Chapter 353 --353
By the end of the afternoon, she had identified three candidates she wanted to speak to directly.
---
The first conversation was with a young woman named Teva, whose beast form was something avian and whose particular quality during the individual training session had been the capacity to make a wrong decision, recognize it as wrong in real time, and correct course without the pause that most people needed between recognizing an error and acting on that recognition. That pause — the moment between knowing you were wrong and doing something about it — was one of the most expensive pauses in high-stakes situations, and Teva’s version of it was unusually short.
She sat across from Elara in the small meeting room Venn had provided, and she was neither intimidated nor performing confidence, which was a balance that Elara found rare in people of her age.
"Why do you want to complete this program?" Elara asked.
Teva considered the question. "I want to do something that matters," she said. "Not — I know that sounds—" She paused, choosing more precise words. "I have spent my whole life being capable of things that nobody needed me to be capable of. I want to be somewhere where the capability is actually required."
"What did you do before this program?"
"Border freight work. Four years." She looked at her hands briefly. "It was fine. It was — nobody got hurt. Nothing went wrong. It was completely fine and it felt like standing still."
Elara looked at her for a moment. "If I asked you to do something you believed was wrong, what would you do?"
Teva looked back at her. "Say so."
"And if I gave you a direct order?"
"Say so more loudly."