Chapter 199: A Higher Standard
The seven-day transfer window had begun the previous afternoon. Jin went to Verrick before induction the next morning and needed one conversation to decide he would not be using it yet.
"Absolutely not yet," said Verrick.
He had Flicker’s file open and Jin’s request beside it.
"She’s doing well. She’s doing better than well — she’s regulating for longer periods outside the cradle and her recovery from exertion is more consistent than it was a week ago. But she has not completed the regulation period."
"How long’s the period?"
"Long enough that I’m confident she can hold her own temperature through a disruption, and a room move is a disruption." Verrick tapped the screen. "Different thermal environment, different airflow, transit in between, and a hatchling who has spent her entire life in one room. When she’s cleared, you move her once, and I sign off on it, and you do it in a single controlled transfer."
"And if the window closes?"
"Then you ask for an extension, and they’ll give you one, because ’my registered neonate isn’t cleared to move’ is the least controversial sentence in this building." Verrick closed the file. "Don’t move her twice because you were impatient. That’s the whole of my advice."
Jin declined the transfer for now and asked the housing office to hold the allocation, and the housing officer wrote pending veterinary clearance on a form without looking up.
Better room, better environmental control, more space for both of them, he thought, walking out. And it’ll still be better when Flicker can survive the trip to it.
It was not a sacrifice. It was arithmetic.
Third-Class induction was at 0800 and lasted nine minutes before it became an exercise.
"Neris Holt. Squad Four." The commander was Jin’s age or a year older, brown-skinned, economical in her movements, and did not raise her voice at any point. "Galecrest Kite, Bronze. She scouts. If she reports a lane change, believe her, because she saw it and you didn’t."
The Kite sat on a stand beside her, grey and long-winged and utterly still.
Neris went down the squad and stopped at Jin.
"Astor. Bronze anchor, partial-evolved. What’s his effective role?"
"He holds a route. He can absorb committed contact and punish anything that enters his reach, and he reads approaches through the floor."
"Turning?"
"Wide. He’s still adjusting to the evolved body, and his rotations finish about a quarter-second late. If you need something intercepted laterally, don’t give it to me."
Neris nodded once and moved on, and did not comment, and did not appear to find any of it either impressive or disappointing.
Good, Jin thought. That’s the correct reaction.
The formation exercise was announced with eleven seconds of instruction.
"Four lanes. Layout’s on the floor and it changes at the two-minute mark. Objective is the central marker. Nothing crosses it. Restrictions are non-lethal contact and no beast leaves its assigned quadrant boundary. Go."
That was all of it.
Jin waited for the rest and there was no rest.
No positions. No assignments. No sequence.
Fourth Class had given them a plan and graded the execution. This was an objective, two restrictions, and five students who were expected to work out the rest while it was already happening.
He took the eastern lane because nobody else had and because Glitch’s mass suited a narrow approach, and Glitch anchored it well — he set at the mouth of the lane and did not move and did not need to, and two constructs that came down it went nowhere.
At the two-minute mark the floor reconfigured and the eastern lane became a wide bay.
Jin looked at it, saw immediately that Glitch could not cover a bay that width, and turned toward Neris to report the problem.
"Holt, the east lane’s opened out, I can’t—"
"If the lane is yours, solve it."
She did not look over when she said it. She was watching the north approach and her Kite was already banking toward the reconfigured section, and the correction cost her about two seconds and contained no criticism at all.
Jin solved it.
He pulled Glitch eleven meters back to the bay’s narrow throat, which was now the only place a mass anchor was worth anything, and gave up the outer half of his zone as indefensible, and told the student on his flank what he had just given up so she could cover the seam.
It worked. Not brilliantly. One construct got through the outer half before he repositioned, and it was stopped in the second rank by somebody else, and the squad passed.
Neris said nothing about any of it afterward, which Jin correctly interpreted as neither praise nor complaint.
After induction, Jin inspected the Third-Class facilities properly.
The conditioning halls had beast-safe flooring that his own feet could tell was better. Four specialized rooms had never appeared on his previous access list, and one of them—a variable-surface hall whose floor could be reconfigured between eleven substrates—kept him in the doorway for nearly a minute doing calculations about Tremor Sense training.
Nobody offered him a tour.
That was the practical difference. Fourth Class assigned sessions. Third Class provided a booking system and assumed students already knew what they needed, had a program, and would arrive prepared.
Jin reserved the variable-surface hall for two hours on Thursday. The system then required him to submit the purpose and structure of the session. Writing that plan took an hour and a half and was harder than making the reservation.
Bram found him outside the halls that afternoon.
"Third Class."
"Yeah."
"Good." Bram considered Glitch, who was radiating dignity. "You’ll get the weighted resistance rooms."
"I’ve got them."
"Book them and tell me when. I’m Fourth, so I can’t reserve one, but a Third-Class student can bring a training partner." Bram said it like a logistical fact, which it was. "My beast still can’t handle anything lateral and yours still turns wide. That problem didn’t move."
"Thursday. Fourteen hundred."
"I’ll be there."
Bram left without commenting on the difference between their classes or promising to catch up. Jin found the lack of ceremony restful.
The next exercise notice appeared on the hall board as he was leaving.
[SQUAD EXERCISE — ROTATING COMMAND, BREACH DEFENCE]
[Designated leaders will be removed without warning during the exercise]
[Squads are expected to maintain objective coherence through command transition]
Jin read it standing in the doorway.
They’ve built an entire drill around the moment when waiting for orders becomes the failure.
He thought about turning toward Neris to report a problem she expected him to solve, and about a Tunnelmaw sector where nobody had formally removed the leader. Mira had simply become unable to stand, and Jin had acted because the alternative was letting the unit stop with her.
They do it on purpose here. Every time.