Chapter 201: One Month
Flicker walked the length of the mat on the third morning without stopping.
Jin timed it, because he timed everything, and it was eleven seconds across roughly two meters, which was terrible walking and was the first time she had covered that distance without sitting down partway.
Then she did something new.
At the far end she over-balanced — her left foot went too far, as it always did — and instead of tipping over, both wings came out. Not far. Perhaps a third of their extension, held for about a second, and her body steadied under them and she got the foot back.
Jin sat very still.
That’s balance, he told himself before any other thought could arrive. A bird using her wings to stay upright. Not flight, not gliding, and definitely not anything else.
He wrote it in the log as wing extension for lateral balance, approx 1s, unassisted recovery and then read it back and was satisfied that it said what it actually was.
Verrick’s assessment that afternoon agreed.
"That’s normal and it’s good. Wings are balance organs before they’re anything else." He went through the rest. "She’s holding regulation outside the cradle for longer stretches, and her recovery after exertion is more consistent, which is the reading I care most about."
"And the transfer?"
"Seven-day window’s achievable if this holds. She hasn’t completed the regulation period yet, so no." Verrick made a note. "Ask me in a few days. Don’t ask me tomorrow."
Jin accepted that and did not ask again.
She can’t jump. She can’t glide. She can’t fly, fight, or hold her own temperature indefinitely.
She can walk two meters and catch herself. When I bought her, she couldn’t lift her head.
The notice went out academy-wide at 1600.
[MERIDIAN ACADEMY — ASTRAL TIDE ADVISORY]
[Projected onset: approximately 30 days]
[Status: PREPARATION PHASE — commenced]
[Student and support-unit evaluations begin immediately]
[Assessment categories include:]
[— Wall defence]
[— Internal logistics]
[— Medical support]
[— Reserve response]
[— Reconnaissance support]
[— Supervised operations beyond the perimeter]
[All placements provisional during evaluation. Final unit rosters lock 7 days before deployment.]
Nobody panicked, which Jin found more informative than panic would have been.
Astral Tides happened. They had happened before he was born in this world and they would happen after, and Shelter 7 had walls in tiers and a scraped strip four hundred meters wide because of them. The academy’s response was an advisory, an evaluation schedule, and a distribution list.
The second notice was personal and arrived four minutes later.
[ASTOR, J. — PROVISIONAL EVALUATION CANDIDACY]
[Category: Defensive support — coordination and leadership]
[Basis: field command record; breach-defence performance; defensive organization assessment; Bronze anchor-class bonded beast]
[Status: PROVISIONAL. Candidacy does not constitute assignment]
[Roster lock: 7 days before deployment]
Jin read it three times and then sat down on his bed.
Provisional. Candidacy isn’t assignment.
He checked that twice, because it was the only load-bearing sentence on the page, and it held. He was on a list. Lists had names removed from them constantly. Roster lock was in twenty-three days.
That was not what was bothering him.
What was bothering him was that the list was right.
He went through it with the same flat honesty he had used in a review room two days earlier, because there was no point in doing it any other way.
I turned off a generator that was drawing a colony and moved the noise two hundred and forty meters. I got five students out of a sector with a map that was wrong. I stopped a squad tearing itself apart when two people gave competing orders and a third abandoned his lane. I gave a Fourth-Class exercise its formation back after its leader was carried out.
Every one of those was me trying to make a bad situation smaller. That’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at out there.
He had come to this academy to dodge the draft.
That had been the entire plan, stated plainly to himself on the morning he registered: get a logistics posting, sit behind a wall, calculate beast diets at a desk, and be so boring that nobody ever thought of him when something needed doing outside.
And every single step of executing that plan had made him better at the thing that made people want him outside.
Nobody twisted the record. They read the file and drew the obvious conclusion.
It’s just that the file is a list of me being useful in exactly the places I was trying to avoid.
He opened the equipment requisition page, looked at the approved categories — protective gear, defensive equipment, training consumables — and thought about what a defensive-support coordinator would actually want to have on a wall in a month.
Then he closed it, because he had twenty-three days and no assignment and there was no version of this where he built a Tide loadout on the day of the advisory.
Flicker’s supervised exercise began at 2100 and lasted exactly as long as Verrick had authorized.
She managed the length of it four times. On the third crossing she over-balanced again, and both wings came out again, and she caught it again, and this time she looked extremely smug about it.
Glitch lay at the edge of the mat with his chin on his forelegs and watched her the way he always did.
Outside the window, Meridian had started.
Jin heard it before he saw it: a deep industrial rumble from the direction of the freight yards, and when he went to look, the heavy platforms were running. Four of them, moving reinforcement sections toward the eastern gate under lights. A sealed transport went past below with an Association escort. Somewhere further off, something enormous was being uncoupled with a series of impacts he could feel through the floor.
The preparation machinery would run for most of the month. The advisory schedule had already reserved the freight lanes through the week before roster lock.
He stood at the window with the noise coming through the glass and looked back at the room.
Flicker was upright in the middle of the mat with her wings half out, holding herself steady, entirely pleased with an achievement that amounted to not falling over.
She’s getting steadier every day, Jin thought.
Behind her, through the window, a crane arm swung a wall section into position against the dark.
And everything else is going the other way.
He did not say any of it out loud. When Flicker’s exercise time ended, he picked her up, checked the cradle readings against Verrick’s numbers, and set her down inside it.
Then he sat on the floor with his back against the desk, between a Bronze anchor beast who took up half the room and a hatchling who could walk two meters, and listened to Meridian getting ready.