"It’s a written exam ," Kelly said. "I didn’t skip out on much."
Alex kept his hand on the closed book and waited.
"The phases don’t actually change much. It’s a cycle of evaluation, and it repeats over and over. Every phase, every year, it is the same test with different pressure." She picked up her own book again but did not open it. "It’s an awakening ceremony of sorts. You stand in front of a suit, it reads you, and you find out what your percentage is. That’s all."
"That’s all?"
"Awakening isn’t the difficult part." She said it flatly, as though it were obvious. "Most people awaken though they sustain serious damage. What matters is the number that comes after. All of this would be unnecessary if you just read the textbooks I’m going to be handing you."
She opened her book and lowered her eyes to the page.
Alex knew a dismissal when he heard one. She was telling him, in the politest way she could manage, to stop disturbing her. The answer was in her posture, in the way she turned her shoulder toward him and angled the book to catch the light.
’I know what you’re doing,’ he thought.
He ignored it.
"I’m sorry," he said, "but I need to understand this. It isn’t a school exam for me. My life’s on the line here."
Kelly’s eyes stayed on the page for a moment. Then, with a small sigh, she closed the book again.
"I don’t know if they told you," she said, "but most people don’t know you can die if synchronization with the suit fails."
Alex went still.
"Most people think the suits are just armor. They think a bad sync means you walk away with a headache. It doesn’t. Sometimes it means..." She trailed off and let out a breath. "That’s probably the reason they decided to fit you inmates."
She stopped there. She did not finish the sentence, and she did not look at him.
He took note of it.
’Damn. She really...’
He did not finish the thought either. It did not need finishing. The Foundation was not doing this out of mercy or generosity. They were using the people the world had already decided to throw away.
’That makes sense,’ he thought slowly. ’That’s probably why those people were protesting. They don’t know our lives are at stake. If they did, they’d probably be happy the Foundation was using us.’
He almost laughed, though nothing about it was funny. He remembered the woman holding up the photograph and screaming at the bus. He remembered the bottles and the fists. And the whole time, none of them had known.
He turned his attention back to Kelly, who was watching him with an unreadable expression.
"So you’re not fitted yet," he said. "With a suit."
"No."
"I thought..."
"That would be after the second evaluation." She shrugged.
"So until then..." He stopped and tried again. "You’re in the same boat as us."
"Till then, I’m no different from you, I guess."
She said it out loud in an easy voice, but the thought behind it was very different, and she kept it locked away.
’No different from you? Hardly.’
She had trained for years. Hand to hand, weapons, endurance drills, the works. Combat skill was one of the prerequisites for suiting up successfully, and half the textbooks on the shelves said as much. A suit amplified whatever you already were. If you were weak, it made you a weak thing that moved faster. If you were skilled, it made you something else entirely.
The criminals in front of her had none of that. They had a month and a stack of books.
She kept her face neutral and did not say any of it.
The door opened.
Jerry slipped back in with his hands tucked into his sleeves and closed the door softly behind him. He said nothing, crossed to his desk, sat down, and opened his textbook to the page he had left.
Then he started reading.
Alex glanced at him sideways. Something was different. Jerry’s eyes moved across the page with a steadiness they had not had before. His finger no longer traced the lines. His shoulders were loose, and he turned the pages without hesitation. He was reading like someone who believed it mattered.
’What changed?’ Alex wondered. ’Was it what Kelly said?’
Think about what’s at stake. Don’t read and die.
It had been directed at Alex, but Jerry had been sitting right there. He had heard it. He had taken it in, and in the few minutes he had been gone, he had turned it into something useful.
’He picked it up faster than I did,’ Alex thought, almost with envy. ’And here I was stuck arguing about it.’
He stopped questioning it. There was no point in wondering about Jerry when he had his own pages to get through.
He opened the book to the place his finger had been holding and lowered his head.
This time it was different. He did not read to get through it. He read to get something out of it. When he lost the thread he stopped, went back, and traced it again.
When he hit a word he did not know, he circled it in his mind and pushed on, trusting that the next paragraph might explain it. It was slow, but it stuck. A classification table began to make sense. A definition clicked into place.
’One page at a time,’ he told himself.
He turned the page.
The room went quiet in the way of a place where people are working. Pages turned. A chair creaked. Outside, a bird called somewhere across the field. Time went by without announcing itself. The gray rectangle of light from the window drifted slowly across the floor.
Alex finished the first Chapter. Then he started the second. His neck ached, and his eyes were dry, and somewhere in the middle of the third section he realized he had stopped thinking about the collar altogether.
A sharp electronic chirp cut through the room.
He flinched and looked up.
It came from Kelly’s wrist. She had lifted her arm and pressed a button on the side of her watch to silence it. It was a heavy, rugged thing with a wide leather strap. The face was a plain white dial, but the frame around it was unusual. It had been shaped into the open jaws of a great cat, with long curved canines curling around the edges of the glass and a ridge of mane worked into the metal along the sides.
’That’s a lion,’ Alex thought. ’The markings are from a Beast.’
It was not a normal watch. The carving was too fine, and the metal had a strange, dull sheen he recognized from the drop site. It looked like something made from a piece of an animal or Beast that had once tried to kill someone.
He opened his mouth to ask.
"That’s about it for today," Kelly said, before he could speak. She stood and pushed in her chair. "See you tomorrow, then."
She reached for the textbooks on their desks, her hand already extended, out of pure habit. Then she stopped halfway and let it drop.
’Right. I loaned them.’
She turned away.
"Ok," she said, and walked out of the classroom without looking back. The door closed behind her with a soft click.
The room was quiet.
Alex looked at Jerry.
Jerry looked at Alex.
Neither of them said a word. They sat there for a moment, two convicts in an empty classroom with two thick books in their hands, and the silence stretched a little too long.