They call our numbers in a flat, unbroken sequence.
"Ten. Three-nine-nine. Seven-one-two."
The sound of my own number is different when it comes from someone else's mouth. It feels heavier, stripped of any softness, like it's been forged into metal in the air between us.
I rise. The bench creaks under my weight, the first sound I've made since sitting down, and the two others stand with me. 10 is tall, narrow-shouldered, his movements clean but slightly stiff, as if precision is a habit and not yet instinct. His uniform hangs perfectly, no sign of strain. 399 is broader, compact, with a weight in his stance that says he trusts his body more than his mind. His gaze flicks briefly to me, then away, already fixed on the door ahead.
We follow the old man through the hallway. The air changes: cooler, with the faint scent of ozone and scorched dust. It smells like a place where things move fast and don't stop for mistakes.
The corridor opens into a large, enclosed chamber. The walls are tall and seamless, made of some dull, reinforced material that drinks in sound instead of throwing it back. Overhead, the lighting is bright but cold, casting everything in hard edges without warmth.
A line is painted on the floor, crisp and white. We're told to stand behind it.
On the opposite side of the chamber, about fifteen meters away, is the device. Not a weapon in the traditional sense, no rifle, no barrel, just a blocky, turret-like construct mounted on a rotating base. Its front face is a smooth black panel, the surface reflecting the light in thin streaks.
An attendant stands to one side, adjusting something on a console. The machine gives a low, pulsing hum, like it's waking up.
The old man speaks without raising his voice:
"This is the agility assessment. You will dodge. Do not hesitate. Do not freeze. The system tracks every movement. Hesitation counts against you more than contact."
The attendant turns a dial. The turret shifts, scanning across the chamber until its face points directly at us. No one explains how fast the projectiles will come. No one says how much time we have to survive.
The test happens.The three of us go in turn: 10, then 399, then me, standing inside the painted box while the machine's empty eye studies us, learns us, tries to erase the gap between our thought and our movement.The red light above the console blinks when we're touched.
For each of us, it blinks. Twice for me.
When it's over, the hum fades and the door opens.
The corridor exhales us back into its narrow ribs. The vibration in my legs lingers like a leftover tremor. The three of us walk in a staggered line: 10 a half-step ahead, 399 a fraction behind, me in the quiet pocket between.
I don't look at them directly. I let the picture settle from the edges inward.
10 was the first.
Precision, almost to a fault. Even before he stepped across the painted line, he looked like someone who had rehearsed arriving: shoulders square, chin level, no wasted angles. His boots landed as if the floor were a grid only he could see: short steps, toes aligned, heels brushing the line before lifting again. It wasn't just movement; it was a measurement.
The hum of the turret rose, and his spine locked into what could have been parade posture. Upper body fixed like a sighting post while his legs did the work.
Clean, minimal, correct.
the turret twitched left and fired right. Broke tempo without warning. Cut beats in half, then stretched others until the space between pulses felt wrong in the lungs. Each time, 10 paused for the briefest fraction, translating the new rhythm back into his language: pattern, decision, movement. That fraction was a gap the machine could hunt.
For the first few passes, he kept his breath steady—slow inhale, measured exhale through the nose. Then the first graze came, a brush along his forearm that lit the red light over the console. His exhale shifted upward, into the throat. The ribs stopped expanding. Every breath after was shorter, tighter, like his body had abandoned the blueprint to protect the structure.
The next thirty seconds were a contest between his discipline and the machine's feints. He tried to stay small, knees absorbing each change, but his insistence on keeping his shoulders level forced him to commit more weight to each dodge. When the turret broke its own rhythm: high, pause, then low without warning, he was half a step behind. Second red blink.
By the final pass, the stiffness had set into his hips. His feet still landed parallel, still kissed the floor with the same stand, but the speed was gone. The machine didn't rush the kill: it feinted twice, drew him into an overcorrection, and clipped his ribs on the third.
When the hum died, he stepped back exactly two paces, no more, no less. His face stayed composed, but his right hand twitched once at his cuff, tapping it twice with his thumb—the same rhythm his breath had kept before the first hit. He didn't look at the turret. He didn't need to. Whatever he was thinking, he'd already folded it into the same grid he'd walked in on.
Then 399.
He made the floor an ally instead of a boundary: dropped levels early, rolled his center under the line of fire, let momentum do half the work. Good instincts,honest movement. But instinct has its own blind spot: it speaks loudest just after the moment passes, like an echo arriving a beat too late.
The first three rounds, that delay didn't matter. He was reading well enough to survive on raw reaction. The turret threw a high sweep, and he ducked under it before the hum had faded. A sharp right-hand flick, and he was already pivoting left, knees folding deep, hands brushing the ground for balance. For a moment, it looked like he might last the full time without a red blink.
But the machine doesn't care about looking good. It cares about patterns.
By the fourth sequence, it had found his recovery arc. Every dodge ended with his hips drifting fractionally to his right, a natural reset for him, an open invitation for the turret. The feint came low-left, baiting him into that familiar path; the real shot cut in high-right and kissed his calf as he came up.
He shook it off fast, jaw tightening once before settling again. That was his tell: one small reset in the jaw every time something got through. The rest of him stayed in motion: weight shifts, short half-steps, deep drops that made the floor complain under his boots.
The turret answered his stubbornness with the double-stack: low-high in the same breath. He folded for the low, but the high caught him square in the shoulder before his spine had time to straighten. Second red light. His head tipped back for half a heartbeat, eyes narrowing, not at the pain, but at the fact that he'd walked into the same trap as a thousand others before him.
When the hum cut out, he didn't look back at the turret. He just rolled his shoulder once, slow, like he was telling himself it didn't matter, and stepped out of the painted box.
And, me, 712.
I step into the box and let the room become a room inside my body: four edges, one rule: be somewhere else when the bullets arrives.
The hum is already there, a low note under the skin. The turret's panel tilts a fraction: pre-fire micro-sag in the pivot, there and gone. That's the cue.
First shot: low-left, faster than sense. I don't wait for sense. Heel peels, hips slide, forefoot carries me past the path of metal so close I feel the air graze the fabric at my knee. Wall takes the hit with a dull, obedient sound.
Second: high-right feint, real trajectory is center-left. I sell the drop with a shoulder fake, then cut diagonally across the box instead of giving ground. The turret tracks late, corrects hard. I'm already gone.
Breathe low. Quiet. Ribs, not throat.
Third comes early, the hum compressing tighter before sound: I step before the brain understand it. Weight stays light.
The floor wants me to commit.
I don't.
I keep a fraction of falling in every step, so the next movement is born already moving.
The machine adjusts. It always adjusts.
It tries tempo first: long pause, then two shots almost stacked. I break the pause by moving anyway, small, meaningless drift to the left that means everything, because it means the turret must pick one of two futures and be wrong in both. When the double comes, low then high, I'm already bent at the waist in a hinge that keeps my head low without costing me the hips. The high passes where my skull isn't.
Four, five, six: angles sharpen. It hunts recovery paths, not dodges. After a leftward slip it expects a right reset: I give it a forward surge instead, a quick two-step that crosses the room and forces it to swivel through more arc than it wants. The panel's seam flashes like a blank eye. The round smacks the far wall a breath behind me.
Seven: a trap. It dips right, offers a gap on my left, tries to herd me into the back corner where choices die. I don't honor the offer. I pivot on the ball of my right foot but keep my chest squared to it, a sideways slide that reads like retreat until the last instant, then becomes a half-spiral through the open middle. The shot skates the wake I leave behind, late by inches.
Eight, nine, ten: the hum tightens. New cadence. It's listening to breath now. Fine. I make the breath a lie down: two slow inhales stretched longer than comfort, two quick exhales cut shorter than calm. Let it read steadiness, then change nothing but the timing.
The floor is loud in my bones, quiet in my ears. My vision narrows to: my hip is a hinge, my spine a softened line, knees springs, feet answers.
Eleven: I test it. I throw myself left: overcommit, make it ugly on purpose. Chin tucked, shoulder rolled, the kind of mistake that begs to be punished. The turret holds its fire. No round. Just the machine's silence, hanging there like a verdict.
Twelve: comes from low-right, meant to take the shin. I hop the thin line of its path, both feet leaving the ground for a fraction that feels like a sin. In air there is no correction. I make the air brief. Land soft. Keep moving.
Thirteen through sixteen: the turret starts doubling off my balance shifts, not its own cadence. I make my balance impure. I let the right shoulder lead, then ask the left hip to move. I let my head imply retreat, then put my feet into advance. Disagreement becomes safety.
Seventeen: the first nick of inevitability arrives. Not a mistake. The round comes straight for the seam of my movement, hip height, true line, no feint. I've shifted early, but not early enough. I roll the soft part of my side toward it, take surface, spare bone. Impact brightens the nerve for an instant, a white pinprick, gone as I'm already off that axis. Red light blinks somewhere I'm not looking.
Eighteen: the machine tries to buy a freeze with sympathy—slower windup, wider tilt, an almost-kind pause. Kindness is a muzzle. I break it with a meaningless half-step and steal back the right to move on my time.
Nineteen, twenty: it cheats its own pivot, firing mid-swing. That's the tell I was waiting for. If it fires while the base is still traveling, the vector will be a shade behind its desired aim. I step not away but into that delayed shadow, let the shot go where I just was, and paint the box's far diagonal with my next two steps. The wall eats another dull thud.
Twenty-one through twenty-five: my thighs carry heat now: calves begin to stack acid. I lower the stance a hair to keep spring without locking the knees. Ankles are honest, if they stiffen, I'm late. I keep them lying.
Noise rises from the other side of the glass: someone's breath, another attendant shifting weight. The world tries to exist beyond the room. I let it, but I do not attend.
Twenty-six: double-stack but not in height, two centers, one delayed a fragment. It's asking for a flinch. I give it drift. The first misses because I'm not where I "should" be. the second bullet because I refuse to reverse to the expected.
Twenty-seven: the old trick again, offer the corner like it's mercy. I walk two inches toward mercy and then fold my torso around the imaginary pole of my spine, spinning without moving my feet more than a shoe's width. The round carves the space where my shoulder would have been. I leave the corner unconsumed.
Twenty-eight through the end: it runs out its patterns and I refuse them without ceremony. Nothing spectacular. No heroics. Bend. Step. Keep the chest quiet. Do not throw mine arms like flags. When it expects height, compress. When it expects retreat, write a line across the box and dare it to meet you in motion. When it expects breath to spike, put the air somewhere uninteresting, low back, side ribs, make respiration a background process.
Time is relative inside the room. It stretches to fit the space between episodes, then snaps after the last one like a rubber band released. The hum dies and the room reappears: walls, lights, the old man's shadow leaning long from the doorway. My skin realizes it's been sweating. My legs admit to shaking and then pretend they aren't.
I step out without looking at the console. Right now the only matters is: exit line, left turn, corridor's cool air balancing the heat in the calves.
In the hallway, my heartbeat finds a slower drum and my eyes widen back to full field. The room stays printed on the inside of my lids, a pale ghost of paint and choices.
We move in that staggered line again: 10 half-step ahead, 399 a fraction behind, me between them with the silence. My arm hums with the certainty of the second hit, a low ache that is less pain than proof. I leave it uninspected. Looking is often an invitation to feel more than you must.
The old man is waiting for us when we return. The bench sits between us like a neutral strip of territory. Old man doesn't gesture for us to sit. Doesn't take the seat himself. Both hands rest lightly on the backrest, not gripping, just there, fingertips loose enough that they could drum but never do.
The chamber behind us is still humming faintly, as though the walls are digesting what just happened inside. The faint tang of ozone clings to my skin, mixing with the salt of my own sweat. My calves are still holding that after-vibration, not trembling exactly, but waiting for another signal that doesn't come.
He studies us. His eyes move in a fixed order: 10 first, then 399, then me. Old man doesn't linger long on any one of us at first, but when his gaze comes back around, it feels like he's seeing a different layer each time, not skin, but something under it.
When he finally speaks, it's without ceremony. The tone is flat enough that it might have been the same whether we'd passed or failed.
"Not bad," he says. Not praise, just an observation, like a weather report. "All three of you kept your feet moving. More than most manage their first time in the room."
He shifts his weight and turns his full attention to 10.
"Clean," he says. "Almost too clean."
10's posture is already correcting itself, spine straighter, shoulders smoothing back into the same stand he carried into the test. He looks like a man who has already stored the criticism somewhere safe to study later, the way others might keep a blueprint.
Then the old man's eyes lower half an inch, finding 399.
"You trust your body. That's good. But trust without discipline is just luck. And luck runs out."His gaze sharpens, catching on something only he seems to see. "I could see the moment you reset. Anyone with eyes and patience will see it too. Hide the tells before someone decides to hunt them."
His voice doesn't change volume or speed, but something in the air tells me the sentence has ended. 399's jaw tightens, the same tell the old man has just correct.
Finally, his attention turns to me.
It's different. Not warmer, not softer, but steadier, as if he's measuring the space I take up without looking at the edges. His eyes are the same color as cold ash, and just as unyielding.
"Seven-one-two. You break patterns before they can root. That's rare. You understand that rhythm is a weapon and that it can be turned against the one who thinks they control it. But you paid for it twice today. Chaos is only worth the price when you choose it."
The room goes still again. This silence is heavier than the first.
He turns and begins walking, and the three of us follow. The bench creaks behind us as if exhaling relief.
"All three of you pass the agility assessment. Scores will be recorded. You'll see them when they matter. Next test is strength." No smile. No handshake. Just the facts, dropped into the air like stones into still water.