The eighth class was different from every class before it.
Not larger — smaller, actually. Twenty-two students from seventeen territories. The smallest class since the second.
But different in the specific way that things become different when the context that shaped them has changed.
The first classes had been populated primarily by people who had been suppressed — the correction workers, the fragment-carriers, the between-walkers who had been working alone. People coming to the school because the school had what they needed to survive and continue.
The fifth and sixth classes had been the transition — people arriving because they had heard, because the signal had reached them, because the principle document had traveled through the correspondence chains and the methodology documentation had named what they were already doing and the naming had oriented them toward the school.
The eighth class arrived because they had chosen.
