Chapter 390 - 389: Assessment Day
Location:Seven Peaks — Technomancer Battalion Barracks, Training Yard
Date/Time:TC1854.08.16, Dawn
Sera Vahn woke at 04:47, thirteen minutes before the alarm she’d never needed.
The barracks were dark. Quiet, the way military quarters got quiet — not the absence of sound but the presence of discipline. Three hundred and twelve people sleeping in shifts, the off-duty cohort breathing with the synchronized rhythm of soldiers who’d learned to rest on command. Boots beneath bunks, aligned to the millimeter. Packs on hooks. Personal effects stored left-to-right, heaviest to lightest, exactly as Federation Regulation 14-C specified for deployable infantry.
Nobody had asked them to do this. Nobody had issued a regulation. They’d been at Seven Peaks for six days, sleeping in barracks that smelled like living wood instead of recycled air, eating food that tasted like food instead of nutritional efficiency paste, and still — the boots were aligned. The packs were on hooks.
Old habits didn’t die. They just followed you to better places.
Sera dressed in the dark. Her left leg — the cybernetic one, the one the Federation had installed after the Virescent Expanse incident seven years ago — calibrated silently as she stood. The seized mechanisms that had ground against her bones for months were gone now. Since the golden rain, the metal had changed. Not alive, exactly. But not inert either. The joint moved with a fluidity that Federation engineering had never achieved, as if the mechanism had remembered what it was supposed to feel like and decided to try harder.
She ran her hand down the calf plate. Warm. The metal was always warm now.
She didn’t think about what that meant. She thought about the day ahead.
***
The training yard at dawn was a cathedral of pale light. Sylvara’s canopy — the great tree’s crown reaching over the eastern quarter like a hand held against the sky — caught the first sun and scattered it in shafts of gold and green. The yard itself was formation-enhanced stone, smooth and self-repairing, large enough for five hundred. Raven had ordered it expanded three days ago when the soldier count was confirmed.
Sera arrived first. She always arrived first.