Kovac’s hand shot forward with the heavy, unthinking precision of a pneumatic clamp, his thick fingers locking around the collar of Jack’s stiff uniform.
The sudden yank snapped Jack’s head forward, his throat pressing hard against the rough fabric.
His boots slid through the grit as he stumbled into the instructor’s personal space.
Jack’s right arm went rigid against his thigh.
He did not raise it.
He did not reach for the hand clutching his collar.
He let his eyes go blank, fixing his gaze on the dull brass bar pinned to the instructor’s collar seam, refusing to look higher.
Kovac’s other hand came up, hooking his thick thumb under the collar of Jack’s shirt, pulling the fabric down to expose the fresh, angry welt of the CDF brand against his collarbone.
The cold polymer lanyard of his tag bit into the back of his neck as Kovac turned the alloy plate over, scanning the numbers with clinical efficiency.
The stretch of burn tissue that pulled the instructor’s left eye into a permanent slit did not twitch.
“You are TC-11-9G.” Kovac’s voice was flat.
An assertion of ownership.
Jack said nothing.
The polymer cord cut deeper.
“You will answer when addressed by your designation, recruit.”
“TC-11-9G,” Jack said.
His voice came out steady.
The buried mechanism beneath his sleeve woke, a numb vibration climbing his bones like freezing coolant seeping through a hairline fracture in a conduit.
He pressed his arm harder against his thigh, forcing the tremor down.
Kovac held him there for three long heartbeats, his colorless eyes searching Jack’s face, reading the set of his jaw, the stillness of his pupils.
Then he released Jack’s collar with a rough shove that sent him stumbling back.
Jack’s boots scraped against the gravel.
He tucked his right forearm under his left armpit, pressing the length of the limb hard against his ribs.
The vibration continued beneath his skin, a frantic, double heartbeat running out of sync with his own.
Stop.
The chill did not stop, but it did not intensify either.
It remained a steady, thrumming presence, like a second nervous system running parallel to his own.
Kovac turned and barked at the assembled recruits.
“Columns. Now. Three lines. Face the blast doors. Move your fucking feet.”
“Drop your gear-sacks along the western retaining wall,” Hess yelled from the flank.
“If they aren’t in the bins in three seconds, they go in the incinerator.”
The draftees scrambled, tossing their grey canvas sacks into the heavy iron bins by the wall before shoving their way into formation.
Jack found his place behind Vance’s gangly frame.
He did not look at the guards.
Instead, his gaze tracked the deep drainage channels cut into the yard, noting the thick, greased hinges of the massive blast doors ahead.
Above them, the automated watch-turrets hummed, their sensory lenses tracking the movement of the crowd with small, oily clicks.
The doors were massive slabs of iron, pitted from decades of volcanic ash and thermal scaling.
They stood at least five meters tall, set into a reinforced concrete frame built to withstand an artillery strike.
Kovac walked down the line of recruits, his heavy boots leaving dark impressions in the grit.
He pointed a leather-gloved finger at the threshold.
“Those doors lead to the middle ring assessment hall. You will enter in column order. You will not speak. You will not break formation. You will do exactly what the medical technicians tell you and nothing more. Any recruit who cannot complete the physical evaluation will be routed through the auxiliary transfer gate for reassignment.”
The phrase hung in the freezing air.
Auxiliary transfer gate.
The administrative euphemism for the people who simply ceased to exist, broken down into whatever components the CDF could still use.
The blast doors groaned back on heavy hydraulic rams, revealing a long, dimly lit transit tube where the static-charged cold of the yard met the heavy, chemical-scented warmth of the interior.
The air that washed over them carried the smell of ozone, sterile floor cleaners, and old sweat.
The recruits shuffled forward in three uneven columns, their shoulders hunched against the howling wind.
Jack walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Vance and Kayla, his boots finding the raised treads of the concrete floor as they passed through the threshold.
The blast doors closed behind them with a hollow, echoing boom.
The sound of the wind cut off instantly, replaced by the steady hum of climate control systems and the distant clatter of machinery.
They emerged into the physical assessment hall.
The space was cavernous, its ceiling lost in shadow.
Rows of black rubber pressure tracks lined the floor, each track flanked by overhead diagnostic rigs that hung from the structural steel like skeletal crane winches.
Thick bundles of yellow high-voltage cables ran along the base of the walls, disappearing into the concrete floor like sleeping serpents.
At the far end of the hall, an elevated metal observation platform rose from the floor, connected to the rest of the facility by a narrow catwalk.
Kovac mounted the platform, his heavy forearms resting on the safety railing as he looked down at the rows of tracks.
At the front of the cohort, a broad-shouldered volunteer stood apart from the others.
His uniform was tailored to a clean, regulation fit, untouched by the ash of the outer yard.
He was stretching his arms across his chest, moving through a series of practiced, athletic movements.
On his chest, a polished black nameplate bore the surname in stark white block letters: VOSS.
Jack’s chest tightened. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Voss.
The name was a cold needle in his memory, a direct link to Mara’s warning in the shadows of the lower rings.
He forced his eyes away, dropping his chin, but the name lingered like a bad taste.
Vance shivered next to Jack, rubbing his hands together.
“Look at him,” Vance muttered, his voice barely lifting over the whine of the diagnostic dynamos.
“He looks like he was printed in a facility. Not a speck of dust.”
Jack said nothing, his eyes scanning the track layout.
Kayla’s jaw was set, her fists digging into her palms as she stared at the volunteer with quiet fury.
Kovac’s voice boomed from the observation platform.
“First ten. Tracks five through fourteen. Move.”
Jack was directed toward track seven, stepping onto the black rubber belt alongside Vance, Kayla, and the volunteer named Voss.
The diagnostic harness descended from the ceiling, a compact metal device with multiple articulated arms.
It settled around Jack’s chest, the canvas straps adjusting with the whine of a small motor before locking with a click that vibrated through his ribs.
A digital display board lit up in front of him, showing his designated speed and duration.
The tracks began to rotate.
Jack ran.
He kept his stride short, his boots striking the rubber with a heavy, uncoordinated rhythm that matched the pace of an underfed scavenger.
He forced his shoulders to round, mimicking the shallow, desperate breathing of the draftees beside him, though his chest felt hollow and unstrained.
To his right, Voss ran with perfect, textbook form, his chest rising and falling in a controlled, rhythmic pattern.
On track twelve, a thin recruit stumbled.
His foot caught the edge of the belt and he went down hard, his body sliding backward before the harness caught him and held him suspended.
The track stopped with a hydraulic whine.
Two technicians ran forward, unlocking his harness and pulling him to his feet.
Kovac pointed a single finger from the platform.
“Auxiliary.”
The man did not plead.
He simply shuffled toward a narrow, grey-painted portal on the eastern wall, his hands hanging limp at his sides.
Jack watched him go, noting how the remaining recruits tightened their strides, their faces pale under the fluorescent glare.
Overhead, the green targeting beam of the biometric scanner swept down Jack’s spine, tracking his posture, the alignment of his shoulders, and the muscle tension in his back.
It moved down to his right forearm.
The scanner stuttered.
A localized static ripple flickered across the technician’s console, the green targeting beam dancing erratically over the sleeve hiding Jack’s implant.
The mechanism clicked—a sharp, repeating sound of a lens failing to lock.
Jack’s heart hammered against his ribs.
He forced his legs to maintain their clumsy, lumbering rhythm, but his right hand tensed, a sudden spike of heat blooming in his wrist as the device fought the scanner’s pulse.
Beside the track, a medical technician frowned, tapping the side of the display with his knuckles.
The static persisted, an amber warning light flashing INTERFERENCE.
Jack kept his eyes locked on the digital display ahead, his breathing ragged by design, though the cold sensation in his arm was already numbing the exertion.
The technician grunted, reaching for a pressurized canister to spray a burst of dry air at the sensor housing.
“Ash in the emitter lens,” he muttered, logging the anomaly as a benign environmental error before hitting the override.
The amber light cleared to a dull grey.
But Jack saw the small, grey index number file itself into the local memory cache.
The machine had cleared the error, but the data remained, a tiny grain of sand waiting in the system’s gears.
The track ground to a halt.
Jack let his knees buckle slightly, stumbling against the frame of the track to sell the fatigue, but as his feet hit the concrete, he realized his legs did not ache.
His chest was not burning.
The chill beneath his skin was working quietly, clearing the lactic burn before it could even settle in his muscles.
He staggered over to a low steel bench and collapsed onto it, forcing his chest to rise and fall in heavy, exaggerated heaves.
Vance landed on the bench next to him, his chest laboring.
“Fuck,” Vance gasped, water dripping from his matted hair.
“That track… I thought my lungs were going to rupture.”
Jack placed two fingers against his own neck, feeling for his pulse.
It was steady.
Calm.
Eighty beats per minute, perhaps, when it should have been hammering at his ribs.
“Next phase. Load-bearing carry. Ballast blocks on the north wall.”
Jack approached his block.
It was a solid block of concrete with a rough iron handle embedded in the top.
He bent his knees, his back taking the weight with an honest, grunt-producing heave. New chapters come out on g.com first.
He lifted it, expecting the strain to grind into his lower spine, but the moment his fingers locked around the handle, his core engaged with a machine-like precision.
The weight was there, but the fatigue that should have crept into his shoulders simply failed to register.
His stride remained perfectly even, his footing solid against the anti-slip grooves of the floor.
He reached the line and dropped the block with a heavy thud, immediately letting his shoulders sag, dragging air through his mouth as if his lungs were failing.
From the observation platform, Kovac’s eyes tracked him, his scarred face revealing nothing.
“Ten-minute hydration break,” Kovac’s voice echoed.
“Then hand-to-hand assessment. Out to the yard. Move.”
The draftees collapsed onto the dark, ash-strewn gravel of the middle yard.
The freezing wind hit them fully now that they were out of the climate-controlled hall, carrying the bitter stench of sulfur.
Jack sat on a low concrete barrier, simulating an exhausted pant, his eyes half-closed.
Kayla dropped her water flask into the dirt.
Her hands were trembling so violently from the carry that she could not unscrew the cap.
She stared at her fingers, her mouth twisting in frustration.
Vance reached down, his own hands shaky.
“Here. Let me…”
“I don’t need help,” Kayla snapped, her voice sharp.
She gripped the flask with both hands, twisting the cap until it cracked open.
She drank, her throat moving in hard, gulping swallows of the metallic water.
Nearby, Voss stood leaning against a structural support beam.
His uniform was immaculate, his breathing barely elevated as he sipped from his flask.
He looked down at Kayla and the other struggling draftees, his lip curling slightly.
“Three minutes on a belt and two laps with a stone, and half the cohort is ready for the scrap heap,” Voss said, his voice carrying easily over the wind.
Kayla’s head snapped up.
“You like the word ‘scrap,’ don’t you, Voss? Easy to use when your family didn’t have to watch the Aldric turn into a dry ditch of dead silt so your processing plants could run at full capacity.”
Voss did not flinch.
“The river diversion was a strategic necessity. The orbital defense grid requires the output. Without it, the Vorthak would have turned your district into a crater decades ago. The math is simple.”
Kayla rose to her feet, stepping directly into his space, her fists digging into her sides.
“The math. My brother drank from an irrigation run-off because your plants bought the wells. He was eight, Voss. Tell me more about your fucking math.”
Vance quickly slid his lanky frame between them, his hands raised.
“Hey. The water here tastes like rusted sheet metal anyway. Let’s not kill each other over who gets to drink the poison first. I’d like to keep my nose in one piece for at least another hour.”
Voss’s eyes slid past Vance, dismissing him entirely.
They moved across the yard, scanning the exhausted draftees, and locked directly onto Jack.
“You,” Voss said, pointing a finger at him.
“The scavenger. You’re barely sweating.”
Jack felt the weight of the gaze.
He forced his shoulders to slump further, letting his face go slack as he looked up with a dull, uncomprehending expression.
“What?” Jack asked, keeping his voice flat, the empty tone of a tired laborer.
“You didn’t break stride on the track,” Voss said, his eyes narrowing.
“Your recovery was too clean. You aren’t shaking.”
Jack kicked a loose piece of gravel.
“I work scaffolding in the lower rings,” he said, letting a tired rasp enter his voice.
“If you don’t learn how to hold your breath and keep your hands steady while the furnace vents are blowing, you drop ninety feet into a grease vat. You get used to the strain.”
Voss studied him, his jaw tightening.
“You’re lying.”
Before Jack could respond, Kovac’s whistle blew—a sharp, metallic screech that cut through the wind with clinical authority.
Kovac strode over from the edge of the yard, pointing his thick finger directly at Jack.
“You.”
Then his finger moved to Voss.
“And you.”
Voss’s face hardened into a cold, satisfied expression.
He stripped off his heavy outer jacket, revealing the lean, powerful lines of his torso beneath his grey undershirt, and stepped onto the raised concrete pad in the center of the yard.
“Hand-to-hand assessment,” Kovac said.
“The ring. Now.”
Jack stood frozen, the numbness in his arm flaring into a sharp, icy pressure.
He was trapped.
If he fought at the level of a normal, untrained scavenger, Voss would beat him to a pulp.
But if he fought back—if the device beneath his skin responded to the threat and gave him the speed and reflexes to counter an academy-trained volunteer—Kovac and every technician in the yard would see it.
I’m trapped, he thought, his gaze locked on the white paint of the ring.
There was no clean exit.