Fortress Citadel Vega was the largest of the three remaining GDF strongholds, built into the shoulder of a mountain range with its back to solid rock and its face toward a cleared killing field twelve kilometers wide. From the transport vehicle's small window, Ray watched it grow as they approached layer by layer, wall by wall and felt something he hadn't felt in three weeks.
He almost didn't recognize it. The feeling was: safety. Theoretical, impermanent, bought with walls and guns and the constant labor of ten million people. But safety.
He looked away before it could take root.
The intake process at Vega was extensive and impersonal in the way of systems built for volume rather than individuals. Ray and Dayo were separated Dayo to the civilian processing wing, Ray to something called Enhanced Intake, which turned out to be a series of rooms where different people asked him the same questions in different orders and took notes on tablets that they didn't share with each other.
The questions were about Harlan's Gate. The breach timeline. The Striker's behavior. The Brute's pattern. At the fourth room, a woman in a Vanguard Lieutenant's uniform looked at his answers and then at him and then at his answers again.
"You said the Striker paused before engaging."
"Yes."
"For how long?"
"Maybe four seconds."
"And you read that as interest rather than threat assessment."
"It was both. But the interest came first."
She wrote something down. Her handwriting was extremely neat and extremely fast, which Ray found interesting.
"Why did you fire at the ground rather than at the target?"
"I had a solid-burn flare, not a void-null round. At the Stage 4 level, surface contact from a solid-burn does disruption but not damage. The photosensitivity response is stronger when the light source is close to the visual field than when it's striking the body. Firing at the ground directly under the target maximizes the disorientation window."
Lt. Mira looked up from her notes.
"Where did you learn that?"
"I read the GDF Stage Classification Manuals. Years 1 through 32. I found them in the library in Harlan's Gate."
"Those manuals are military-classified."
"The library's archive section had a gap in its security. It was built before the breach classifications were established."
A pause. She was looking at him in a way he'd noticed people occasionally did like they were trying to find the part of him that didn't fit the frame they'd already built.
"How old are you?"
"Nineteen."
"Have you ever applied for GDF Cadet intake?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Ray considered how to answer this honestly without sounding like he was complaining.
"I was taking care of things."
Lt. Mira looked at him for one more moment. Then she wrote something at the bottom of her notepad, tore the page out, and handed it to him.
"Give that to the desk officer when you leave. He'll add it to your file."
He read it after he left the room. It said: Recommend Vanguard Cadet Assessment Priority Flag.
He thought about that for the rest of the day and then put it somewhere in the back of his mind and left it there.
Dayo was in the civilian sector by the time Ray found him, already attached to a processing queue for school-age youth registration. He looked marginally better than he had in the tunnels under the fish market and significantly worse than he had eight days ago before the breach.
"They said you're going to be in a different section."
"For a while."
"What section?"
"I don't know yet."
Dayo nodded slowly. He had the look of someone who was deciding whether to say the thing he was thinking. Ray waited.
"You know I'm going to need to process the fact that you walked toward a Stage 4 Striker with a flare gun."
"You can process it on your own time."
"Ray."
"Dayo."
"I just want to say I mean, I know you, right? I know you, and I was still scared watching you do that. The way you didn't even hesitate."
Ray looked at his cousin. At this boy who was the last person alive who remembered the same things Ray remembered.
"I hesitated. I just didn't stop moving while I did it."
Dayo looked at him for a long moment. Then he laughed not a big laugh, just a small, private one, the kind that meant something specific between two people.
"Your mom would have something to say about that."
"She would have a lot of things to say about all of this."
They were quiet for a moment. The civilian sector sounds moved around them ten million people and all the noise that made.
"I'll check on you. Every week."
"Every week."
"Every week."