The Processing Centre didn't look like a place where lives got sorted.
It looked like a warehouse. A clean one—Dominion clean—with white surfaces, recycled air, and lights that hummed until your teeth ached after an hour. Still, it was just a warehouse. Long, wide, and packed with people waiting in lines that crawled so slowly it felt like time itself had given up.
Rael got there early. Checked in at the gate terminal, got a numbered tag printed on his wrist. BATCH 7, #214. Joined the queue.
There were hundreds of conscripts, mostly human, mostly from Ground-Zero and Sector-Zero. They all wore the same expression he probably had now. Not scared, just very still—the kind of stillness you learn when showing any feeling costs too much.
A few were crying. He didn't judge them.
He scanned the room the way he always scanned rooms. He checked the room like he always did: exits, cameras, choke points, who might cause trouble, who looked ready to do something reckless. It was an old habit from Sector-Zero. He was at the head of the queue, talking.
Not nervously. Not to herself. Just talking. To the guy next to her, who looked like he wanted to disappear into the floor, and then to the woman behind her, who seemed surprised to be included in a conversation she hadn't signed up for. Rael watched her work through four different people in ten minutes, as if she were at a social event rather than a military conscription facility.
She caught him watching.
"Hey." She turned around fully, like that was just a normal thing to do in a queue. "You been here long?"
"Long enough."
"You know what the hold-up is?"
"Assessment takes thirty seconds per person. There are about two hundred people ahead of us. You can do the math."
She did. He could see it on her face. "That's like... two hours."
"Closer to three."
She pulled a face—not panicked, just annoyed, like someone whose train was running late. "Great. Cool. Love that for us." She held out her hand. "Kira."
He looked at her hand for a second. Shook it. "Rael."
"You from Ground-Zero?"
"Sector-Zero."
Her eyebrows went up a little, not in a bad way, more like she was adjusting her expectations. "Oh. Okay. That's... yeah, okay."
"You?"
"Ground-Zero. East block." She turned back around as the queue shuffled forward, then half-turned back as she'd just remembered something. "You scared?"
"No."
"Really."
"Are you?"
She paused and really thought about it, which surprised him. "Yeah," she said. "But it's the useful kind—the kind that makes you pay attention."
Rael didn't answer.
She turned back around.
He kept watching the room.
The Assessment Station was a white booth with a scanner on a mechanical arm. Each station had a technician, and ten stations ran at once. The process matched the briefing: stand still, let the scanner work, get your grade, then move on.
Thirty seconds.
He watched it happen down the line. A person steps in. Scanner runs. Technician taps a screen. Grade-F confirmed. Next.
Every time, it was the same: Grade-F confirmed, again and again. They were all human, and humans always got Grade-F. That's just what the scanner saw.
Kira went three people ahead of him. Stepped in, stood still, scanner ran.
"Grade-F confirmed." She got a small blue wristband printed. Walked out, caught his eye, gave him a look that said well, that happened.
Next person. Grade-F confirmed.
Next, Grade-F confirmed.
Rael stepped into the booth.
The scanner arm moved. He stood still. Thirty seconds, that was the cycle, he'd counted it every single time.
The arm stopped.
The technician frowned at his screen.
The arm moved again. Re-scanning. Slower this time.
Stopped again.
The technician tapped at the screen, then tapped again. He leaned in, as if being closer might change what he saw.
"Sir, I'm going to need you to stay still for a moment."
"I haven't moved."
"I understand, just..." The man tapped his earpiece. Said something in a low voice that Rael couldn't catch. Then looked back at his screen with an expression that wasn't confusion.
It was recognition.
Rael noticed and filed it away.
Thirty seconds became a minute. A minute became two. The queue behind him was backing up. People were craning their necks.
Kira was watching from the assignment area, brow furrowed.
A supervisor appeared from a side door. Looked at the screen. Looked at Rael. Looked at the screen again.
The scanner output read: ERROR — BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE UNCLASSIFIED.
The supervisor leaned toward the technician. The supervisor leaned in and spoke quietly in Dominion—the language they used when they thought humans weren't listening. The words were clipped and fast, the dialect Rael had spent three years learning from stolen audio files. Information was the only currency that never got taxed. Protocol Null. Do not let the subject leave the facility."
Rael understood every word.
He stayed still, didn't blink, and kept his face blank and a little bored—the look of someone waiting for a paperwork mistake to get fixed.
Inside, his brain was already running numbers.
He could see three exits. Two had guards. The third was a maintenance corridor behind the row of stations—no guard, but a camera that swept past every four seconds. He'd noticed it an hour ago without even trying.
The supervisor straightened up. Reached for something on his belt.
Rael's eyes went to Kira.
She was still watching. Hadn't moved. When he caught her eye, he gave her the smallest possible tilt of his head, sideways, toward the maintenance corridor.
She looked at the corridor. Looked back at him.
Gave him a tiny nod.
He thought, Smart. Good.
He didn't know her and had no reason to trust her. But she'd figured it out in three seconds and kept her expression calm, which was more than most people could do.
The supervisor turned back around.
Rael was still standing exactly where he'd been, still bored. Still waiting.
"There seems to be a calibration issue with the scanner," the supervisor said in flat, accented Standard. "We'll need to run a secondary assessment. If you'll follow me..."
"Sure," Rael said.
He followed.
Two steps in the wrong direction. Then he turned, cut left, and moved.
The maintenance corridor smelled of recycled coolant and old cables. The ceiling was low and the space narrow, with strip lights every few meters casting long shadows.
Kira was already there.
"Okay," she said, falling into step beside him, voice low. "What was that?"
"Scanner error."
"That's not what that looked like."
"Keep moving."
She kept moving. "They said something to each other, right? In Dominion. You understood it."
He glanced at her sideways.
"Your face changed," she said. "Just for a second. But it changed."
He made a note of that too. He'd need to work on it.
"Protocol Null," he said quietly. "It's a detain-and-extract order. They use it for anomalous subjects."
"Anomalous."
"Yeah."
"Are you anomalous?"
"Apparently."
She was quiet for three steps. "Cool," she said. "Cool, cool, cool. Great. Love that."
Despite everything, a hint of a smile almost appeared at the corner of his mouth.
They moved deeper into the corridor.
He heard them before he saw them. One set of footsteps, heavy, moving fast from the junction ahead. No time to redirect.
The Compliance Officer came around the corner and saw them both, and that was that.
"Stop. Both of you. Hands..."
He raised the disruptor and fired at Rael's arm.
It wasn't a regular bullet. It was an augmentation disruptor, meant to overload active aug systems and drop the target. Standard crowd control for conscript processing—painful, non-lethal, and effective.
It hit Rael's left forearm.
The pain was immediate and total. White, sharp, the kind that wiped everything else out for a second. He heard himself make a sound he hadn't planned on making.
Then.
Something else.
The pain didn't stop, but it changed. It felt different, as if his body was processing it. Whatever was in the round had hit something in his arm that didn't know it should shut down, and it was doing something else with the signal. ved up from his wrist to his elbow. Not fire. More like current. Like something was being written into him very fast.
He didn't have time to think about what that meant.
The officer was already reaching for his wrist comm.
Rael moved. Closed the distance fast, got inside the reach, used a Sub-Level 3 trick that didn't have a name but worked fine on people who expected conscripts to be afraid. The officer went down. Not badly hurt. Just down.
"Go," Rael said.
They went.
They found a dead end, a storage alcove behind a coolant unit, and stopped.
Kira had her back against the wall, breathing controlled. She looked at him, at his arm, back at his face.
He looked at his arm.
Under his skin, where the round hit, something shifted. It wasn't really visible—more like a heat shimmer, a faint pattern that pulsed once like a heartbeat, then faded.
Gone. Like it had never been there.
"What augmentation is that?" Kira asked.
Her voice was steady. He noted that. Most people's voices weren't steady after what just happened.
"Not one I had," he said.
Silence.
The corridor hummed around them. Somewhere behind, footsteps echoed—coming closer, then turning away down the wrong corridor.
Kira looked at the ceiling for a second. Then back at him.
"Okay," she said. "So what's the plan?"
Rael leaned against the coolant unit and thought.
Running wasn't an option. Sector-Zero would be the first place they searched. Going back meant giving up the only lead he had on his mother's file—the only chance he'd had in eleven years.
He needed to be inside the system. Not running from it.
He pulled out his wand. He pulled out his wand and accessed the processing network's local node. Every facility like this had one, linked to the main intake system but less secure, since no one expected a Grade-F conscript to even know it was there. own assessment results."
Kira stared at him. "You can do that?"
"I can do that."
"And it just... works?"
"The system trusts its own data. If it says Grade-F confirmed and batch assignment processed, no one looks twice." He was already in the network, finding the intake log and their tag numbers. "Nobody checks two hundred conscripts by hand."
"That is either really smart or really stupid."
"Both, probably."
She watched him work. "And then what? We walk in as if nothing happened?"
"We walk in like we belong." He finished the entry, closed the connection, and put away the wand. "Which, technically, we do."
Kira was quiet for a second.
"You've done this kind of thing before," she said. Not a question.
"Sector-Zero," he said, like that was an answer.
It was.
They emerged from the maintenance corridor eight minutes later, joined the tail end of the assignment processing queue, and got their unit assignments printed without incident.
UNIT ZERO. TRAINING COMPOUND ALPHA. REPORT 0600.
Rael looked at the printout.
Kira looked at hers. Same unit. She glanced at him.
"Guess we're teammates," she said.
He folded the printout. Pocketed it.
"Don't call it that."
She smiled like he'd said something funny.
He hadn't said anything funny.
In the Assessment Station, the supervisor stood in front of a frozen scanner screen.
ERROR — BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE UNCLASSIFIED.
Still there. Hadn't cleared.
He looked at the empty booth where the subject had been standing twenty minutes ago and looked at his supervisor's comm, which he hadn't used yet.
Made a decision.
Picked it up.
"This is Station 7, Processing Centre Jakarta-Node. Batch 7. We had an anomaly."
A pause on the other end.
"Describe."
"Scanner returned unclassified on a Grade-F human conscript. The subject is no longer in the facility. He's in the Draft pool."
Another pause. Longer.
"Don't touch the log. Don't file a report. Someone will handle it."
The line went dead.
The supervisor stood very still for a moment.
Then he deleted the scanner error from his personal terminal, left the station, and did not think about it again.
That was how you survived here: see things, delete them, and keep moving.
VOSS, RAEL. GRADE-F CONFIRMED. UNIT ZERO.