. He knew what cultivation forms were, which meant the body's knowledge was partially accessible to him, a passenger reading the manual while someone else drove.
He could feel, when he turned his attention inward, the faint structural map of pathways, channels that should have been carrying energy, and he could feel also that something was wrong with them. Not damaged yet. Not quite yet.
But he could feel the wrongness waiting, like a hairline crack in a foundation that hasn't shifted yet. They had been sealed off.
He was eighteen years old, he estimated. Maybe nineteen. In his previous life he had died at sixty-three and the comparison was, frankly, disorienting. He had forgotten what it felt like to be inside a body that hadn't started complaining yet.
They stopped at a door at the end of the corridor. The small man with the case set it down on a table that had apparently been positioned there for this purpose, and opened it, and began removing equipment with the focused calm of someone doing a procedure they had done many times.
He looked at the equipment.
The collar was sitting in a fitted case interior, dark metal, slightly warm-looking even from here. There were other components, tools, a small device with a display, something that looked like a scanner. And a document, sitting to one side, that had already been signed. He could read the names from here. Three of them. One of them was the older man from the gallery.
He looked at the signature for a moment.
Then he looked back at the collar.
The medical man, he was clearly medical, or the closest equivalent, picked up the collar with a cloth, not his bare hands, which told him something about the metal. He noted the specifics: how it hinged, where the seam was, what the mechanism looked like.
The man approached and he stayed still, not because the guards were holding him but because he was interested in the application process and stillness was the best way to observe it without the guards becoming attentive.
The collar closed around his throat with a sound like a lock finding its catch.
It was heavier than it looked. He breathed through his nose and assessed the weight of it, the pressure points, the way it sat against his collarbone. He could feel something from it, a low, even hum, almost sub-audible, that seemed to press slightly against the pathway structures in his chest. Suppression. It was doing something active even now. He catalogued that and moved on.
The scanner device was run along the outside of the collar. A tone sounded. The medical man checked a reading and made a small note on the document.
"Grade Zero confirmed," he said to no one in particular. "Collar active. Registration complete."
He said nothing. He looked at the ceiling. The same blue-tinted strips, running all the way to the end.
One of the guards made a gesture for him to turn around and he turned around and they walked him back down the corridor, through a door he hadn't come in through, and out into a wide loading bay where a transport vehicle was idling with its back open.
There were other people in it already. Fifteen, maybe eighteen, all collared, all sitting in whatever posture communicated that they had already finished the process of being surprised. He climbed in. A guard locked the bay door from the outside. The vehicle began to move.
He sat with his back against the wall and looked at the other occupants without making it obvious he was looking, which was a skill that came naturally to him after forty years of doing it professionally.
Most of them were not looking at anything. A few were sleeping or attempting it. One, a woman maybe ten years older than his current body, with a collar that had a different configuration from the others, older model, he thought, more worn, met his eyes briefly and looked away in a way that said she'd been here before and had learned to budget her attention carefully.
He could appreciate that.
He spent the rest of the transport time going over what he had. The body, its condition, its training history encoded in muscle memory he could access but not fully interpret yet.
The collar and its apparent functions. The court scene, the faces, the signatures, the specific charge, assault on a princess he had never met. The family who had signed without visible distress.
Whatever Voidrot Poison was and whether it had already been administered or was coming. The name Mol Sareth, which had been mentioned twice in the courtroom in a tone that suggested destination.
He was starting from nothing. He had done that before, technically, his first life had involved several periods of genuine destitution and one extended stretch of being in a country whose language he did not speak with no money and no contacts and a very pressing need to become functional quickly.
He knew what starting from nothing felt like. He knew the methodology of it. Observe first. Map the ecosystem before moving through it. Find the real hierarchies, which were never the official ones.
Identify what people needed and what they were afraid of, because those two things together constituted most of human motivation regardless of the species or the world.
He was in a slave transport on a world he had woken up in twenty minutes ago, in a teenager's body, convicted of something he hadn't done, with an active suppression collar and no power of any kind.
He had worked with worse starting conditions.
He closed his eyes. Not to sleep. To think.