The second sun's first rays were just breaking through the rockcrete jungle of Lumiosia’s Undercity when the shuttle arrived.
Thea and James had walked to the plaza together, not wanting to cut it close on a day like this, and now stood side by side in silence as it came down—sleek, aerodynamic, roughly the size of a car, descending into the open space with quiet precision.
She had her small, well-worn bag over her shoulder, the last surviving strap held firm in her left hand. She'd kept the packing minimal: Her controller, her lucky violet hoodie, her favourite pillow.
The last one had been the Old Man's suggestion—apparently the UHF's standard issue left something to be desired in terms of comfort.
As the shuttle continued its descent, he turned toward her.
"I guess this is it, missy." A brief pause. "There's one more piece of advice I want to give you. It's an important one—remember it for the years to come."
She looked up at him.
"There will come a time during your training when the UHF will ask for your unconditional trust. They won't explain why, or what you're trusting them with. You especially will struggle with that decision—you've always been more perceptive than most—but trust in me when I tell you this: Trust the UHF blindly, in that particular moment. No matter what your instincts tell you. No matter what your eyes, ears, and every other sense might be screaming at you from the very bottom of your being."
His voice was level and certain. "Trust the UHF at that moment."
‘He's deadly serious.’ She could see it immediately—the expression he almost never wore, the one that meant the thing being said wasn't up for discussion or “thinking about it later”.
Old Man James had a face for important things, and this was it.
‘I don't know what this is about. And he's not going to tell me either—if he could, he already would have…’
"Got it," she said, meeting his eyes with a firm nod. "I'll trust the UHF when the time comes. For you. I don't know what it's about, but I'll do it."
The shuttle touched down at that moment, settling onto the plaza with a soft thud, and the passenger compartment opened with a quiet hiss.
An attache in a civilian-cut UHF uniform stepped out and took up a position beside the opening, ready and waiting.
She took a few steps toward the shuttle, then stopped.
‘Just go. Just—’
She turned around and ran back, threw her arms around him, and held on.
"I… I just wanted to say thank you," she managed, her voice muffled against his chest, the stutter she couldn't help giving away everything she was trying to hold together. "For everything."
She kept going, because if she stopped she wouldn't start again.
"Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for accepting me for who I am and helping me become who I am today. I never would have made it without you. Thank you for always being there. For giving me everything I could have asked for—and things I didn't even know I needed."
Her voice was getting harder to understand and she knew it, the words coming out unsteady as everything that had been building for years came spilling out at once. "I've been a brat. Moody, rebellious, all of it—and you never once hated me for any of it."
She pressed her face into his shirt.
"I won't ever be able to repay you. But I—I just wanted you to know that I'm grateful. For all of it. I'll work hard. I'll do my absolute best to make you proud."
A deep, shuddering breath.
"Thank you, James. Thank you so, so much."
The tears came freely after that and she stopped fighting them.
He'd stood completely still through all of it, listening without interrupting. But after she was done, his arms came up and wrapped around her properly—a firm, solid hug—and he gave a small, slow shake of his head with a sad smile that Thea could barely make out through her blurry vision.
"There's definitely one thing you're misunderstanding, missy," he said, his voice warm. "You don't owe me anything."
He paused, his gaze going somewhere distant for a moment.
"Saving you was the best thing I have ever done in my entire life. One of the only truly good and proper things, at that." He looked down at her, and there was something pained in his expression that she didn't see there often, if ever. "I didn't come to this backwater planet's Undercity to be a hero, though. Quite the opposite. I never told you why I came here—and that was for a good reason..."
A brief, uncharacteristic hesitation, before he continued.
"I was hiding. To be honest with you—I was either going to try to somehow mend my broken soul, or simply end it all. That was my purpose in coming here. I've lived a very long life. One full of constant war and the deaths of people I cared about. I was tired, Thea. When I left the UHF, I told myself I would just disappear. Vanish into the Void and be done with it."
His arms tightened slightly around her.
"And then I came to this Undercity, and I found you in that alleyway. And I saw the determination in your eyes to keep going, to keep living—and there was nothing else I could have done. You deserved better than what you had. So I took you in. Simple as that.
“Ever since then, you've changed the way I see everything. Not just my own life—the lives of the people I used to know, and the ones I'll never meet. I realised I could do a lot more to make things right than just disappear. It has been a privilege to watch you grow into the person you are today. And you don't need to try hard to make me proud—I already am. I'm simply looking forward to seeing where you go from here."
His voice dropped slightly on the last part.
"So yes—I saved you, all those years ago. Maybe a few times since then too." A pause. "But you have saved me every single day for more than a decade."
That was the end of her.
The sound that came out of her wasn't quiet or controlled—it was the kind of crying that came from somewhere deep, the kind she'd been keeping a lid on for years without fully realising it.
Her body shook, held up almost entirely by the arms around her, and she stopped trying to hold any of it back.
She clung to him while he rubbed her back in slow, steady circles, and they stayed like that for what felt like a long time but probably wasn't.
Eventually the shaking eased. Eventually she could breathe evenly again.
She stepped back and looked up at him with red, soaked eyes.
He was wearing a stoic smile.
It shifted into something more familiar.
"Now—go out there and show the rest of the galaxy what I already know you can accomplish."
The teasing note was back in his voice with his next words. "Remember that you're my daughter now. If you perform badly, it'll make me look bad too. We can't have that, are we understood?"
The word 'daughter' hit her somewhere in the chest and she tensed for just a second—then let it go, and the smile that replaced it was wobbly, wet and more genuine than anything she'd managed all morning.
"Sure thing, Old Man," she said, her voice finding something closer to their usual tone. "Always out to make yourself look good for the ladies—I know how it is. I'll make sure everyone knows about the great James McKay and his honourable deeds, don't you worry!"
She pulled out of his arms and dried her face on her sleeves, then turned and walked toward the shuttle in measured steps.
A couple of metres from the open passenger compartment, she stopped.
‘Say it. Just say it… It’s your last chance.’
She turned back one last time.
"Thank you for everything…"
A breath. "Dad."
The weight of that word—how long it had been sitting in her chest without a name—lifted the moment it was out.
She stepped into the shuttle before she could second-guess it or watch his reaction.
The attache, who had been studying the second sun's rise over the Undercity roofline with particularly great interest throughout the entire goodbye, gave James a small nod before following her inside.
The compartment closed behind them with a soft hiss.
Thea sat down and stared at nothing in particular while her vision blurred all over again.
‘He was going to end it.’ She kept circling back to that. Everything he'd said, everything she'd just learned—it sat differently than she'd expected, heavier and far more complicated than she had ever thought possible.
Part of her, a small but definitely loud part, wanted to get back up, go back out there, and not leave any of it behind.
‘Not him… Not any of it.’
The shuttle rose before that thought had a chance to go anywhere.
The quiet hum of the propulsion thrusters and the anti-gravity engine filled the cabin as the Undercity fell away beneath them.
Thea turned to the tinted window and watched it go.
‘No way back now.’
She let the breath out slowly and felt something settle—not the anxiety, exactly, but the part of her that had been pulling in two directions at once.
‘Forward. That's all there is now.’
She was going to work hard. She was going to be someone worth the faith Thomas and James had put in her, all those years, without ever being asked or asking anything of her in return.
‘That's the only option left. So that's what I'll do…’
The wristband alarm dragged Thea up from the dream, and her first move was to roll over and pull her pillow tight against her chest before shutting it off.
The dream had been a full, vivid replay of her leaving Lumiosia—every detail intact, every emotion right back at full weight—and she lay there for a moment letting it settle.
Not exactly restful.
But she did have a pretty good idea why those particular memories had surfaced today, though.
She untangled herself from the blanket and got up to start her morning routine.
Today was her graduation ceremony.
Two years. Two years on a UHF station in the local star cluster, and now here she was on the other side of it. She stood in the narrow gap between the bed and the wardrobe and let that sit for a second.
‘Two entire years since I’ve seen or spoken to any of them…’
The training itself had surprised her, if she was being honest.
She'd gone in expecting something heavily military—squad tactics, individual strategies, combat-focused from the first week.
What she'd actually gotten was closer to an Inner-World’s academy curriculum, broad and thorough across a lot of fields she hadn't anticipated.
The physical regimen had been brutal enough to bring her to her knees more than once, and the shooting drills had been serious, of course—but the overall shape of it hadn't been what she'd pictured at all.
“Why not more military training?”
The question had come up more than a few times over the past two years.
The UHF had always valued quality over sheer numbers—that much she understood—but it still didn't fully explain the gap between what she'd expected and what she'd actually received.
‘Not my place to second-guess people who've been doing this for longer than I've been alive though.’ She'd ultimately made her peace with it. After today, she'd be a UHF Marine either way, and presumably things would start making a lot more sense from there.
‘After today.’
The thought sent a jolt of giddy energy through her that she couldn't quite suppress, mixed with something more measured underneath it.
She grabbed her Recruit uniform after a quick shower—there were dried tear tracks on her face from the dream that needed dealing with—and started getting dressed in the small, familiar way she'd learned to navigate the room.
The room itself had been a genuine surprise when she'd first arrived.
She'd heard enough about other military branches to mentally prepare herself for bunk beds and a shared barracks, so having her own space—even a small one—had felt almost luxurious by comparison.
It wasn't large by any measure, of course.
Bed, wardrobe, a retractable desk mounted to the wall, and just enough floor space to get dressed without ending up sitting on the mattress halfway through.
But it was hers, and that had mattered more than she'd expected.
She took a last look around the small room, then stepped out into the brightly lit hallway and pulled the door shut behind her.
‘Two years of this corridor…’
She walked past the rows of identical doors, each one belonging to a Recruit she'd come to know in the loose, passing way that this place seemed designed to allow—faces she recognised, names she mostly knew, but nothing deeper than that.
Which was the other thing that had surprised her.
‘I really thought we'd be in squads for all of this—or at least a big portion.’
She'd assumed the UHF would push them together, build camaraderie early, get them used to the structure they'd be living inside for the rest of their careers.
Instead, it had gone almost exactly the opposite direction.
The schedules had been staggered so thoroughly that she'd barely shared a classroom with anyone from her dormitory. The Recruits she did study alongside kept rotating on a weekly basis, making anything more than surface-level familiarity nearly impossible.
She'd turned over the why of things plenty of times without landing on anything that fully satisfied her. It felt deliberate—far, far too consistent to be mere coincidence—but the intent behind it had stayed out of reach.
She'd eventually filed it alongside the other things the UHF did that she didn't fully understand yet, and left it there.
‘I really fucking hope that whole “I don’t get it” part changes after today… ’
The want for actual peers—people her own age, people she could build something real with—had been a low, persistent ache throughout the whole two years—maybe even before then.
Growing up, she'd had James and Thomas, and before them, no one.
Peers had always been more of an idea than a reality for her.
She was more than ready for that to finally change.
She kept moving at her usual pace, joining the quiet current of Recruits making their way toward the assembly hall.
The hallway had far more of a nervous energy in it than normal—doors opening, Recruits filing out, small clusters of them adjusting uniforms and exchanging the kind of quick, low-voiced words that happened between people who didn't know each other that well but were sharing something significant anyway.
The route took her past all the familiar landmarks she'd spent two years building her life around.
The mess hall, where chicken-flavoured nutrient packs had featured heavily enough that she'd lost count somewhere around month three. The training facilities, which had introduced her to entirely new definitions of exhausted. The study rooms, where she'd worked through more subjects than she'd expected to ever touch—military and academic alike, stacked one on top of the other across two solid years.
The corridors leading to the assembly hall were lined with UHF emblems and motivational posters, the kind that had blended into the background after the first few weeks.
Her footsteps echoed off the reinforced durasteel walls as she walked, and the closer she got, the more her pulse picked up.
The assembly hall's entrance was already busy when she finally arrived—hundreds of Recruits formed into neat lines, the hall itself high-ceilinged and hung with banners and flags that made the space feel larger than it was.
She took a deep breath, joined the queue, and stepped up to the organiser at the front when her turn came.
"Name?"
"Recruit Thea McKay, Sir."
He typed briefly, reached into the crate beside him, and held out a data chip. "You're in assembly hall P, down that hallway. Use the chip to get inside. Dismissed."
A practiced gesture to the hallway on her right, and then he was already looking past her to the next person in line.
‘Assembly hall P?’ She moved out of the queue and looked down at the chip in her hand, frowning. She hadn't even known there were multiple halls. ‘Why a different hall entirely?’
The unease that crept in got a little louder when she looked back at the main entrance and realised that almost everyone else was simply being given a row number and walking straight inside.
She was clearly going somewhere very different.
It eased slightly when she spotted a handful of other Recruits peeling away toward the same hallway, each of them turning a data chip over in their hands with matching expressions of confusion.
She quickened her pace to fall in with them and took a closer look at the chip.
Standard issue—she'd used dozens of them over the past two years, four centimetres by two, indistinguishable from every other data chip she'd ever handled.
‘Still doesn't explain why we're being separated, though...’
Nobody in the small group spoke.
They were seven by the time they entered the hallway, and the silence felt loaded—everyone clearly running through the same questions and not quite ready to voice them openly.
The hallway wound through twists and turns for what felt like ten minutes before it dropped into a long staircase, and at the bottom stood a large plasteel gate with a single crimson "P" stamped across it in the UHF's signature dim crimson red.
They'd picked up a few more people along the way. Sixteen total now, standing at the base of the stairs, all of them looking at the gate and then at each other.
‘Someone has to go first.’ Thea looked around the group.
Nobody moved.
The scanner was right there on the left side of the gate—obvious enough that everyone knew exactly what they were supposed to do.
That obviously wasn't the problem.
The problem was the silence, and the way everyone kept glancing at each other sideways, and the way the whole thing just kept stretching out with nobody willing to move first…
‘I fucking can't stand this!’
After nearly a minute of it, Thea pushed through the group, swiped her chip over the scanner without ceremony, and stepped through the door-sized section of gate that swung open in response.
It slammed shut automatically behind her.
‘Much better.’
The hall in front of her was large—a scaled-down version of the main assembly hall, same kind of banners and flags, and an impressive podium at the front.
Two things stood out immediately, however.
The walls were reinforced placrete, the rockcrete-plasteel combination the UHF used for bunkers and headquarters—absolutely not standard for a mere assembly hall like this. And instead of marked rows on the floor, there were hundreds—maybe thousands—of aluminium folding chairs lined up in neat rows facing the podium.
The door opened again behind her.
Another Recruit from the group, eyes moving around the room, taking it in.
Thea moved toward the chairs before anyone could try to talk to her, scanning for a seating assignment printed on them or placed nearby.
Nothing.
‘Of fucking course…’ She groaned quietly.
She pulled out her personal datapad and stared at it with the focused expression of someone reading something important, which she absolutely was not.
Across the hall, roughly thirty Recruits were already seated—some in small clusters, most alone.
A second door on the opposite wall let in another Recruit as she watched.
‘So there are multiple entry points.’
She was still pretending to read when one of the Recruits from her group called out across the hall with a cheerfulness that cut straight through the ambient tension.
"Hey, you folks over there! How did ya figure out where to sit? We didn't get no assignments like we usually do. Any idea what's going on?"
A Recruit closer to the podium looked up. "Just sit anywhere. The chairs register to your butt—your name shows up after you sit down for the first time, long as it’s unclaimed, so you don't have to stay in the same one the whole time."
‘Oh. That's it? Why wasn’t this explained at any point before this…?!’
"Hahaha!" The loud Recruit's laugh bounced off the placrete walls. He threw a full salute at the helpful Recruit across the hall. "Thank you, buddy! May our butts reserve the greatest of seats!"
Thea pressed her lips together hard. ‘That's an absolutely ridiculous thing to say.’
The smile came anyway.
She kept up the datapad charade for another minute out of principle, then picked a chair about a third of the way to the podium and sat down…
Forty minutes later, the hall had filled up considerably.
Chairs were going fast, Recruits still trickling in at a steady rate, and Thea estimated them somewhere above nine hundred strong in the room by this point.
She'd spent most of that time watching others.
‘I know them.’
That was the most surprising realization she’d had in that time.
Not all of them, of course, but most—faces she recognised from classrooms, training sessions, the shooting range. Never for long, given the way the schedules had been shuffled, but long enough to stick.
Her memory had done the rest.
And they weren't random faces, either.
‘These are the ones who stood out in all the classes, aren’t they…?’
They had been the Recruits who'd consistently topped the physical drills. The ones who never missed at the range. The ones whose theoretical scores had quietly become a point of reference for everyone around them.
She couldn't be completely certain she wasn't just pattern-matching in hindsight—but it felt too statistically significant for her to ignore.
‘They put us in here together on purpose.’
The thought landed with a quiet kind of satisfaction.
If that was true, it meant the UHF had been paying very close attention. It meant her two years of relentless, back-breaking efforts had hopefully not gone unnoticed.
‘Good.’
Five minutes after the hall had reached capacity, the lights dropped.
Spotlights came up on the podium—bright and golden—and the shift in atmosphere moved through the room like a current.
The podium itself was clean and imposing, crafted from sleek dark wood, framed on either side by dim crimson curtains that fell from ceiling height.
The UHF emblem on the backdrop behind it caught the spotlight in gleaming silver.
Every voice in the hall went quiet without anyone asking.
The sound of boots on the stage broke the silence—measured, unhurried.
A figure stepped out from behind the right curtain and moved to the front centre of the podium with clean, elegant strides.
The spotlights caught her face and Thea's eyes went wide.
Major Zephyr Quinn. Proprietor of the Kuigon Star Sector. The exact same officer who had introduced the challenge to Lumiosia's Undercity two years ago, when the Cube had activated inside the Golden Age Arcade.
She was tall—not Daxton tall, nothing like that, but far enough above Thea that the height difference would have been immediately obvious standing next to her.
‘Probably around 190cm, I’d guess…’
The long black hair, the striking green eyes, the posture that somehow managed to be both relaxed and completely unapproachable at once.
Thea recognised her the moment the light hit her face—not that anyone local to the Kuigon Sector likely would have struggled to.
The grey coat with its UHF insignias only further underlined what her presence already made abundantly clear: This was someone who had spent a long time being exactly what she was now, and it more than showed.
Her hawkish gaze moved slowly across the hall, taking in the assembled Recruits without any particular hurry, and then she gave a single, measured nod—apparently satisfied with whatever she saw—and spoke.
"Attention, Recruits!"
Nine hundred chairs scraped back simultaneously as everyone came to their feet—Thea included.
"My name is Major Zephyr Quinn, and I am the Proprietor of the Kuigon Star Sector. Aside from that, however, I am also the UHF official responsible for this Recruitment Drive in our little Sector of the Star Cluster. It is my duty and honour to welcome you all to the UHF’s military branch—the UHF Marine Corps—today. Over the past two years, you have undergone rigorous physical training, demanding academic education, and a range of tests and assessments designed to prepare you for this moment."
She paused, green eyes moving across the rows.
"You are undoubtedly wondering why you are not in the main assembly hall with the rest of the Recruits. I know this because I was once standing exactly where you are standing now, so don't bother trying to deny it."
A brief, measured pause. "The reason is simple: They did not pass muster."
The gasp that went through the hall was immediate and audibly genuine.
‘Eleven thousand.’ Thea's mind went straight to the number. Over eleven thousand Recruits had been accepted into this round of recruitment aboard the station. She was sitting in a room with just under a thousand of them. ‘The rest didn't make it…?’
The Major's smile widened slightly at the reaction.
"That's exactly right. Every Recruit in the other hall will not be continuing their journey toward becoming a UHF Marine today. Some will keep training until they pass muster. The majority—around eight in ten—however, will be absorbed into one of the UHF's other branches instead. The Armored Division, the Civilian side, local peacekeepers, administrative roles. All of it matters. None of it is what you are here for, however, is it?"
She let that open question sit for a moment before continuing.
"The UHF cannot afford subpar Marines, nor will I indulge them personally either. You will come to understand the reasoning behind that rigorous standard soon enough. What I can tell you today is this: You have earned your place in this hall. You are, without question, the best this Recruitment Drive had to offer. Whether you will continue to meet the UHF's expectations going forward remains to be seen—but today, you have all earned the right to feel proud."
Her posture shifted slightly, the formality easing just a fraction.
"At ease, Recruits. Take your seats. There is one more matter I need to address, and I would prefer you all to be comfortable for it."
The assembled Recruits sat back down, and Thea could see the pride on the faces around her matching what she felt herself.
‘I was right.’
The pattern she'd noticed—the standouts from training, the ones who'd consistently pushed ahead—they were all here.
And she was right among them.
The giddiness was hard to keep off her face.
She sat down and turned her attention back to the podium, the earlier anxiety almost entirely gone, replaced by something warm and buzzing.
The shuffling of chairs faded.
"Well then," the Major said, her tone shifting into something more careful. "Here's the most challenging part of these ceremonies."
Thea's attention sharpened.
"I need to ask each and every one of you for your utmost trust. I cannot tell you why I require it, what it will be needed for, or anything beyond that. What comes next will be frightening—in a way that none of you have ever experienced before. Please trust me, and more importantly, trust the UHF, when we tell you that at the end of it, you will be fine."
The room had gone very still, and the atmosphere had changed severely.
"I will repeat my request once more before giving you a minute to consider your decision, as there will be no way back afterward: Please give the UHF your utmost trust for what comes next."
She bowed her head.
The room erupted in murmurs immediately.
Thea felt it in her chest as well, before she fully processed it—a Major, bowing to Recruits?! It simply wasn't done. The sheer wrongness of it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, and her apprehension, which had been quietly manageable a moment ago, shot straight through the roof.
‘What in the void is the UHF thinking?!’ Thea's heart rate had spiked hard. ‘This is way too vague. They can't give even a single hint of what's about to happen? Just—trust us, no context, no explanation, nothing?’
And then, cutting clean through the noise in her head—James' voice.
His exact words on the plaza, the morning the shuttle came.
“No matter what your instincts tell you. No matter what your eyes, ears, and every other sense might be screaming at you. Trust the UHF.”
She'd spent two years turning those words over without being able to place them.
Now they landed with the precision of something that had always been meant for exactly this moment.
‘He knew. He knew this was coming and he warned me specifically because he knew I'd struggle with it…’
She closed her eyes for a second, pulled his words back up in full, and let them sit.
‘Okay, Da—Old Man. I've got it. I’ll trust you.’
She straightened in her chair, exhaled slowly, and braced herself for whatever the UHF was about to ask of her—putting every instinct that was currently screaming at the back of her mind, and every ounce of the trust she had in her Old Man, firmly at the front.
When the minute was up, the Major raised her head and spoke again.
"For anyone who is uncertain—even just slightly—please step outside the hall. You will face no repercussions, no scrutiny, and no punishment for your decision, although your path to becoming a UHF Marine will end here. You will be placed directly into one of the other branches, if you so choose, just like the Recruits in the main hall—but with higher pay and better conditions overall, in recognition of being among the best this Recruitment Drive had to offer."
A few faces around the room shifted.
Thea caught it—the flicker of temptation on expressions that had looked completely certain and proud of themselves just two minutes ago.
After a moment, a few dozen Recruits stood up, made their way to the exit, and didn't come back.
‘How…?’ She watched them go and genuinely couldn't follow the logic.
A comfortable life with good pay wasn't nothing—she understood that, of course—but she'd spent a decade in the Undercity working toward exactly this very moment. She'd clawed her way through conditions most of these Recruits had probably never even heard of—much less seen—before, survived on luck and stubbornness, and somehow ended up here by the narrowest possible margin.
‘A cushy life.’ She turned the offer over for exactly one second. ‘No. Not a chance.’
Whatever was coming, she was staying in her damn chair…
Five minutes passed.
Recruits trickled out in ones and twos until the flow stopped, and only determined faces remained, all of them looking up at the podium in silence.
The Major's proud smile carried something underneath it—a discomfort she wasn't quite willing—or capable—of hiding.
"Very well. You have all chosen to trust the UHF, and for that, I thank you personally—and on behalf of the UHF and humanity as a whole. You have stepped into the unknown without hesitation."
She paused once again, the significant kind of pause that Major Quinn seemed to like to place in her speeches.
"And… I am truly sorry for what comes next. Do try not to hold too much of a grudge against the UHF for this part—it is genuinely uncomfortable." Something in her tone made it clear she wasn't understating it in the least. "May the Emperor's light guide you, Recruits. I will see you on the other side."
She saluted them—clean, precise, and unmistakably sincere—then executed a sharp heel-turn and walked back behind the curtains without another word.
The room didn't react immediately.
It took a second, like everyone inside the room needed a moment to confirm what had just happened.
A Major. Bowing to and saluting Recruits. Twice.
The frozen silence that followed lasted about two seconds.
Then it hit Thea like a fist to the chest.
She was on her feet before she'd made any conscious decision to stand, cold sweat already running down her back, every instinct she had detonating at once.
‘Run. Get out. Now.’
The feeling wasn't like anything she'd encountered before—not the warning sensation from the simulation, not even the terror she'd felt looking into Daxton's eyes. This was something deeper and more absolute, like every cell in her body had reached the same conclusion simultaneously and was screaming it at the top of its lungs.
James’ words cut through the noise like a blade: “No matter what your instincts tell you. Trust the UHF.”
She hunched forward, hands gripping the back of the chair in front of her, shaking—actually shaking—as her conscious mind and every survival instinct she'd ever developed went to war with each other for control of her legs.
‘Stay. Stay. You promised him. Stay…!’
Around her, she only barely registered that the other Recruits were clearly beginning to feel it too as the first sound started filtering into the hall. A low hum had crept into the hall at some point without anyone noticing—but now some of them had.
The room was shifting quickly after that—some Recruits repeating conditioning phrases under their breath, others grabbing the arms of whoever was sitting next to them, voices low and urgent as people tried to talk each other down from the same edge Thea was standing on.
‘Stay in the chair. Trust the UHF. Trust James…!’
Her knuckles were white on the chair back.
Some Recruits dropped their composure entirely and ran for the doors as the hum intensified—only to find them sealed.
A handful of Recruits, to their credit, didn't move at all.
They stood at their chairs with fists pressed to their chests in salute, knuckles white, eyes fixed on the empty podium.
Thea was only tangentially aware of it all, as she kept fighting her instincts.
The hum kept climbing, and with it the panic in the room reached a kind of critical mass—nowhere to run, nowhere to go, the sealed doors making sure of that.
The noise of it barely reached her.
She was somewhere else entirely, fighting her own battle one breath at a time, James' words the only thing keeping her feet planted as the hum turned sharper and sharper, louder and louder by the second.
Then, abruptly, the sound cut out entirely and the podium exploded.
The wooden facing blew outward in a burst of splinters, and a massive beam of concentrated plasma erupted from inside it—blindingly white and utterly enormous—and began sweeping across the hall in one fluid motion, right to left.
Every Recruit the beam touched was gone. Instantly. No sound, no struggle.
The hall dissolved into screaming chaos, everyone still standing breaking in the opposite direction from the sweep of certain death.
‘Illusion-tech.’ The thought arrived in Thea's mind with surprising clarity, the frozen grip around her heart having vanished the moment the beam appeared.
She stood and watched the chaos around her with an almost eerie calm.
‘There's no way the UHF vaporises its top Recruits at their own graduation. This is a test. It has to be. Why hasn't anyone else worked that out?’
The beam kept coming.
The heat hit her first—a wall of it, radiating out from a hundred metres away with enough intensity to buckle the aluminium chairs in its path instantly, melting them like they were nothing.
‘Okay.’ She raised a hand to shield her face. ‘Okay, it's a test, it's fine, it's—’
The skin on her hands blistered.
She watched it happen—watched the blisters rise and burst as the heat cooked through her from the outside in—and the calm she'd been holding onto cracked clean open.
The pain was total and immediate and real in every way that mattered, and the scream that tore out of her was equal parts agony and defiance, her eyes locked on the incoming white as she held her ground.
‘Test. It's just a test. It's just a—’
She was wrong.
Her brain had no time to reconcile that fact.
The beam reached her, and in an instant that contained no pain and no fear and no final thought, every atom that had ever made up Thea McKay simply ceased to exist in a fiery blaze of plasma.
She didn't hear the voice. Not really.
But it was there—flat, monotone, arriving in the fraction of a second before the end…
[Initializing System...]