The Processing Centre didn't look like a place where lives got sorted.
It looked like a warehouse. A clean one, Dominion clean, which meant white surfaces and recycled air and lights that hummed at a frequency that made the back of your teeth ache after an hour. But still a warehouse. Long, wide, full of people standing in lines that moved slowly enough to make you feel like time itself had decided to stop cooperating.
Rael got there early. Checked in at the gate terminal, got a numbered tag printed on his wrist. BATCH 7, #214. Joined the queue.
Hundreds of conscripts. Mostly human, mostly Ground-Zero and Sector-Zero, the kind of people who had the same look he probably had right now. Not scared, exactly. Just very still. The stillness of people who'd learned that showing too much of anything was expensive.
A few were crying. He didn't judge them.
He scanned the room the way he always scanned rooms. Exits, cameras, choke points, who looked like trouble, who looked like they were about to do something stupid. Old habit. Sector-Zero habit.
That was when he noticed her.
She was three people ahead of him in the queue, talking.
Not nervously. Not to herself. Just talking. To the guy next to her, who looked like he wanted to disappear into the floor, and then to the woman behind her, who seemed surprised to be included in a conversation she hadn't signed up for. Rael watched her work through four different people in ten minutes, as if she were at a social event rather than a military conscription facility.
She caught him watching.
"Hey." She turned around fully, like that was just a normal thing to do in a queue. "You been here long?"
"Long enough."
"You know what the hold-up is?"
"Assessment takes thirty seconds per person. There are about two hundred people ahead of us. You can do the math."
She did. He could see it on her face. "That's like... two hours."
"Closer to three."
She made a face. Not panicked, just annoyed, the way someone got annoyed when their train was late. "Great. Cool. Love that for us." She stuck out her hand. "Kira."
He looked at her hand for a second. Shook it. "Rael."
"You from Ground-Zero?"
"Sector-Zero."
Her eyebrows went up slightly. Not in a bad way. More like she was recalibrating something. "Oh. Okay. That's... yeah, okay."
"You?"
"Ground-Zero. East block." She turned back around as the queue shuffled forward, then half-turned back as she'd just remembered something. "You scared?"
"No."
"Really."
"Are you?"
She thought about it. Actually thought about it, which was not what he expected. "Yeah," she said. "But like... the useful kind? Where does it make you pay attention?"
Rael didn't answer.
She turned back around.
He kept watching the room.
The Assessment Station was a white booth with a scanner mounted on a mechanical arm. One technician per station, ten stations running simultaneously. The process was exactly what the briefing materials said: stand still, let the scanner run, receive grade confirmation, and move to assignment processing.
Thirty seconds.
He watched it happen down the line. A person steps in. Scanner runs. Technician taps a screen. Grade-F confirmed. Next.
Every single time. Grade-F confirmed, Grade-F confirmed, Grade-F confirmed. Because they were all human, and humans were Grade-F, and that was just what the scanner said when it looked at a human.
Kira went three people ahead of him. Stepped in, stood still, scanner ran.
"Grade-F confirmed." She got a small blue wristband printed. Walked out, caught his eye, gave him a look that said well, that happened.
Next person. Grade-F confirmed.
Next, Grade-F confirmed.
Rael stepped into the booth.
The scanner arm moved. He stood still. Thirty seconds, that was the cycle, he'd counted it every single time.
The arm stopped.
The technician frowned at his screen.
The arm moved again. Re-scanning. Slower this time.
Stopped again.
The technician tapped something. Tapped it again. Leaned forward like getting closer to the screen would change what it said.
"Sir, I'm going to need you to stay still for a moment."
"I haven't moved."
"I understand, just..." The man tapped his earpiece. Said something in a low voice that Rael couldn't catch. Then looked back at his screen with an expression that wasn't confusion.
It was recognition.
Rael caught that. Filed it.
Thirty seconds became a minute. A minute became two. The queue behind him was backing up. People were craning their necks.
Kira was watching from the assignment area, brow furrowed.
A supervisor appeared from a side door. Looked at the screen. Looked at Rael. Looked at the screen again.
The scanner output read: ERROR — BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE UNCLASSIFIED.
The supervisor leaned toward the technician and spoke quietly. Dominion language, the kind they used when they didn't think humans were listening. Clipped syllables, compressed vowels, the dialect Rael had spent three years learning off stolen audio files because information was the only currency that didn't get taxed on the way down.
"Confirm anomaly, batch Jakarta-7. Activate Protocol Null. Do not let the subject leave the facility."
Rael understood every word.
He didn't move. Didn't blink. Kept his face exactly where it was. Blank, mildly bored, the expression of someone waiting for a bureaucratic error to be resolved.
Inside, his brain was already running numbers.
Three exits are visible from here. Two had guards. The third was a maintenance corridor behind the station row. No guard, but a camera covering the entry point with a four-second sweep cycle. He'd clocked it an hour ago without meaning to.
The supervisor straightened up. Reached for something on his belt.
Rael's eyes went to Kira.
She was still watching. Hadn't moved. When he caught her eye, he gave her the smallest possible tilt of his head, sideways, toward the maintenance corridor.
She looked at the corridor. Looked back at him.
Gave him a tiny nod.
Smart, he thought. Good.
He didn't know her. Had no reason to trust her. But she'd done the math in under three seconds and kept her face clean while doing it, and that was more than most people managed.
The supervisor turned back around.
Rael was still standing exactly where he'd been, still bored. Still waiting.
"There seems to be a calibration issue with the scanner," the supervisor said in flat, accented Standard. "We'll need to run a secondary assessment. If you'll follow me..."
"Sure," Rael said.
He followed.
Two steps in the wrong direction. Then he turned, cut left, and moved.
The maintenance corridor smelled like recycled coolant and old cables. Low ceiling, narrow, lit by strip lights every four meters that threw long shadows between them.
Kira was already there.
"Okay," she said, falling into step beside him, voice low. "What was that?"
"Scanner error."
"That's not what that looked like."
"Keep moving."
She kept moving. "They said something to each other, right? In Dominion. You understood it."
He glanced at her sideways.
"Your face changed," she said. "Just for a second. But it changed."
He filed that too. He'd have to work on that.
"Protocol Null," he said quietly. "It's a detain-and-extract order. They use it for anomalous subjects."
"Anomalous."
"Yeah."
"Are you anomalous?"
"Apparently."
She was quiet for three steps. "Cool," she said. "Cool, cool, cool. Great. Love that."
Despite everything, something almost twitched at the corner of his mouth.
They moved deeper into the corridor.
He heard them before he saw them. One set of footsteps, heavy, moving fast from the junction ahead. No time to redirect.
The Compliance Officer came around the corner and saw them both, and that was that.
"Stop. Both of you. Hands..."
He raised the disruptor and fired at Rael's arm.
It wasn't a kinetic round. Augmentation disruptor, designed to overload active aug systems and drop the target. Standard crowd control for conscript processing. Painful, non-lethal, effective.
It hit Rael's left forearm.
The pain was immediate and total. White, sharp, the kind that wiped everything else out for a second. He heard himself make a sound he hadn't planned on making.
Then.
Something else.
The pain didn't stop, exactly. But it shifted. Changed texture. Like it was being processed, like whatever was in the round had hit something in his arm that didn't know it was supposed to shut down and was doing something else with the signal instead.
A heat moved up from his wrist to his elbow. Not fire. More like current. Like something was being written into him very fast.
He didn't have time to think about what that meant.
The officer was already reaching for his wrist comm.
Rael moved. Closed the distance fast, got inside the reach, used a Sub-Level 3 trick that didn't have a name but worked fine on people who expected conscripts to be afraid. The officer went down. Not badly hurt. Just down.
"Go," Rael said.
They went.
They found a dead end, a storage alcove behind a coolant unit, and stopped.
Kira had her back against the wall, breathing controlled. She looked at him, at his arm, back at his face.
He looked at his arm.
Under the skin, where the round had hit, something moved. Not visible exactly. More like a heat shimmer, almost nothing, a pattern that pulsed once like a heartbeat and then faded.
Gone. Like it had never been there.
"What augmentation is that?" Kira asked.
Her voice was steady. He noted that. Most people's voices weren't steady after what just happened.
"Not one I had," he said.
Silence.
The corridor hummed around them. Somewhere behind them, distant footsteps. Getting closer, then veering off. Wrong corridor.
Kira looked at the ceiling for a second. Then back at him.
"Okay," she said. "So what's the plan?"
Rael leaned against the coolant unit and thought.
Running was out. Sector-Zero would be the first place they swept. And going back meant abandoning the only lead he had on his mother's file, the only door that opened upward, the only thing that had given him a direction in eleven years of having none.
He needed to be inside the system. Not running from it.
He pulled out his wand. Accessed the processing network's local node. There was always a local node in facilities like this, always connected to the broader intake system, always less secured than the central servers because nobody expected a Grade-F conscript to know it existed.
"There's a way," he said.
"Yeah?"
"We submit our own assessment results."
Kira stared at him. "You can do that?"
"I can do that."
"And it just... works?"
"The system trusts its own data. If the data says Grade-F confirmed, batch assignment processed, don't look twice." He was already in the network, finding the intake log, locating their tag numbers. "Nobody manually checks two hundred conscripts."
"That is either really smart or really stupid."
"Both, probably."
She watched him work. "And then what? We walk in as if nothing happened?"
"We walk in like we're supposed to be there." He finished the entry. Closed the connection. Pocketed the wand. "Which, technically, we are."
Kira was quiet for a second.
"You've done this kind of thing before," she said. Not a question.
"Sector-Zero," he said, like that was an answer.
It was.
They emerged from the maintenance corridor eight minutes later, joined the tail end of the assignment processing queue, and got their unit assignments printed without incident.
UNIT ZERO. TRAINING COMPOUND ALPHA. REPORT 0600.
Rael looked at the printout.
Kira looked at hers. Same unit. She glanced at him.
"Guess we're teammates," she said.
He folded the printout. Pocketed it.
"Don't call it that."
She smiled like he'd said something funny.
He hadn't.
In the Assessment Station, the supervisor stood in front of a frozen scanner screen.
ERROR — BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURE UNCLASSIFIED.
Still there. Hadn't cleared.
He looked at the empty booth where the subject had been standing twenty minutes ago and looked at his supervisor's comm, which he hadn't used yet.
Made a decision.
Picked it up.
"This is Station 7, Processing Centre Jakarta-Node. Batch 7. We had an anomaly."
A pause on the other end.
"Describe."
"Scanner returned unclassified on a Grade-F human conscript. The subject is no longer in the facility. He's in the Draft pool."
Another pause. Longer.
"Don't touch the log. Don't file a report. Someone will handle it."
The line went dead.
The supervisor stood very still for a moment.
Then he deleted the scanner error from his personal terminal, left the station, and did not think about it again.
That was how you survived in this system. You saw things. You deleted them. You kept walking.
VOSS, RAEL. GRADE-F CONFIRMED. UNIT ZERO.