FULL GEAR — CHAPTER 10: "Occupied"
Herro took the stairs two at a time.
(Seventy percent. Dean said seventy percent. That's not a guarantee that's a WARNING.)
He hit the third-floor landing and immediately heard it—a cheerful, tuneless hum drifting from the direction of room 304. His room. His currently being violated room.
He reached the door.
It was open.
Rosa stood in the center of his space with the focused energy of a general surveying a battlefield, hands planted on her hips, head tilted like she was solving a complex architectural problem. She'd already moved the desk two feet to the left. His plastic bag—the one with everything he owned—sat relocated to the bed, unopened but clearly evaluated.
On his otherwise bare wall, Rosa had taped a single poster.
A cartoon sun wearing sunglasses, giving a thumbs up.
It said: YOU GOT THIS CHAMP!!
Herro stared at it.
(She put that up first. Out of every possible thing to decorate a room with, that was her priority.)
"Rosa."
She spun around, completely unsurprised by his presence. Her navy-blue eyes lit up. "Oh good, you're here! I needed your input—"
"How long have you been in here?"
"Like... twenty minutes? Maybe thirty?" She tilted her head. "Why?"
"Dean just told me there was a seventy percent chance you were already up here."
Rosa blinked. Then slowly, a grin spread across her face. "He said seventy percent?"
"Yeah."
"That man is so humble." She turned back to the wall, completely unbothered. "It was a hundred percent. It was always going to be a hundred percent. I had a plan."
Herro looked at the cartoon sun poster already taped to his wall.
(She had a plan. She came up here with a plan. Dean knew. Everyone knew except me.)
"Did anyone think to maybe ask if I wanted my room decorated?"
"We assumed."
"You assumed."
"Correctly." Rosa gestured at the poster with obvious pride. "You like it. I can tell."
"So! Decorating! Are you a plants person or a no-plants person? Because there is genuinely no wrong answer—" She paused, studying his expression with sudden seriousness. "—wait. Are you mad? You look like you might be a little mad."
"I'm not mad."
"You have the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a face," Rosa insisted. "Hilda makes the same one when she's trying to not be mad because she thinks being mad is embarrassing."
Herro opened his mouth.
Closed it.
(Do not get drawn into a conversation about Hilda's face. Do not. That path leads nowhere good.)
"I'm not mad," he said again, and stepped inside the room because standing in the doorway was apparently an invitation for Dean to appear at the end of the hallway and give him a small encouraging nod before disappearing again.
(Did he just—was that intentional—)
Rosa was already pulling out her phone, scrolling with purpose. "Okay so I was thinking about your vibe—"
"My vibe."
"Everyone has a vibe. Your vibe is—" She made a gesture that encompassed him entirely, from cap to sneakers. "—this. Comfortable. Understated. You're not trying to be anything except exactly what you are, which is actually really rare for a seventeen-year-old."
Herro blinked.
That was surprisingly perceptive for someone who'd entered his room without permission and taped a cartoon sun to his wall.
"So the decoration should feel like YOU," Rosa continued. "Not like someone's idea of what a cool teenager's room looks like. Just—lived in. Yours."
She turned the phone toward him. Photos of small spaces—some military-sparse, some cozy-cluttered—all with one thing in common. They looked like someone actually inhabited them. Like a person with a history had been there.
(Oh.)
Herro looked at his room. The bureaucratic beige. The single window. The bed and desk and closet and nothing else.
Then he looked at Rosa, who was watching him with the same brightness she always had, except underneath it was something else. Something that recognized exactly what an empty room meant about the person living in it.
"You don't have to do this," he said.
"I know." Rosa shrugged—easy, uncomplicated. "I want to."
Herro looked at the cartoon sun poster.
(You Got This Champ.)
(She put that up first.)
He exhaled slowly.
"Okay," he said. "But I'm keeping the poster."
Rosa's entire face transformed. "YES—OKAY—I KNEW YOU HAD GOOD TASTE—"
"Don't push it."
"The plant. We're doing the plant."
"Rosa—"
"Small plant. Very small. You won't even notice it."
"...Fine."
"And maybe one more—"
"Rosa."
She made a zipping motion across her mouth.
Held it for approximately three seconds.
"Two more."
Herro sat down on his bed, pushed his plastic bag to the side, and decided that this was his life now. Rosa Tanya was in his room, rearranging things that had just been arranged, talking about plants with the passion of a military strategist, and somehow—
Somehow the room already felt less empty than it had five minutes ago.
(Family is in the name, he thought, watching her hold her phone up to the wall to test how a photo would look there. Maybe it actually is.)
"Hey, Rosa."
She turned. "Hm?"
"The seventeen minutes thing. You being born first."
Her expression shifted—somewhere between pleased and suspicious. "Yeah?"
"Does Hilda actually acknowledge it?"
The suspicious look won. "...Why?"
"Just curious."
Rosa stared at him for a long moment with the specific intensity of someone deciding whether a question was genuine or a trap.
"She said, and I quote, 'the seventeen minutes were probably a mistake.'"
"Wow."
"Yeah."
"That's mean."
"That's love." Rosa turned back to the wall, already moving furniture slightly to the left with the unearned confidence of someone who'd clearly done this before. "You'll understand eventually. The Hilda-language learning curve is steep but the payoff is worth it."
Herro stared at the back of her head.
(The Hilda-language learning curve.)
I already understand it, he thought, and immediately decided to never say that out loud because the last thing he needed was Rosa Tanya knowing she was right about something.
"Okay," Rosa announced, stepping back to survey her minimal progress with excessive satisfaction. "First: the plant. Dean's room. I'll be back in four minutes. Don't move anything."
"You moved everything."
"Don't move anything back."
She was gone before he could respond, footsteps light and rapid down the hallway.
Herro sat alone in his room.
The cartoon sun looked at him from the wall.
YOU GOT THIS CHAMP!!
He adjusted his cap.
(Yeah,) he thought. Maybe.
Rosa returned in three minutes and forty seconds carrying a small succulent in a terracotta pot, a string of paper cranes she'd apparently had in her room already, and a framed photograph she set face-down on the desk before Herro could see it.
"What's that?"
"Later." She held the succulent up at different heights against the windowsill, testing the light with the focus of a scientist running an experiment. "Plants need sun. Your window faces east so mornings will be good."
"You know which way my window faces."
"I checked yesterday."
Herro stared at her back.
(She checked yesterday. She had a plan. Before I even moved in she had a plan for my room.)
He watched her hang the paper cranes from a nail that was already in the wall — already in his wall, pre-installed, as though this moment had been anticipated — and decided he was done trying to understand how Rosa Tanya operated. Some things simply existed outside the reach of logic. Rosa was one of them.
The room was changing. The bureaucratic beige was still there, still the same washed-out color that every wall in this building seemed to share, but something about it felt less hollow than it had an hour ago. Less like a container waiting to be filled and more like a place where someone had decided to put down some weight.
Herro looked at the framed photo still face-down on the desk.
"Rosa."
"Hm?"
"What's the photo."
She picked it up and handed it to him without preamble.
It was from a few days ago. The mission debrief aftermath — Herro hadn't noticed anyone with a camera, had been too busy trying to remember how to breathe — but somehow the whole team was captured on the sagging common room couch. Lyra looked like she was three seconds from falling asleep. JJ was staring at his phone with the dedication of a man refusing to exist socially. Nate was mid-sentence about something, notebook open. Dean was smiling that small, precise smile that took up barely any space and somehow filled the room anyway.
Hilda had her arms crossed and her eyes closed and was scowling even in repose.
Herro was in the corner of the frame with his hands in his lap and an expression like he wasn't sure whether he was allowed to be there.
They looked ridiculous. All seven of them, crammed onto furniture that was visibly losing structural faith in the concept of support.
"Where did you get this?"
"Dean takes a photo after every new member's first mission." Rosa positioned herself beside the wall, holding up her phone like she was testing where a frame might go. "It's his thing. He doesn't announce it, just... does it. You'll find them if you look — there's one for everyone." She tilted her head at Herro. "I thought yours should start in your room. You can say no if it's weird."
Herro looked at the photo for another long moment.
Then he set it on the desk, face up.
"It stays."
Rosa's smile happened all at once, sudden and complete. She turned back to the wall immediately, which was probably the kindest thing she could have done because Herro wasn't quite prepared for the full force of it aimed at him.
"Okay," she said, already measuring something with her eyes. "We're done with the essentials. The room has a plant, a photo, and the sun poster. That's a person. That's enough for now."
"For now."
"Decorating is a process." She said it with the gravity of someone stating a universal truth. "You can't rush it. It has to happen with you, not to you."
(That's... actually a reasonable thing to say.)
"Rosa."
"Hm?"
He wasn't entirely sure why he said it. It came out quieter than he intended. "Thanks."
She glanced back at him — just briefly, just enough — and her expression was different from the bright, kinetic energy she usually operated on. Simpler. Just warm.
"You're one of us now," she said. "That means you get the full service."
She headed for the door, cardigan sleeves falling over her hands.
"Come down when you're ready. Dean is making real food and I am going to help by staying in an adjacent room and providing moral support."
"You're not allowed to cook."
"Correct." She said it without any embarrassment whatsoever. "See you downstairs."
She was gone.
Herro sat alone in room 304.
The paper cranes turned slowly in the small invisible currents that moved through old buildings when no one was paying attention. The succulent sat in its window, absorbing the afternoon light. The photo of seven people who looked like they'd been assembled by a particularly chaotic accident sat on the desk where someone who lived here would put it.
The cartoon sun looked at him from the wall.
YOU GOT THIS CHAMP!!
Herro adjusted his cap.
(Yeah,) he thought. Maybe.
He went downstairs.
Dinner was good, because Dean made it and Dean made everything good.
Herro came down to find him already at the stove — something with chicken, something with rice, vegetables being handled with the specific quiet focus Dean brought to anything his hands were doing. The kitchen smelled like the kind of cooking that didn't announce itself, just arrived and made everything feel more settled than it had been before.
Rosa was at the counter with a knife, positioned over a cutting board with the confidence of someone about to do something inadvisable.
Dean reached over without looking, took the knife from her hand, and set it on the far side of the counter in one motion.
"Hey—"
"Sit down, Rosa."
"I was going to help."
"I know." He handed her a bowl of grapes instead. "Eat these."
Rosa sat down, looked at the grapes, and began eating them with the uncomplicated cheerfulness of someone who had lost this particular argument enough times to have made peace with it.
Herro took a seat at the table. A few minutes later Nate appeared from the direction of his room with his notebook, sat down, opened it, looked at his own notes, and sighed the specific sigh of a man who had found an administrative problem with no clean solution.
"The quarterly report," he said, to no one in particular.
"Not at dinner," Rosa said.
"It's due Friday."
"Not. At. Dinner."
"The formatting requirements changed again—"
"Nate." Dean set a plate in front of him with the precision of a man placing a full stop at the end of a sentence. Nate looked at it. Looked at Dean. Closed the notebook.
"The formatting requirements," he said, quieter, "are very frustrating."
"I know," Dean said.
"Last quarter they wanted the incident summaries in the third column. Now they want them in the first column and the personnel hours in the third column. Which means everything I filed last quarter is technically formatted incorrectly retroactively—"
"Nate."
"—and I don't know if that triggers a compliance review or just a correction notice but the difference matters because one of them requires Lyra's signature and the other—"
"Nate." Rosa pointed at his plate. "Eat."
Nate ate. He looked deeply unhappy about the formatting requirements but he ate.
JJ appeared in the kitchen doorway at some point between the main course and whatever Rosa had quietly designated as dessert. He had his headphones around his neck and the particular expression of someone who had come downstairs for a specific item and had not accounted for the presence of other Terrans. His eyes moved across the occupied table. Something flickered in his face — not retreat exactly, more the rapid calculation of someone assessing whether the social expenditure was worth the food.
He went to the counter, took a bowl from the cabinet, served himself from the pot Dean had left on the stove, and went to stand by the far wall rather than sit at the table.
Nobody said anything about this. It was apparently normal.
(That's his spot,) Herro realized. (The standing-by-the-wall-eating spot. Everyone else has adjusted around it.)
"JJ," Rosa said.
JJ made a sound that was not quite an acknowledgment but was not quite a dismissal either.
"Did you finish the network re-route thing?"
"Done this morning."
"And the—"
"Also done."
"I hadn't finished asking."
"I know what you were going to ask." He looked at his bowl. "It's done."
Rosa turned to Herro and stage-whispered: "He does this."
"I can hear you," JJ said.
"That's the point."
JJ's expression suggested he found this exchange deeply beneath him. He ate his food by the wall and said nothing else for the rest of the meal, which everyone appeared to accept as a successful social interaction by his standards.
Lyra came down eventually, barefoot, hair looking like she'd been asleep even though it was only early evening. She looked at the table, looked at the stove, took a plate without ceremony, and sat at the head of the table in the manner of someone occupying a throne they had no particular attachment to.
She ate. She didn't start any conversations. She did interrupt one of Rosa's stories about something that had happened on the second floor to say, flatly: "That was my shampoo."
Rosa's expression shifted rapidly through approximately four emotions.
"I thought it was communal."
"It was in my room."
"Your door was open."
"My door is always open."
"So—"
"Not communal." Lyra went back to eating. "That one's expensive."
"Since when do you use expensive shampoo—"
"Rosa."
Rosa closed her mouth.
Nate, who had been watching this exchange with the resigned attention of a man who had catalogued hundreds of identical ones, said: "I can add shampoo to the weekly supply list."
"Don't add it to the list," Lyra said. "Just replace it."
"With the same one?"
"It's the blue bottle. Second shelf of the right side. Use the unit card."
Nate wrote this down. Of course he wrote it down. He had written down things that required substantially less documentation than this.
Herro sat at the table and ate his dinner and listened to six people argue gently about nothing and looked at the photo in his pocket — he'd put it there before coming downstairs, hadn't been sure why — and thought about the room upstairs with the east-facing window and the paper cranes and the cartoon sun that said you got this champ in capital letters.
He thought about Hilda's door closing in his face that afternoon, and about Rosa handing him a bowl of grapes without asking if he wanted grapes. About Nate's sigh over formatting requirements and Dean taking a knife from Rosa's hand like it was automatic, like looking after people was something he did the same way he breathed.
(Three days,) Herro thought. (I've been here three days.)
He ate.
The food was warm and the table was loud and nobody looked at him like he was a problem that needed to be managed.
Nate had a briefing packet before lunch the next day.
Herro was in the common room when it arrived, sitting on the floor with his back against the couch — he'd discovered this was his preferred position, floor rather than furniture, back against something solid — going over what Hilda had told him about Divergent Impact. Palms forward. Pushing motion. Memorize the sensation before the sensation. He'd been trying to reconstruct the feeling from memory, the specific drain from the chest flowing outward, the way the air had felt different for half a second in Hilda's room.
He hadn't tried it yet. Not without Lyra watching.
(Which,) he thought, (is actually not insane. Having someone present who can physically survive a mistake before you practice a Gear that once put three people in the hospital is extremely rational.)
Nate came in from the direction of the front door carrying a slim folder with the particular purposeful energy of someone who had already read its contents and was now in the process of deciding how to present them.
"Morning mission brief," he announced.
The room contained: Herro on the floor, Rosa on the couch eating something pastel-colored, Dean in the kitchen visible through the open doorway, and Hilda standing near the tactical map with her arms crossed, looking at nothing in particular with the focused attention of someone thinking through something they weren't ready to say out loud.
Lyra was on the recliner.
The briefing packet landed on the armrest within her reach.
She was not reading it.
"Lyra," Nate said.
"I'll read it."
"It's been forty minutes."
"I've been thinking."
"About the brief?"
"About whether ceilings are underappreciated."
Nate placed the folder so it was physically in her line of vision. Lyra's eyes didn't move to it.
"Summary," she said.
"Precinct 14. North Valor North District. Family Unit consultation — Gear disturbance in their holding block. Single individual, non-cooperative, minor property damage to cell fixtures."
"Grade?"
"C at most. Probably C-minus." Nate paused. "The paperwork is unusually clean for a disturbance call. Everything matches, no flagged discrepancies in the initial request." He delivered this with the careful neutrality of someone leaving information in a place where it could be picked up.
"How's the pay?"
Nate told her.
It wasn't much. It was enough. The calculation moved behind Lyra's eyes without her face changing.
"Seems easy," she said.
"It does," Nate agreed.
Lyra looked at the room. The practiced sweep of a commander reading the board — Nate, Rosa, Dean through the kitchen doorway. Hilda by the map. Herro on the floor.
Her eyes lingered on Herro for a moment, just briefly, the same calibration she'd run during the Pending Youth conversation. Assessing what she had and where to put it.
"It's a consultation," she said. "One person, minor damage, C-grade. We don't need full squad for a holding block." She pointed. "Hilda."
Hilda turned from the map.
"You're going." A nod toward the kitchen. "Dean." Dean appeared in the doorway. "And—"
Herro looked up.
He felt it immediately — the specific alertness of someone who has been named — and something underneath it that was not quite fear but lived in the same neighborhood. His second mission. His first real one where the van didn't get flipped in the opening minute.
"—Touya."
"Yes, ma'am."
Lyra looked at him directly. Not long. Just enough.
"It's a nothing job," she said, and her voice carried the particular flatness of a person who had seen enough real things to know the difference between a real threat and an administrative inconvenience. "Consultation only. You go in, assess, file the paperwork, come back."
She glanced at Hilda again. Something passed between them — the shorthand of a leader and her ace, established over months of working together, communicating without words. Hilda received it. Gave a small nod.
"Keep it clean," Lyra said. "Don't touch anything that doesn't need touching. And—" her eyes moved back to Herro one more time "—make sure you're listening to Hilda."
"Understood."
Lyra picked up her drink.
Nate's expression stayed professionally neutral. He closed the folder. His thumb ran along the edge of it once — a small, unconscious gesture.
(He's still worried,) Herro thought, watching his cousin set the brief down with fractionally too much care. (About something he can't name.)
But Lyra was already looking at the ceiling, and the conversation was evidently done.
They left forty minutes later.
Herro stood in front of the small mirror inside his closet door for longer than he'd admit — jersey, cargo pants, worn sneakers, cap forward — and tried to assess whether he looked like someone who belonged on a mission or like someone who was trying to look like someone who belonged on a mission. The difference was visible, he suspected. To people like Hilda it was probably very visible.
(You have a badge. You survived the gauntlet. You've been on one mission, it involved a flipped van and a Gear awakening under duress, and you didn't die.)
(That's a resume.)
He adjusted his cap and went downstairs.
The elevated rail to North Valor North District ran twenty-two minutes. The car was half-empty — mid-morning commuters, people with briefcases and tired faces, nobody paying attention to three teenagers with Family Unit badges on their clothes.
Herro sat by the window.
He kept his hands still in his lap. Watched North Valor scroll past — commercial district giving way to residential, buildings getting shorter, the city's energy settling into something older and more practical as they moved north.
(Okay. Observation only. C-minus disturbance. You follow their lead, you watch, you don't do anything unless something goes wrong. Nothing is going to go wrong. Lyra called it a nothing job.)
He became aware he was tapping his knee and stopped.
Dean sat across from him, reading something in a small notebook, silver hair tied back. Completely at peace with the train car and the noise and the other people in it. Herro had noticed this about him before — Dean didn't brace against spaces. He just existed inside them.
Hilda sat one seat over from Dean. Arms crossed, back straight, eyes forward. Not tense. Not restless. Already somewhere ahead of this moment, working through it in the particular way fighters thought about situations before they arrived. She looked the way a surgeon looks before an operation — not afraid, just already there.
She was the veteran. She and Dean both. This was routine for them in a way it genuinely wasn't for him yet, and Herro was self-aware enough to know that.
"Dean," he said.
"Hm?"
"Is there protocol I should know? For a police precinct consultation specifically." He kept his voice level. "I don't want to do something wrong."
Dean looked up from his notebook. No hesitation, no pause to soften the answer. "Observe. Let Hilda handle the initial interaction. Don't speak unless directly addressed, and if you're uncertain — wait."
"Wait for what?"
"For certainty." Dean closed the notebook. "You read situations well. Trust it when something feels off. Don't act on it until you understand why."
Herro nodded.
"You'll be fine," Dean said. Simply. Like a fact.
Hilda glanced across at Herro. A quick, flat look — not critical, not reassuring, just checking. The kind of look you give someone before a job to confirm they're with you. Then she looked away.
"First real mission nerves?" she said, to the window.
"I'm not nervous."
A beat.
"You're tapping your knee."
He wasn't tapping his knee. He'd stopped. "I stopped."
"You were."
(She noticed that from one seat over while looking forward.)
"It's my first consultation," he said. "I'm being appropriately alert."
Hilda made a sound — not quite a laugh, not quite dismissive. Somewhere in between. "Appropriately alert," she repeated. Like she was filing it somewhere.
She didn't say anything else for the rest of the ride, and that was its own kind of reassurance. If she'd thought he was a liability she wouldn't have stopped there.
The train pulled into the North District station. They stepped off into streets that were quieter than the commercial district — older, slower, the kind of neighborhood where the city's energy had settled into something more tired and practical. Corner stores. Low-rise apartments. The transit stop's advertisement board missing its bulb on one side.
Precinct 14 was two blocks north.
They walked toward it.
The building came into view — functional, mid-sized, designed to be used rather than looked at. Imperial architecture at its most utilitarian: clean lines, minimal signage, the faded paint of an institution that got its budget allocated and spent it on other things. A flag above the entrance. A worn stone step. The quiet of a station running ordinary hours.
Normal.
Herro kept that word in his head as they pushed through the front door.
The interior was cooler than the street. Fluorescent light, the kind that made everything slightly flatter than it actually was. Reception desk to the left. Waiting area with bolted-down chairs. Notice board covered in Empire-issued materials nobody read.
The receptionist looked up when they entered.
Her eyes moved across all three of them — badges, ages, a brief read of who they were. Something happened in her expression. Quick, small. A settling. Like someone deciding how to hold their face when they already knew what was coming through the door.
She looked back at her screen.
"Family Unit Ironhide?"
"That's us," Hilda said.
The receptionist typed, printed, slid three visitor badges across the desk without looking up. "You're cleared for the lower holding block. Officer Grey will meet you past the gate. Officer Dudley is already downstairs."
Hilda took the badges. Passed one to Dean, one to Herro.
Herro clipped his on.
The gate buzzed open.
(She didn't look at us after,) he thought. (Not once. Just back to the screen.)
He filed it. Wasn't sure what to do with it yet.
The station was quiet. That was the second thing. Active precinct, mid-morning, and the ambient noise was wrong — too low, too controlled. There should have been the sound of movement, of an institution doing its ordinary work. Instead it was the specific quiet of a space where people had learned that being audible was a choice with a cost.
They rounded the corridor.
Two men were already there.
The first was tall — silver hair, wire-frame glasses, a lean frame that moved with economy. He stood the way people stand when they've been standing in the same posture for years: naturally upright, entirely without effort. His face was angular and composed, the kind of face that had learned which expressions were useful and deployed them accordingly. When he saw them he produced a smile — warm, measured, the professional warmth of someone for whom approachability was a practiced tool rather than an impulse.
The second man was a different category of Terran entirely.
He stood back, off to the side, arms folded across a chest that was doing significant structural work. Six feet and several additional inches of Officer Second Class Burkin Dudley occupied his corner of the corridor with the unconscious territorial confidence of something large that had never been seriously challenged for its space. A short beard, small eyes under a flat brow, the expression of a man who found most things either amusing or irrelevant and had not yet decided which category the three teenagers in front of him fell into.
He looked at Hilda.
Something moved behind his small eyes. A flicker of something — recalibration, dismissal, mild entertainment. His eyes moved to Herro, then Dean, then back to Hilda. He unfolded his arms and refolded them, shifting his weight, and didn't say anything, but the slight adjustment in his posture communicated something clearly enough: this is the assignment they sent.
Hilda met his look with the particular quality of attention she gave things she was assessing. Flat, direct, unhurried. She didn't look away and she didn't react.
Dudley's mouth moved fractionally. Not quite a smirk. Something adjacent.
The first officer extended his hand to Hilda — correctly, reading her as the senior member without being told. "Officer First Class Grey, Precinct 14. Thank you for coming on short notice."
Hilda shook it. One pump, clean. "Hilda Tanya. Dean Jean and Herro Touya."
Grey's eyes moved to Dean — brief, genuine — then to Herro. They paused on him one beat longer than the others. Not suspicious. Just cataloguing.
"Welcome." The warmth in it was seamless. "I appreciate Ironhide's responsiveness. The situation is minor but we prefer not to leave Gear-active disturbances unaddressed — it creates complications for standard processing."
"Of course," Hilda said.
Grey gestured down the corridor. "I'll brief on the way down. The individual is contained, no further property damage since this morning. I don't anticipate difficulty, but Family Unit involvement tends to make detainees more cooperative than officer requests alone. The badge helps."
He was already moving, easy and unhurried.
Dudley peeled off the wall and fell into step at the back of the group without being asked. He moved quietly for his size — not stealthy, just practiced. A body that had learned to navigate spaces without announcing itself. As they walked he was half a step behind Herro, and Herro was aware of it the way you become aware of most large things: gradually, then all at once.
They passed the first row of holding cells.
Herro looked — because that was his job, to observe.
The cells were full. That wasn't what stopped him. It was the quality of stillness inside them. He'd spent five months in juvenile detention. He knew what holding cells sounded like from the inside, how people carried themselves when they were waiting — bored, frustrated, the particular restlessness of containment. He knew those sounds and those postures.
These people were not that.
An older man in the third cell sat with his knees to his chest and his eyes on the floor with the deliberate non-existence of someone who'd learned that being seen had a cost.
A woman in the second cell had her arms wrapped around herself, still and wakeful, the posture of someone who had been still for a long time already and knew better than to move.
They were Gearless. Herro could read it from the absence — small Terran Energy signatures, the specific quality of air around people who didn't carry it. Working-class clothes. Worn shoes. The kinds of faces he'd grown up next to in South Valor.
(They look too scared,) he thought. (For an ordinary Thursday. For a standard holding situation they look too scared.)
Grey was still talking. Even, informative, measured. Telling them exactly what a briefing was supposed to tell them.
Herro looked at Dean.
Dean was walking with his hands loose at his sides and his face composed, the careful neutrality he wore in uncertain spaces. But his eyes had moved across the cells the same way Herro's had, and something behind them had closed — quietly, like a door.
Herro looked at Hilda.
She was two steps ahead of him, listening to Grey with the focused attention of a professional doing her job. But her hands, which had been relaxed, had shifted. Not tight. Just ready. The posture of a fighter who'd felt the temperature of a room change.
At the end of the corridor, Grey pushed open a door. Stairs going down.
"The lower block," he said. Pleasantly. "Right this way."
He descended.
Dudley moved past Herro to follow, unhurried, and as he passed he glanced down once. His eyes moved from the top of Herro's cap to his sneakers and back up, the look of someone taking a measurement. His face communicated nothing specific. Just the awareness of a man who was very confident in his own arithmetic.
Hilda came level with Herro. Close enough that her shoulder almost touched his. Her voice dropped to just above nothing.
"Something's wrong."
"Yeah," Herro said.
His voice came out steady.
They followed Grey down the stairs.
Neither of them did anything yet.
END OF CHAPTER 10
GLOSSARY
Consultation Log — Official paperwork filed when a Family Unit assists or advises on a precinct-level Gear disturbance. Creates an Imperial record of collaboration between law enforcement and Family Units. Can be filed regardless of the consulting unit's active participation.
North District — The northern residential sector of North Valor City. Working-class, aging infrastructure, lower Imperial oversight presence than the commercial or central districts.
Pending Youth Field Authorization — The provisional clearance that allows under-processed members (like Herro, whose official Ironhide paperwork remains incomplete) to participate in low-grade consultation missions under the supervision of verified unit members.
C-Grade Disturbance — The Empire's classification for minor Gear-related incidents. Low threat level, minimal personnel required, standard consultation protocols apply. Most are resolved without physical engagement.
the White Lion empire either scales on the threat the gear pose or the threat the individual does which has a whole nother distinction