Chapter 202: The List No One Wants
There were nine names on the provisional defensive-support list, and Jin counted them before Coordinator Sennet started talking because he wanted to know what fraction he was.
Nine candidates. He had no idea how many positions there were, which made the fraction useless. He found that mildly annoying.
"Some of you have already worked out that being on this list is not an achievement," Sennet said. "Good. It’s a shortlist for a job none of you have been given."
She went through the terms without decoration. The candidates would spend the next three weeks undergoing practical evaluations scheduled around their existing coursework, not in place of it. The roster would lock one week before the projected onset of the Astral Tide. Strong results could place a candidate in Shelter 7’s interior defenses or at a controlled exterior support position, but no assignment had been decided for anyone in the room.
"Weak results remove you from leadership consideration," she added. "That’s all they do. Nobody is demoted for being unsuited to a command role at sixteen. Some of you will come off this list and return to your term with nothing worse than a lost afternoon each week."
Someone near the front asked what happened to the students who came off.
"They get given a job by someone who stays on it," said Sennet.
That answer followed Jin out of the room.
He considered it on the way to the practical hall and did not enjoy where the thought went.
Come off the list and I’m internal logistics.
That was the position he had claimed to want before reaching Meridian and the position he had continued wanting after Meridian started rewarding him for everything except staying safely behind a desk. It might have been the only goal he had maintained across two lives.
The route off the list was obvious. Evaluations included judgment. A candidate who was slightly slow, slightly indecisive, and slightly unwilling to communicate with the neighboring lane could lose leadership consideration without doing anything dramatic enough to look deliberate.
Jin turned the possibility over properly. Pretending it had never occurred to him would have been its own kind of dishonesty.
Sixteen hundred Credits a month. A Bronze feed schedule. Flicker’s continuing clinical support. A recommendation Marr had put his own name behind.
They’ve paid up front. I don’t get to take the payment and then quietly be bad at the job.
Underneath the arithmetic was a shorter and less comfortable answer. Someone would be standing on that route whether Jin wanted the position or not.
If I hand it back, they give it to whoever’s next.
He did not know who was next.
Neris Holt was already in the practical hall with her Galecrest Kite perched on a stand beside her.
"I’ve been assigned your practical evaluations."
"All right."
"Before you start feeling encouraged, the Lynx match and the breach drill only got you evaluated. They didn’t demonstrate that you can do the work."
"What’s the work?"
"One route. A few students. Your beast’s information." She handed him a sheet. "You hold the route, allocate what you have, talk to whoever is beside you, and recover casualties without opening your lane. You make your own decisions inside your sector and stay out of everyone else’s."
Jin read the sheet.
Local. Not command.
It was an unusually accurate description of what he and Glitch could do. Glitch could occupy a position and track movement beneath it. Jin was good at noticing when an assumption had stopped being true. Neither talent scaled to an entire battlefield, but both could handle one failing stretch of it.
"Most candidates fail by trying to run the whole exercise," Neris said. "You’ll want to. Don’t. Outside your lane is somebody else’s problem, and you will let it be."
The assigned route was a corridor of broken ground between two construct feeds, narrowed near the far end by a chokepoint of piled rubble. Jin received three Third-Class students he had never worked with.
Sena Karr’s long-limbed courser was extremely fast and unable to absorb a serious hit. Dolo Merren had a heavyset beast that produced a low screening haze but contributed little in direct combat. Priya Anand’s burrower could collapse a gap and hold it shut.
Jin asked what each beast could not do. That was usually a better question than asking what it did well, and it gave him the limits he needed.
Before the start signal, he walked the narrowed section with Glitch and checked where the rubble would bear his new weight. The evolved lizard no longer turned as easily as he once had, but the route did not require him to. Jin settled him where the broken walls forced every approach into reach, leaving enough space behind him for Karr’s courser to retreat without colliding with his tail. Merren and Anand received their own boundaries rather than detailed movement instructions. If the situation changed, they needed room to use the beasts they understood better than Jin did.
"So Glitch holds the choke and everyone else waits," he said. "That’s the plan until something happens."
"That’s not a plan," Merren said.
"It’s the part I can plan."
Neris took the neighboring lane. Her Kite rose as the exercise began, circling above the broken course while she sent brief reports through the shared channel.
The interference started early. Jin recognized it as a change in Glitch rather than information of his own.
The bond grew crowded. Glitch’s attention spread through the ground and returned carrying several contacts at once, reminding Jin unpleasantly of the night a newly synchronized Tremor Sense had tried to process an entire dormitory building.
He crouched beside Glitch’s shoulder and pushed a simple focus through the bond: north first.
A heavy repeating impact came from that direction. Something lighter moved to the east. A third contact appeared and vanished, while a broad grinding vibration beneath them made everything else harder to separate.
Impact plates were buried under the course, firing on different cycles and striking the ground hard enough to resemble weighted approaches.
They built this to stop Tremor Sense from being an answer by itself.
Jin pushed once for a cleaner reading and received a surge of frustration from Glitch. The skill was not failing. Glitch was accurately receiving everything the ground carried; the problem was that most of it did not matter.
Then the casualty dummy dropped from a rail beyond the chokepoint, out in the open.
Jin held for eleven seconds, counting every one. The east contact had gone quiet and returned. The northern contact had never stopped. Sending Karr’s courser beyond the choke would put the only fast beast he had between two unresolved approaches.
Confirm it. Then commit her.
He asked Glitch to isolate the east contact and received the same crowded impression. Asking again would not change it.
"Astor," Neris said over the channel. "Kite has nothing under the north scaffold. Can’t see through it."
That narrowed the uncertainty without resolving it. Her aerial view ended at the same scaffold line Glitch could not separate from the interference.
Jin finally stopped trying to get a better signal.
He’s sensing fine. I’m the part that isn’t working.