The scanner finished its third sweep and chimed.
Green light. Standard tissue mending.
Elara studied the readout long enough that Caleb thought she was going to ask the machine to run it again. Instead, she set the wand down on the bedside table with the careful precision of someone setting down something she'd been thinking about hitting him with.
"You've been pulling this indestructible act since we were nine."
"Lucky," he said.
"Sure."
She crossed her arms. The leather of her jacket made the small unhappy sound it made when she crossed her arms. He had heard the sound a thousand times in their lives. That was her I don't believe you posture, worn without apology.
The door of the ward swung open before either of them had to commit.
Iris Calder came in with a datapad in one hand and the look of someone who had not slept since the surface broke. The scars on her forearms caught the overhead light. Her dark-gray sleeves were rolled up the way she wore them when cuffs had lost the argument.
"Listen up."
The ward went quiet on the first word.
"Captain Kade is alive. He's down a leg and out of active duty. Until further notice I'm the Acting Captain of the Seventh Division. If you have an issue with that, save it. I'm not in the mood."
Nobody had an issue with it.
"You survived a live deployment, which the Defense Force counts as proof you can be trusted with real equipment. Automatic promotion to Rank E. Combat stipend, surplus artisan access, the whole package. Your strength is the same as yesterday. The paperwork finally stopped assuming you'd die before lunch."
She tapped the datapad.
"Twenty of you across the divisions overperformed. Furuhashi. Okuda. Mitsurugi. Mercer. You four and sixteen others bump straight to Rank D. Ledgers are credited. Go buy something that won't tear like wet paper. We run drills at thirteen hundred."
She left without ceremony.
Elara watched the door swing shut. "Down a leg," she said quietly.
"Yeah."
"He won't take that well."
"No." Quiet took over for a while.
The artisan wing smelled like solder and burnt coffee.
Caleb found the workshop at the end of the third corridor by following the noise. Someone was welding inside a cage of suspended armor plates, the sparks falling in slow lazy showers onto a stained concrete floor. A hand-painted sign over the door said NO REFUNDS NO RETURNS NO COMPLAINTS in three different colors of marker.
He ducked under the cage.
"I need a Rank E tactical undersuit."
The welder froze mid-stroke. The mask flipped up.
The woman on the stool was around his age and twice as tired. Pink hair had gone greasy at the roots, twisted into a knot with a zip tie that had given up. She was chewing gum. She kept chewing gum while she gave him the same evaluating squint she'd had on the welding seam.
"You're the pipe guy."
"I'm not the pipe guy."
"Sure you are." She blew a bubble. It popped. Tali offered no apology for the sound. "I watched the tunnel feed. You generate terrible marketing but excellent stress-test telemetry. Tali."
No hands were offered.
She hopped off the stool and rummaged in a locker with the kind of disorganization that suggested she actually knew where everything was. A dark-gray undersuit hit the counter in a heavy slap of folded fabric.
"Rank E stipend won't buy you miracles, scrubber. This is ballistic-weave hybrid, reinforced joints, two and a half percent yield instead of your one-point-two. The seam pattern's mine. I want something."
"Of course you do."
"Your suit tore at the shoulder right before the ceiling fell on you. The footage cut off before I could see how the weave behaved under the actual shear, which is rude of the cameraman. Wear my build. I get your visor diagnostic feed straight off the helmet next time you get thrown into a wall."
"You assume there's a next time."
Her expression stayed flat. He picked up the suit.
"Deal."
"Thought so."
She was already turning back to the cage. The mask came down. The sparks started up again before he was out of the doorway.
He liked her and had enough sense to keep that private.
The undersuit fit closer than the surplus did. The collar sealed flush against the bandage at his neck. He kept catching himself trying to roll his shoulders against the give of fabric that wasn't fighting him for once.
The staging ground floodlights were running too hot. Someone in the upper rig was riding the breakers.
Hiro and Iharu found him at the rifle racks. Iharu had a stubborn bandage across the bridge of his nose and a new chip in his front tooth that he was clearly proud of.
"Look who bought his way out of the bins," Iharu said.
"Mm."
"My count's holding," Hiro added, eager, talking over Iharu. "If I can hold it through tomorrow I get the tier-two optics."
"Good."
He meant it. He was distracted.
Elara came down the deployment line and stopped them all talking by being there.
"Asymmetrical synergy drills. Simulated Rupture Zone. Shifting terrain, controlled hostiles. We want to see whether your survival instincts hold up when the floor isn't on your side."
Her attention moved from Caleb to the transport crate behind him.
Kikaru stepped out from its shadow.
The new white armor was the same as the old white armor except the brace on her left leg was visible through the joint plating now. She kept her attention inside her helmet like there was something written there she was trying to memorize.
"Pairs," Elara said. "Mitsurugi. Mercer. Find the biological nexus. Move out."
Kikaru walked.
Caleb followed.
The arena went dark in the way artificial twilight always went dark, which was the wrong way. Resin spurs jutted out of fake moss. The moss gave under his boots when he stepped on it. Real moss had better manners than that.
Kikaru took point.
She was good at point. He watched her sweep the false ruins with the muzzle of her plasma rifle the way she'd been taught to sweep them at the academy. Her boots placed themselves where the instructor had said boots go.
"Keep your spacing, Mercer. Don't engage unless I verify."
He kept his spacing.
The ground shook.
A drone came out of the moss to her left. Plated, training-blunted, fast. She pivoted exactly the right way. Her boot caught on a resin root she had not been told about because her instructor had never been in a real Rupture Zone, and her stance opened just enough to throw the shot.
He was already moving.
His shoulder hit her under the ribs and they both went down hard into the dirt. The drone's claw clipped his side as they fell. Something in his ribs cracked the way bones crack when they remember they're alive.
They rolled into a resin ridge.
He chewed through a ration bar without tasting it.
The cold under his sternum took the calories and gave him back the air in his chest, the way it did.
Kikaru was breathing in shallow even bursts a few feet away. Dirt across her white plates. A streak of it on her cheek where she'd wiped sweat with a dirty glove. Her attention stayed on the dirt.
"I had the angle."
"Ground gave."
"I had the angle."
"The moss hides sinkholes. You plant your feet and the floor leaves."
Her silence lasted long enough to become its own answer.
"What's the read."
"Vibration-tracked. I'll go left and noisy. You take the ridge and hit the casing."
It was the wrong way around. She was the academy shot. He was the asset. Asking her to hold position while a scrubber drew aggro was an insult to about four generations of Mitsurugi training.
She tightened her grip on the rifle.
"Don't miss your cue."
He kept still, then went left, loud, boots into the spongy floor on purpose. The drone tracked the noise. He slid under a sweeping claw and put three rounds into its knee at point-blank. The plating buckled. From the ridge above him a plasma round came down clean through the central casing and the machine sat down hard and stopped pretending to be a threat.
He climbed the ridge.
Kikaru had her helmet off. She was sitting against the resin with one knee up and the other locked straight by the brace. There was room for one person on the ledge. They sat shoulder to shoulder anyway.
"Clean shot," he said.
She stayed where she was.
She gave one slow nod, attention still on the smoking drone.
Footsteps on the resin stairs.
Elara stepped onto the ledge with her datapad and logged the kill the way she logged everything, without checking her hands. Her attention came back to Caleb.
"Clean bait. Like the compactors." A small thing in her voice he hadn't heard since they were teenagers. "Try not to lead with your ribs, Mercer."
She went back down the stairs.
The viewer count on his visor climbed.
[VIEWERS: 45,000]
A red dot bled into the corner of his HUD.
The red dot belonged to no system interface.
It slid across the glass with the slow deliberateness of a finger drawing on a fogged window. It came to rest in the center of Kikaru's face and held there.
He stopped breathing.
Purple text, two seconds, fast:
[??? : Step away from her.]
Before his hand could go to her shoulder, before he could do anything, the text went out.
A gold panel hit the screen. He had seen it once before, on a different day, in a different ward.
[SSS-AUTHORIZATION]
The reticle evaporated.
A man's voice came through his earpiece on a channel that should not have existed, older and calm enough to sound bored.
"My asset forgot her manners. Apologies for the static, recruit. Keep up the good work."
The channel clicked off.
The military blue HUD came back like it had never gone anywhere.
Kikaru brushed dirt off the brace, unaware of the dot, the voice, and the kill switch that had rested on her face until someone else took it away.
She turned toward him.
"Are you functional, Mercer?"
He racked the bolt of his rifle. His knuckles ached against the polymer now that the kill was over.
"Yeah."
"Then let's find the anchor."
He stood up with the ugly certainty that he no longer knew whose asset he was. His ownership of himself seemed to be losing bids.