Six days remained.
The morning after Kelly left, the building felt wrong. The corridors were quieter. The classroom was cold. Alex sat at his desk with a book open in front of him and found himself glancing at the empty chair at the front, then away.
Jerry did not comment. He only read.
At nine, an announcement crackled through the speakers in the ceiling. All inmates were to report to the compound at once.
They filed out in silence and lined up on the packed dirt in the same rows they had stood in on the first day. The sixty six seemed had become fewer, though nobody said how many. Guards ringed the field.
Dr Hela was waiting at the front.
She stood with the tablet under her arm and a white coat that snapped in the wind. Behind her, on a wheeled platform, sat something large under a gray tarp. She did not speak until the last row had settled.
"Good morning."
Nobody answered.
"Your supervisors have returned to the academy. From today until the evaluation, the Foundation staff will oversee your training." Her eyes moved along the rows. "I will be brief. You have six days."
A murmur ran through the crowd, quickly hushed.
"Six days before the fateful selection. Some of you have forgotten what that means. I would like to remind you. It is your lives on the line. Every one of you. There are no second chances, no appeals, no extensions."
She let that hang.
"I have received a report from each of your supervisors. They describe your progress, your habits, your weaknesses." She tapped the tablet. "I will tell you now that these reports mean little. Nothing they contain will decide who lives. All of it will be decided on the day of evaluation. Only the suit will speak."
Alex stood very still. He thought of Kelly, writing a report about him at some desk in the academy. He wondered what she had said.
"There is one more matter," Hela said.
She stepped aside and gestured to the platform. Two technicians pulled the tarp away, and a low sound went through the rows.
It was a machine.
It looked like a pod, a tall, narrow capsule standing upright on a steel frame, with a rounded front panel and a bank of cables trailing from its base. It was not a suit. It had no arms or legs. It was closer to a coffin stood on its end, gleaming under the overcast light.
"The Foundation has developed a new device," Hela said. "We call it the mock ravager."
The name meant nothing to Alex. He leaned forward slightly.
"It was designed to simulate the feeling of being fitted with a suit. It does not replace the real thing. Wearing it will not awaken you, and it will not raise your rank." She glanced at the pod. "It simply lets you feel what the fitting might be like. A preview, if you will."
She looked out over the crowd.
"Is there anyone who would like to try it?"
Nobody moved.
The wind blew dust across the dirt. A guard coughed. In the second row, a man looked at the ground. Someone else shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Not a single inmate looked ecstatic. A few looked like they wanted to be sick.
’A preview of the fitting,’ Alex thought. ’Of the thing that decides whether I live.’
He looked at the pod. He looked at the cables coiled at its base.
’I should know what I’m walking into.’
He raised his hand.
A few heads turned. Somewhere behind him, Jerry drew a sharp breath.
Dr Hela’s eyes found him. For a second her face was blank. Then, slowly, she smiled. It was thin and pleased, and it did not reach her eyes.
"Step forward," she said.
Alex walked out of the line. His boots crunched on the dirt. He stopped in front of the pod, and a technician opened its front panel with a hiss of air. Inside there was a padded space just wide enough for a man to stand.
"It is not meant to fit you," Hela said. "The mock ravager is a pod. You will stand inside. The rest is automatic."
Alex nodded and stepped in.
The panel closed behind him, and the world went dark. It smelled of metal and cold plastic. He could feel cables pressing against his back, along his arms, at the base of his skull. Somewhere in the walls, a machine began to hum.
’Ok,’ he thought. ’How bad can it be?’
The humming rose to a whine.
Then the pain began.
It was not like anything he had known. It came from everywhere at once, a white heat that scraped along every nerve, as if his whole body were being pulled apart and stitched back together in the same instant. His mouth opened. A sound tore out of him, and he did not recognize it as his own.
Outside the pod, the inmates heard the scream.
It went on. It rose and cracked and rose again, high and raw and inhuman, and it echoed off the fence and the walls of the building. A few men flinched. One of them covered his ears. Jerry stood rigid in the line with his face gone white. Nobody spoke.
The scream ended abruptly.
For a second there was only the humming. Then the machine shut down, and the panel slid open, and two guards rushed forward and dragged Alex out by the arms.
He hung limp between them. His head lolled. His eyes were closed, and a thin line of spit ran from the corner of his mouth.
"He’s out," one guard said.
They laid him on the dirt. A medic knelt and checked his neck and lifted an eyelid. He nodded once, and two more guards brought a stretcher.
Dr Hela had not moved. She watched them carry him away with her arms folded.
"Well," she said. "That settles it."
She turned back to the rows.
"That is what it will feel like. What you have just heard is only a fraction of the pain you will be exposed to during the fitting process." Her voice was cool and clear. "I do not say this to frighten you. I say it so you understand. This is not a test of strength. It is a test of whether the suit accepts you. And if it does not, the pain is only the beginning."
She let the silence stretch.
"Return to your quarters. Training resumes at noon."
The inmates dispersed slowly, in small groups, without speaking. It had been more than a demonstration. It was a reminder, sharper than any speech, that their lives were still on the line.
Alex woke in a white room.
He did not know how long he had been out. The ceiling was smooth and pale. A machine beeped softly to his left. There was a needle in his arm and a plastic tube taped to his wrist, and every muscle in his body felt bruised from the inside.
A nurse looked down at him.
"You’re awake," she said. "You’ve been out for two days."
’Two days.’
He tried to speak, and his throat cracked. She gave him a cup of water and told him he would be staying five days in total. The doctors wanted to monitor him. His nerves had taken a serious shock.
’Because of my stupid bravery,’ he thought. ’If you can even call it that.’
He lay back and stared at the ceiling.
The days in the hospital followed a pattern. In the morning, a nurse brought porridge and pills. In the afternoon, a doctor checked his eyes and reflexes and wrote something on a chart. In the evening, the lights dimmed and the ward grew quiet.
He had asked for his books on the second day. A guard brought the stack from his dorm and set it on the bedside table without a word. Alex began to read, propped against the pillow.
On the third day, his hands still shook. He read anyway, one page at a time. He got through a Chapter on post- drop purity and half of another on Beast classification, and when a nurse came in to change his drip, he did not look up.
Later that day,the shaking stopped. He read four Chapters. He read until his eyes ached, and when the lights went out he lay awake going over what he had learned. Talents. Maximizers. Ranks. The percentages.
’Sixty percent,’ he thought. ’That’s the line.’
He was unexpectedly given an extension of one more day.
On the fourth day, he woke early and finished the last book in the stack. He set it on the table and sat up. His legs were weak, but they held.
A doctor came in at seven, looked him over, and nodded.
"You’re clear to go," he said. "The rest is up to you."
Alex dressed in the orange jacket they had left folded on the chair. His collar blinked green against his throat. A guard waited at the door to escort him out.
He stepped into the corridor and walked down it slowly, one hand on the wall. At the end there was a set of glass doors. Beyond them was the compound, pale in the early light, and beyond that, the building, gray against the sky.
He pushed the doors open.
Cold air hit his face. It was the morning of the day before the evaluation.