The woman didn’t let it go. Ren found that out about six hours later when he stepped out of his quarters to find a small crowd already gathered in the corridor outside, whispering in that particular way people did when they wanted to be overheard, and it took him about four seconds to catch the shape of what was spreading.
Apparently she’d spent the afternoon telling anyone who’d listen that the disgraced Miller heir had insulted her to her face on the landing pad in front of half the outpost, conveniently leaving out every single word she’d said first, and by the time the story finished making its rounds Ren had somehow become the villain of an incident he’d actually won.
’Yeah right,’ he thought, walking past the whispering cluster without slowing down, chin up, refusing to give any of them the satisfaction of a reaction. ’Of course the story gets flipped the second it leaves my mouth. Old habits, I guess, even in a whole different galaxy people love a good villain narrative.’
Yegard, for his part, said absolutely nothing about any of it. Ren caught sight of him twice over the course of the day, once crossing the main hall with a data pad in hand and a cluster of officers trailing behind him, once standing at the edge of the training yard watching a sparring match with that same unreadable stillness he wore like armor, and both times their eyes met for exactly as long as it took Yegard to register Ren’s presence before he simply looked away and kept doing whatever he’d been doing. No apology. No explanation. Not even an acknowledgment that anything worth explaining had happened.
’Fine,’ Ren thought, both times, with a little more force than the situation probably warranted. ’Great. Perfect. I genuinely do not care. I wasn’t out here fishing for a defense from a man I broke up with less than twenty-four hours ago, I was simply making an observation, and the observation is that he’s exactly as cold as advertised, and that’s fine, that’s completely fine, moving on.’
He spent most of the day wandering the parts of the outpost he was technically allowed to wander, trying to get his bearings, trying to piece together anything useful from Rafayal’s borrowed memories about how any of this actually worked.
The bloodline rank thing gnawed at him more than he wanted to admit. He remembered the book well enough to know the broad strokes, Yegard’s meteoric rise, the war with the monster territories simmering somewhere in the background for most of the story, the eventual rebellion that got Rafayal executed.
But there were details he genuinely could not pin down no matter how hard he tried, gaps in his memory of the story that felt less like forgetting and more like the information had simply never been there in the first place.
There was a second male lead. He was almost sure of it. Some scattered, half-formed recollection of a rival character who mattered enormously to the plot in ways Ren couldn’t fully reconstruct, someone whose identity felt like it was sitting right at the edge of his memory and refusing to come into focus no matter how hard he squinted at it.
He remembered the shape of a subplot without any of its substance, the way you remembered the general layout of a dream after waking up without being able to recall a single specific image from it. ’Somebody else matters in this story,’ he thought, frustrated, sitting on a bench outside the mess hall and staring at nothing in particular. ’Somebody I’m supposed to know about, and I don’t, and that feels like exactly the kind of gap that gets a person killed if they’re not paying attention.’
He was still turning that thought over, poking at the edges of it like a bruise, when the announcement came.
It hit every speaker in the outpost at once, a clipped, official voice cutting through every corridor and courtyard and training yard simultaneously, loud enough that Ren actually flinched. ["All active and dormant-registered Sentinels report to the main hall immediately. Rank assessment will commence within the hour. This is not optional."]
Around him, the entire outpost shifted gears at once. Sentinels dropped whatever they’d been doing mid-motion, sparring matches abandoned, meals left half-eaten, a stream of blue and black uniforms converging from every direction toward the massive doors of the main hall, and Ren sat there on his bench for one full second doing absolutely nothing while his brain scrambled to catch up. Rank assessment.
The memory surfaced all at once, sharp and sudden, the way the important ones always seemed to with this book. He remembered this scene, actually remembered it, one of the few genuinely vivid Chapters from early in the story, back before Yegard’s rise had properly begun.
Sentinels gathered in a hall exactly like this one, made to undergo a formal rank test in front of the entire outpost, results displayed publicly for everyone to see, careers made or quietly ended depending on where the number landed. He remembered it being important. He remembered a version of this test being the moment Yegard’s own rank first got confirmed on record, an early beat that set his entire trajectory in motion.
He also remembered, with a fresh wave of dread settling low in his stomach, that dormant-registered Sentinels were absolutely, explicitly included in that announcement, and he was now, as of roughly four hours ago on that crash site, officially one of those.
’Ahhhh,’ Ren thought, standing up so fast the bench scraped loudly against the ground. ’No, absolutely not, I refuse, I have had my ability for less than half a day, I don’t even know what it does beyond one lucky slash on a moon full of monsters, there is no version of this where I stand up in front of an entire outpost full of people who already hate me and let them watch whatever happens when I try to use it on purpose.’
But the announcement wasn’t asking. This is not optional, it had said, and Ren had lived in this world long enough now, barely a day, to understand that a Sentinel outpost operating under wartime footing at the edge of hostile monster territory probably didn’t make exceptions for newly arrived disgraced heirs who’d rather not participate, no matter how strong an objection they raised internally.
He fell in with the crowd because there wasn’t really another option, moving through the corridors with a tide of Sentinels twice his age and infinitely more prepared than he was, catching fragments of conversation as he went, people trading guesses about who’d move up this cycle, who was overdue for a demotion, whether the outpost commander himself would be observing personally given the recent incident at the border. Nobody looked at Ren directly, but plenty of people looked at him sideways, the whispers from earlier apparently still fresh enough to earn him a wide, deliberate berth as he walked.
The main hall, when he finally reached it, was enormous, a vaulted space with a raised platform at the center ringed by tiered seating already filling up fast, holographic displays mounted along every wall ready to project results the second they came in. Ren found himself herded, along with a small cluster of other dormant-registered Sentinels, toward a designated waiting area near the base of the platform, and it was there, standing among strangers with his pulse hammering somewhere in his throat, that he spotted Yegard again.
He was seated at the front of the tiered seating, in a position that made it obvious he wasn’t just observing this as a courtesy, upright and still in that same unreadable way, flanked by two officers who kept glancing at him for direction he clearly wasn’t in any hurry to provide.
Their eyes met across the hall for exactly one second before Yegard’s expression did something Ren couldn’t quite read, something that might have been the beginning of a warning, or might have just been the general resting cruelty of his face, and then the officer running the assessment stepped up to the platform’s edge and called the first name from the list.
Ren wasn’t first. He wasn’t even close to first, and he spent the better part of the next hour standing in that waiting area watching Sentinel after Sentinel take their turn on the platform, each of them channeling some form of energy or ability into a diagnostic array that measured and displayed a rank in glowing letters above their head for the entire hall to see, C-Class, B-Class, the occasional A-Class that drew a ripple of genuine applause, and Ren felt his dread compound with every single result, because whatever number came up over his own head, he had absolutely no idea how to control it, no idea how to even attempt to summon it on command in front of an audience instead of in a genuine, blood-pumping moment of survival.
’This is fine,’ he told himself, watching the line ahead of him shrink one name at a time. ’This is completely fine. I’ll figure it out. I figured it out on that moon, I can figure it out here, probably, hopefully, please let me figure it out here.’
The officer running the list glanced down at his data pad, then up toward the waiting area, and called the next name. "Rafayal Miller." Every single head in the hall turned at once.