Chapter 354 --354
Fen was quiet for a moment.
"When do you need an answer?" she asked.
"I’m here for two more days," Elara said. "Before I leave."
Fen nodded once.
Elara stood and went to find Venn to tell her she would be taking all three candidates back to the capital, and also that she had a significant number of questions about the program’s funding structure and intake pipeline that she wanted to address before she left, because the program was good and good things required sustained attention or they stopped being good.
Behind her, at the edge of the training yard, Fen stood and watched the current cohort run their coordination drill, and for the first time in four months, she was thinking about something other than what she was waiting for.
She was thinking about what came next.
The two days at the training post passed quickly, which was what happened when Elara found something worth paying attention to.
She spent the first morning with Venn going through the program’s funding structure, which was — she had expected something like this but had not expected the specific shape of it — chronically underfunded in ways that were not visible from the administrative summaries because the administrative summaries had been written by people who had learned to present inadequate resources as adequate resources, which was a skill that people in underfunded programs developed out of survival necessity but which made accurate assessment from the outside extremely difficult.
The training post was running on approximately sixty percent of what it actually needed. The gap was being covered by Venn and her senior instructors doing more with less in the specific ways that competent people do more with less — cutting corners that could be cut, stretching supplies that could be stretched, absorbing personally the cost of things the budget didn’t cover. The program was good despite its funding, not because of it, and Elara sat with that distinction for a long moment before she said anything.