Catalyst Academy: Recruit

Chapter ONE: Welcome Recruit!

The handcuffs were too big.

That’s the detail my brain decided to fixate on while two armed federal officers drove me to the most prestigious prison in America. Not the fact that I was eighteen years old and shackled in the back of a transport vehicle that smelled like stale coffee and gun oil. Not the fact that the windows were blacked out so thoroughly I couldn’t tell if we were passing through a city or the surface of the moon. Not the fact that everyone involved in this process… every officer, every administrator, every person who had touched my file kept calling the place we were headed a school.

No. My brain chose the handcuffs.

They were standard issue. Adult-sized. Built for wrists considerably thicker than mine. Every time the vehicle took a turn, the metal shifted and the loose cuff on my left hand bit into a spot that was already raw, and I had to concentrate on keeping my fingers curled inward, away from…

Everything. Everyone.

I was getting good at that.

Officer Reynolds sat to my left. Big guy. Brick-wall shoulders straining a uniform that probably fit him two Thanksgivings ago. He’d barely spoken since we left the federal building in Indianapolis, but he breathed loud enough to count as conversation. Every few minutes he shifted his weight and his jacket pressed against my arm through my sleeve, and I could feel him not looking at my hands.

Officer Chu sat to my right. Smaller. Quieter. She’d offered me a granola bar about an hour ago, which was the single kindest thing anyone in law enforcement had done for me since this whole nightmare started. She’d also placed it on my knee rather than handing it to me directly, and I’d eaten it without mentioning that I noticed.

Everyone noticed my hands now.

It wasn’t obvious. Nobody flinched like I was radioactive. They just... adjusted. Little movements. Pulling a sleeve down. Leaning an inch further away when I shifted. Passing things by setting them down rather than reaching across.

Not long ago, nobody on the planet thought twice about touching Aeri Anastasia.

Now I sat in the back of a government vehicle with my wrists cuffed and my fingers pressed against my own thighs, and the two adults assigned to deliver me somewhere safe were being very, very careful not to let my skin brush theirs.

“Can I ask something?”

Reynolds exhaled through his nose. Patient. Tired.

“You can ask.”

“Has anyone called the hospital today?”

Silence. The engine hummed beneath us. Something in the undercarriage rattled over a seam in the road.

“We don’t have that information, Miss Anastasia. The intake staff at Origin—”

“Right.” I cut him off because I already knew the rest. The intake staff. The processing team. The next person. Always the next person. A chain of reasonable adults politely handing my questions down a hallway that never ended. “The intake staff will handle it. You mentioned.”

Chu shifted beside me. “They’ll have a liaison who can help you reach—”

“He’s in a coma.”

The sentence came out flatter than I intended. Both officers went quiet.

I stared at my own knees. Jeans. The same ones I’d been wearing when they picked me up yesterday morning. There was a small stain on the left thigh from the orange juice I’d spilled at the motel while making breakfast, and looking at it was easier than looking at either of them.

My dad was in a hospital bed. He hadn’t opened his eyes in twenty-seven days.

And I was handcuffed in a blacked-out van being driven to a place I didn’t choose, because the United States government had decided that whatever happened to me had made me someone else’s responsibility.

Academy.

The word kept surfacing in every document, every letter, every careful explanation from every careful adult. Origin Academy. As though wrapping the word “Academy” around it changed what was actually happening.

I’d been accepted to Purdue. Early admission. I had the letter in a box in a storage unit… since I no longer had a bedroom. I’d planned to study journalism. I was going to live in a dorm that didn’t require security clearance, eat dining hall food that nobody tested for contaminants, and touch other human beings without anyone filing an incident report.

That was six weeks ago.

Now I couldn’t legally enroll in a normal college. Couldn’t work a normal job. Couldn’t technically leave a federal officer’s supervision until someone at Origin Academy signed a piece of paper confirming I was their problem now.

Opportunity, the letter had said. The one they’d sent to the motel where a social worker was temporarily housing me because my father’s house was still an active investigation site.

We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected for enrollment at Origin Academy, the nation’s premier institution for—

I’d stopped reading after “selected.” You don’t select somebody when the alternative is a federal watch list.

The vehicle slowed.

My stomach tightened before my brain caught up. The road beneath us changed. Smoother asphalt, the kind that gets repaved regularly because somebody important drives on it. Reynolds sat straighter. Chu’s hand moved to the radio clipped to her vest and then dropped.

A low electronic tone. A gate mechanism. The van eased forward, stopped, and I heard a voice outside. Male, clipped, a professional exchange. Something with our driver through the partition I couldn’t see past. Radio static. A second voice confirming something. A word I didn’t catch.

We moved again.

The heater was blasting air that tasted like hot dust. My palms were sweating inside the cuffs.

“Almost there,” Chu said. Not unkindly.

The van made a final turn and ground to a halt. Engine idling. I heard the driver’s door open and close.

Then Reynolds reached across me carefully, jacket sleeve covering his forearm, and unlatched the door.

January came in like a slap. Cold, sharp, carrying the smell of wet concrete and diesel exhaust and something underneath that might have been pine trees or might have been industrial cleaner. I squinted against the dusk light after miles of blacked-out nothing, and for a few seconds the world was just brightness and freezing air and the rattle of my own too-big handcuffs.

Then my eyes adjusted.

Gray. Concrete barriers rising on both sides of a narrow vehicle lane. A small, windowless building directly ahead. Two stories of institutional architecture so aggressively boring it might as well have had PROCESSING stamped across the front. Chain-link topped with coiled wire fed into reinforced walls. Three uniformed officers standing near the entrance, breath clouding in the cold, sidearms visible.

School.

Sure.

But above the concrete, past the roofline of the processing building, past all the gray and the wire and the uniforms… something else.

A tower.

Old stone, not concrete. Dark and tall, rising high enough that the top caught the golden hour of winter’s last light in a way the security structures never could. It didn’t match anything around it. Gothic, maybe, or something I didn’t know the name for. The kind of architecture that belonged to a cathedral or a castle or a university built before the modern age.

It was the single most out-of-place thing I had ever seen, and I stared at it long enough that Chu had to say my name twice before I looked away.

“Miss Anastasia. We need to go inside.”

Reynolds was already standing on the pavement, holding the door wide. Chu had her hand extended toward my elbow, hovering two inches away, not touching, waiting for me to move first.

I looked at the processing building.

I looked at the officers by the entrance.

I looked at the tower, distant and impossible above the concrete.

Then I swung my legs out of the van, stood on ground I hadn’t chosen, and let them walk me toward the doors.

The doors opened into fluorescent light and linoleum.

No grand entrance. No dramatic reveal. Just a hallway that smelled like floor wax and recycled air, the kind of institutional corridor that exists in every government building ever constructed. Beige walls. Overhead lighting that buzzed at a frequency designed to make human beings slowly lose the will to live. A water fountain with a taped-out-of-order sign that looked old enough to have been laminated before I was born.

Reynolds and Chu walked me past a security desk where a bored woman in a navy polo scanned their credentials without looking up. A metal detector. A second desk. A clipboard changed hands. Someone initialed something. The machinery of bureaucracy grinding forward, each station another set of teeth pulling me deeper into the thing.

A man at the third desk with small round glasses had me sit in a molded plastic chair while he typed. He confirmed my name without asking it. Just read it off a screen and waited for me to nod.

“Anastasia, Aeri. Date of birth?”

I told him.

“Powered status confirmed. Contact-designation code flagged.” He glanced at my cuffs, then peered over his glasses at Reynolds. “Those can come off.”

Reynolds unlocked them. The relief was so immediate it almost hurt—blood rushing back into compressed skin, the raw pink bands around my wrists suddenly exposed to the air. I rubbed them without thinking, then stopped when I noticed the man at the desk watching my hands.

Everyone watched my hands.

I was moved on to the next station.

“Place your personal belongings in the bin.”

A gray plastic bin appeared on the counter. The kind you’d see at airport security. A woman in the same navy polo stood beside it with a clipboard and a Sharpie, ready to inventory my entire remaining civilian life.

I didn’t have much. They’d packed a bag for me at the motel. The social worker had supervised, and most of it had already been taken at the first checkpoint. What was left went into the bin piece by piece while the woman wrote it down. Hair tie. Wallet with eleven dollars and a maxed-out debit card. Student ID from a high school I’d graduated from six months ago.

My phone…

I held it a beat too long. The woman waited, Sharpie hovering.

“I need this.”

“All personal electronics are collected during intake and stored—”

“My father is in the hospital.” I said it flat, not loud, the way you say something you’ve already said fourteen times to fourteen different people. “I need to be reachable. If his condition changes, someone has to be able to call me.”

The woman looked at me the way people look at you when they’ve heard every version of every objection and your particular version isn’t even interesting. “Emergency contacts are routed through the Academy’s communications office. Your assigned staff liaison will—”

“I don’t have an assigned staff liaison. I have a phone. With the hospital’s number in it. And I need—”

“Honey.” Another officer at the desk leaned back. He had the energy of someone who’d processed a hundred teenagers through this room and found every single one of them exhausting. “You’re not going to be calling Daddy to come pick you up. You’re in the system now. Big-girl rules.”

The fluorescent lights buzzed.

Something behind my ribs went very still.

I looked at him. Just looked. Whatever crossed my face made the inventory woman take a small step sideways, and Reynolds, still standing behind me… shifted his weight.

“His name,” I said quietly, “is Atticus… Atticus Anastasia. He’s in a coma at St. Francis Medical Center. So when I tell you I need my phone, I’m not asking you to bend a rule so I can update my Instagram.”

The room got careful.

The man at the desk blinked twice, then looked at his screen.

“Phone goes in the bin,” he said, but quieter. “Communications office handles emergency medical contacts. That’s the process.”

I put the phone in the bin.

The woman wrote it down.

“Next!” she yelled as I was ushered to step aside.

Reynolds and Chu walked me down another hallway—more linoleum, more fluorescent buzzing, more beige—until we reached a door marked MEDICAL INTAKE — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Reynolds knocked twice. Someone inside called something I couldn’t make out. Reynolds opened the door, then stepped aside.

“We’ll be right out here when you’re done.”

I stared at him. For a full second I almost said something grateful, which irritated me, because the man had spent three hours helping deliver me to a place I didn’t want to be. But it was the first time anyone had stopped following me since the motel. The first door that would close with me on one side and armed escorts on the other.

I walked in.

The room killed that feeling immediately. Examination table with a strip of paper unrolled across it. Scale in the corner. Sink. Cabinets. A computer on a small rolling desk. The overhead light was the aggressive medical kind that makes everyone look like they’re already dead. The whole space smelled like disinfectant and absolutely nothing human.

A woman in navy scrubs stood by the counter with a clipboard. Mid-forties, dark hair pulled back tight, reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked at me the way a mechanic looks at the next car in the queue.

“Anastasia, Aeri?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Dr. Okoro. I’ll be conducting your intake physical. Step on the scale, please.”

I stepped on the scale. She adjusted the weights, wrote something down. Blood pressure next. Then temperature. Pulse. She asked about allergies, medications, recent illness, prior surgeries. I answered everything in the flattest voice I could manage because, for once, nobody was actively taking something from me. I wanted to keep it that way.

It didn’t.

“I need you to remove your clothing for the physical examination.”

I waited for her to hand me a gown. She didn’t. I waited for her to step out. She didn’t do that either.

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

She said it the way someone says sign here or take a number. Wednesday afternoon. Another recruit. Another body to clear.

I pulled the shirt over my head. Kicked off my shoes. Peeled off the orange-juice-stained jeans, all while trying not to notice Dr. Okoro staring at me like I was a murder suspect trying to smuggle contraband into the maximum security prison.

I stood there in underwear and a bra that didn’t match and looked at Dr. Okoro with what I hoped communicated this is enough, right?

“Everything.”

I unhooked the bra. Stepped out of the underwear. Crossed my arms over my chest and angled slightly away from her because apparently my body still thought modesty was achievable when you were standing naked under surgical lighting in a government medical facility.

“Usually somebody buys me a drink before we get this far.”

Dr. Okoro wrote something on her clipboard.

Cool. Great audience.

“Turn around, please.”

I turned.

“Squat.”

I looked back over my shoulder. “You’re kidding.”

She wasn’t kidding. You could tell nothing about Dr. Okoro had ever been kidding, about anything, at any point in her life.

“Squat and cough.”

I squatted. I coughed. Somewhere out there, eighteen-year-olds were moving into dorm rooms and hanging string lights and arguing about whose mini-fridge went where, and I was squatting naked under fluorescent lights while a stranger with a clipboard watched. Worst college orientation in American history. Not even close.

“Stand. Face me.”

I stood. I faced her. She examined me with the clinical detachment of someone cataloging inventory. Eyes moving across my skin, pausing on my ribs where the last faint traces of bruising from the wreck still lingered... documenting something on her chart. Her gaze tracked down my arms, across my stomach, along my legs.

“Hey doc, my eyes are up here.”

One corner of her mouth moved. Barely. A fracture in the mask so small it could have been a muscle twitch.

Victory.

She returned to the clipboard. “Raise your arms.”

I raised them. She stepped closer, and I watched her snap on a fresh pair of gloves before her fingers came anywhere near me. Watched her check the fit. Watched her make sure the medical gloves covered every millimeter of skin past her wrists.

I was naked and five-foot-three and she was the one putting on armor.

The examination took another few minutes. She listened to my lungs. Checked my spine. Documented the bruising with quick, efficient notes. Her gloved hands were warm and completely impersonal, and she never once touched my bare skin with hers.

“You’re cleared for training.” She set the clipboard down and reached into a cabinet behind her. “Get dressed.”

They gave me grey… gray everything. Sweatpants. Sweatshirt. Long-sleeve shirt, short-sleeve shirt, socks, bra, underwear, even gray-and-white tennis shoes. The ORIGIN logo was printed large across the chest of the shirt. Just the one word, in a font so bland it could have been a hospital brand.

I had never gotten dressed so fast in my life. The shirt dropped over me and something unclenched in my chest that I hadn’t realized was clenched. The fabric was warm against my skin. And clean. Covering my arms, covering my stomach, covering the bruises and the vulnerability and whatever else Dr. Okoro had been writing on that chart. The clothes were ugly. Shapeless. Institutional. They fit like they’d been designed by someone who had never seen a human body and resented the concept.

I loved them.

I hated that I loved them.

I looked down at myself. Gray from neck to ankle. ORIGIN stamped across my chest like I was a product on a shelf. My own clothes were folded on the counter behind Dr. Okoro, already being sorted into a labeled bag. My jeans. My shirt. The last things I’d chosen to put on my own body.

The door opened. Reynolds stood in the hallway, Chu just behind him.

“We’re moving.”

“Where?”

“The Yard.”

Reynolds walked. I followed. Chu’s boots fell into step behind me.

The hallway stretched long and fluorescent, same cinderblock, same institutional nothing. Reynolds talked without looking back, his voice flat and rehearsed. Curfew was at 2200. Meals were at designated times. Restricted areas were marked. Failure to comply with any directive from an instructor or officer resulted in consequences he didn’t bother specifying.

Chu pressed something into my hand as we walked. Plastic. Warm from her pocket.

I looked down.

A badge on a lanyard. My intake photo stared back at me. Washed out under fluorescent light, dark circles under my eyes, mouth set in a line that couldn’t decide between fury and exhaustion. I looked like a mugshot. Fitting.

AERI ANASTASIA

RECRUIT

213

“Your classification is Recruit,” Reynolds said, still walking. “Your assigned number is two-thirteen. Staff will address you as Anastasia or Two-Thirteen. Respond to both.”

I clipped the badge to the neck of my sweatshirt and kept moving.

“No unauthorized use of abilities. You don’t activate a power unless an instructor gives you direct permission. Violate that and you earn yourself a one-way transfer to Deltoro Federal Containment.”

He said it the same way he’d said everything else. Curfew, meals, don’t use your powers or we send you to a federal hole. All one list.

No powers. That shouldn’t be hard. I still didn’t know what the hell I’d done in the first place.

Reynolds reached a set of double doors. Heavy. Steel-reinforced. He pushed through without slowing.

Cold hit me hard after the manufactured heat of the rooms and the walk through intake. January air cutting straight through the gray sweatshirt, finding the bare skin at my wrists and neck. Then wind, lifting the hair off my shoulders. The sun had sunk lower while I was inside, washing the winter sky in pink and purple beneath a soft blue overhead. On another day, it might have been beautiful.

Then sound.

Hundreds of voices.

Reynolds stepped to the side and I saw it.

The Yard opened in front of me like a pen. Concrete underfoot, chain-link and concrete walls boxing in a square maybe half the size of a football field. And packed. Gray everywhere. Hundreds of kids my age milling around in the same shapeless Origin sweats, clustered in groups or standing alone or sitting on the cold ground with their arms around their knees trying to stay warm.

I caught pieces. A tall Black guy with his arms crossed, scanning the crowd like he was cataloging threats. Three girls laughing about something near the far wall. A boy sitting alone with his head between his knees. A girl with red hair pacing the perimeter, eyes tracking every officer posted along the edges.

I watched her measure the distance between two guards.

Officers ringed the square. Not aggressive. No weapons drawn, no shouting. Just standing. Evenly spaced. Watching. Every gate and doorway had someone in front of it.

Near the center, a raised platform. Metal. Temporary-looking. A microphone stand. Speakers mounted on poles. Staff in Origin jackets adjusting something on a folding table behind it.

“This is where we leave you.” Chu stopped. Looked at me.

“Good luck, Aeri.”

“Thanks. I’ll send a postcard from the Yard. Really captures the summer camp vibe.”

Reynolds fought back a smile.

“Don’t die in here, kid.”

Hard to tell if he was joking.

They turned and walked back through the double doors. Steel closed behind them with a heavy, final sound, and the lock engaged with a click I felt in my teeth.

I’d spent the entire drive wanting distance from those two. Now I stood in the gap where they’d been, wind pulling at my sleeves, and the absence felt worse than their presence had.

I turned around.

Gray. Everywhere, gray. Hundreds of strangers wearing the same uniform, breathing the same cold air, none of them looking at me because every single one of them had their own version of today, their own reason for being here. Conversations overlapped into a wall of noise. Nervous laughter, muttering, someone shouting a name across the square. Shoes scraped concrete. The wind carried the smell of too many bodies and cheap institutional soap and something metallic I couldn’t place.

I looked down at my badge.

213.

I was surrounded by people and I didn’t know one of them.

Music cracked through the speakers. Sharp, sudden, loud enough to slice through every conversation in the Yard. Voices dropped. Heads turned. Bodies shifted toward the platform.

I followed their eyes.

A woman stepped to the microphone. Tall, silver-streaked dark hair, navy suit that probably cost more than my dad’s truck. She moved like someone who’d done this enough times that the podium belonged to her.

“Welcome, Recruits!”

Her voice carried cleanly over the Yard without effort. Behind her, four adults stood in a line across the rear of the platform, evenly spaced, completely motionless. They could have been bolted to the stage.

“My name is Dr. Evelyn Ward, Dean of Origin Academy, and as of today, you are first-year students here… Recruits!”

She spoke about the year ahead. Challenge. Structure. Responsibility. Origin would prepare us for independent life with our abilities. We would be tested physically, academically, personally. Greater freedom would come, but it had to be earned.

Standard institutional welcome. Dress it however you want… it still meant sit down, shut up, and do what you’re told.

My attention drifted to the four figures behind her.

The one on the far left looked like he’d been cast from a recruiting poster. Compact build, broad through the shoulders, short bleached-blond hair spiked up. Athletic and annoyingly symmetrical. Something about him nagged at me. Not his face exactly, but the type. Old posters on a classroom wall, maybe. Grade school. I couldn’t place it.

Next to him stood a man who made the first guy look decorative. Massive. Not tall-massive. Wide-massive. Shoulders that could block a doorway, arms thick enough to suggest he’d never encountered a problem he couldn’t solve by walking through it. He wasn’t scowling. He wasn’t doing anything. Standing still was enough.

Third in line. An old man. Actually old. White-haired, with a small, frail build compared to the others, standing with the same rigid posture but looking like someone had accidentally shuffled a grandfather into the wrong lineup. He didn’t fidget. Didn’t smile. Just stood there with the quiet stillness of the other three.

The fourth was a Black woman, lean and athletic in a way that went past casual fitness into something practiced and professional. Box braids pulled back, blue accents threaded through them. Even from a distance I could tell she carried herself like someone used to knowing exactly where she belonged. She was striking, but I didn’t have time to think about that because—

“—divided into four Companies for your Recruit year.”

I’d missed something. Evelyn had shifted from philosophy to logistics while I’d been studying her backdrop.

“Alpha Company, led by Drill Sergeant Jake Morgan.”

The blond man. Morgan. The name didn’t help.

“Bravo Company. Drill Sergeant Rocky Moon.”

The giant.

“Charlie Company. Drill Sergeant Arthur Cambell.”

The grandfather.

“Delta Company. Drill Sergeant Juniper Murphy.”

The athlete.

“Please check the identification you received during processing.”

The entire Yard moved at once. Hundreds of heads dropping simultaneously, hands reaching for badges, fingers flipping lanyards. I looked down.

213.

“Recruits numbered one hundred through one ninety-nine—Alpha Company. Two hundred through two ninety-nine—Bravo.”

I looked up at Rocky Moon.

Of course.

“Three hundred through three ninety-nine—Charlie. Four hundred through four ninety-nine—Delta.”

Around me, people were doing the same math. Checking numbers, glancing at the stage, reacting in whispers and groans and one nervous laugh from somewhere to my left.

“Move to your designated areas now.”

Projectors mounted along the Yard walls flickered on, throwing four massive colored squares across the concrete: red, blue, green, yellow. Each labeled. Alpha. Bravo. Charlie. Delta.

Blue. I belonged in blue.

The crowd fractured. People crossing paths, checking badges, a guy who’d started walking toward green suddenly reversing. Two girls who’d been standing together split in opposite directions without saying goodbye. I found blue and walked into it, shoulder to shoulder with strangers whose ID numbers all started with the number two.

The guards moved.

Not aggressively. They simply stepped inward from the perimeter and formed lines between the four colored sections. A cross cutting the Yard into quadrants. The message was architectural. No crossing. No mixing. You belong where they put you.

I stood in Bravo’s blue square with roughly a hundred other recruits. The four Drill Sergeants watched from the podium as the separation locked into place. Then, without ceremony, they turned and left the stage.

Rocky Moon disappeared behind the platform.

I had no idea where he went.

Evelyn surveyed the four divided groups. The Yard had gone quiet enough that when she leaned into the microphone, I heard her inhale.

“Welcome, Recruits!”

Four doors were set into the outer walls of the Yard, one for each Company. The guards standing in front of them stepped aside.

The doors opened.

Nothing happened for a beat. Nobody wanted to go first.

Then the guards along the back edges of each square started walking forward. Slow. Deliberate. Not running, not shouting. Just compressing the space. Taking away the option of standing still.

Alpha started disappearing through its door. Charlie. Delta. Bodies funneling into openings like water finding a drain.

Bravo moved. Someone behind me pressed forward and I went with the crowd because the alternative was getting trampled. The blue doorway grew larger. Shoulders bumped mine through layers of gray cotton. Cold air gave way to warmer air leaking from inside.

I crossed the threshold into Bravo Company’s building with the current of bodies around me, badge bouncing against my chest.

213.

The room on the other side was exactly as inviting as everything else Origin had shown me so far. Concrete walls, concrete floor, ceiling high enough that the fluorescent tubes mounted across it threw down light without warmth. The space could have held twice our number and still felt empty. No chairs. No tables. No decorations. Just a painted yellow line running across the floor about fifteen feet from the far wall.

I barely registered it before the whistle split my skull open.

The shriek bounced off every surface and came back sharper. My hands flew to my ears before I could stop them, and then a voice detonated from somewhere beyond the mass of gray bodies still pouring through the door:

“TOE THE LINE!”

I couldn’t see him. Didn’t matter. Everyone lurched forward at once and I went with them because standing still when a hundred bodies decide to move is a fantastic way to get trampled. We hit the line in a ragged wave. Toes against yellow paint. Shoulders bumping. Someone’s elbow caught my ribs. I straightened up and tried to figure out what to do with my hands.

“TOE. THE. LINE!”

Everyone tightened. Spines snapped vertical. Chins lifted.

“GET DOWN!”

Half a second of confusion. Then the person beside me dropped and I followed, palms slapping concrete, legs shooting back. Push-up position. The floor was cold and gritty under my hands.

“DOWN.”

We lowered.

“UP.”

We pushed.

“DOWN.”

The cadence locked in. Somewhere past the wall of bodies and heavy breathing, boots began moving.

“I am Drill Sergeant Rocky Moon.”

His voice traveled around the room while we worked. I couldn’t see anything except the concrete three inches below my face, the gray sleeves of the recruit beside me, and shoes. Lots of shoes.

“I am not your friend. I am not your therapist. I am not your daddy. If you came through that door expecting somebody to hold your hand and tell you how special your little trick makes you—”

“DOWN.”

I lowered. Held. My shoulders screamed.

“—you walked into the wrong building.”

Boots entered my peripheral vision. Enormous boots. They passed without stopping and I heard him correct someone’s form two bodies to my left with a bark that made the girl flinch hard enough to collapse. She scrambled back into position.

“UP.”

I pushed. My arms had started trembling somewhere around the sixth repetition and hadn’t stopped.

“You have three strikes in my company.” The boots circled. His shadow crossed the concrete beneath me like a slow eclipse. “A serious disciplinary failure earns a strike. Failing where Origin requires a pass earns another one—”

“DOWN.”

Sweat slid along my temple and dropped onto the floor.

“Three strikes and I will see your ass again next January. You will recycle into next year’s Recruit class and do it all again.”

Someone to my right made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.

“UP.”

My arms burned from wrist to shoulder. The concrete had warmed under my palms and my fingers kept trying to slide.

“You are Hematite Recruits.” Rocky’s voice had dropped from a shout to something worse. Something almost conversational that still carried to every corner. “Hematite means you’re unfinished. It means you showed up to my academy thinking whatever little miracle your body can do makes you ready for something. It doesn’t. You are raw. You are soft. You are dangerous to yourselves and every civilian standing within range of whatever you can’t control yet.”

The boots stopped. Right in front of me.

I saw them first. Then the shadow swallowed everything. I didn’t look up. My chest hovered four inches above concrete and my triceps were on fire and this wall of a man was standing close enough that I could smell boot polish.

“Back flat, Two-Thirteen. Hips down.”

I adjusted. Something in my lower back popped.

He moved on.

“I will break every sloppy habit, every lazy instinct, every arrogant assumption you carried through that door.” His voice swept past me toward the far wall. “And then we build. Stronger. Faster. Smarter. More disciplined than you believe you’re capable of becoming. Your ability is a perk, not a crutch. What’s between your ears is what makes you dangerous.”

The room sounded nothing like it had two minutes ago. Ragged breathing. Grunts. Palms squeaking against grit. Someone collapsed again and the scramble back up was audible.

“UP.”

I pushed. Barely.

“On your feet.”

Standing hurt worse than the floor. My arms hung like wet rope. My shoulders throbbed. My palms stung with concrete burn and I curled my fingers against the raw skin without thinking.

Rocky divided us with two words and a pointed finger. Men left. Women right. Barracks-style dormitories. Twenty-five bunk beds each, enough for fifty recruits. Find your number, find your rack.

The formation dissolved. I turned toward the women’s side with the others, arms still shaking, sweat cooling against my neck.

There was no orientation period. No easing into it. Apparently, this was Recruit.

The women’s barracks smelled like fresh paint and industrial detergent, which meant somebody had tried to make twenty-five bunk beds crammed into one long concrete room feel like less of a warehouse. They’d failed.

Twenty-five bunks filled the room, arranged in two rows along the walls. No partitions. No curtains. No illusion of privacy whatsoever. Just metal frames, thin mattresses, and numbered placards bolted to each headboard.

I walked the row with my arms hanging dead at my sides, reading numbers. 201, 202. 205, 206. Women filed past me in both directions, some moving fast, some standing lost in the aisle.

Bottom bunk.

The first merciful thing that had happened to me all day.

I sat down and the mattress gave about a quarter inch beneath me. My shoulders burned. My palms were raw and pink from Rocky’s concrete. I picked tiny bits of grit from my palms and stared at the bunk frame above me while bodies and voices filled the room.

A girl with long dark hair settled onto the bottom bunk directly across the aisle—215. She moved quietly, pulling her knees up and tucking herself against the wall like she was trying to take up as little space as the architecture allowed. The girl who claimed 216 above her was a different species entirely. Compact, tattooed forearms, black hair shaved along the right side with two clean lines cut through the short section, and an expression that suggested Rocky’s push-ups had been a mild inconvenience rather than a near-death experience. She caught me looking and raised one eyebrow. I glanced away.

Then someone blocked my light.

“Please tell me you don’t talk in your sleep.”

I looked up.

The girl standing at the foot of my bunk was taller than me by a solid four or five inches, which at this point in the day felt like a personal insult. Black hair cut just past her shoulders. Athletic build that her gray Origin sweats somehow couldn’t completely flatten. A face that belonged on something more interesting than a government intake form. Sharp cheekbones, full lips, and eyes that were so vividly purple they almost looked fake.

She checked the placard above my head. Then the one above it. Her mouth twitched.

“Two-fourteen. Top.” She looked down at me. “Fantastic.”

“Could be worse,” I said. “You could be doing push-ups.”

“I could be doing a lot of things.” She grabbed the frame and swung herself up onto the top bunk with an ease that made my screaming shoulders feel offended. The mattress above me shifted as she settled. Then her face appeared over the edge, upside-down, black hair swinging. “Beatrix Frost.”

She extended a hand downward.

I stared at it.

My fingers curled against my thighs. Something automatic tightened behind my ribs… the reflex I’d been carrying for weeks, the one that happened before any conscious thought could intervene.

I didn’t take her hand.

“Aeri,” I said. “Anastasia.”

If the rejected handshake bothered her, it didn’t reach her face. She pulled her hand back and propped her chin on the mattress edge instead.

“Aeri Anastasia.” She tried it out like she was tasting something. “That’s aggressively pretty for somebody who looks like they just got dragged behind a truck.”

“It’s been a day.”

“Hasn’t it.” Her purple eyes swept the barracks. The chaos of fifty women claiming territory, mattresses protesting, someone three bunks down already arguing about a top-bunk assignment.

She disappeared back above me. Her mattress creaked. Through the metal frame I heard her shifting around, testing the limits of what Origin considered adequate bedding.

“Aeri?”

“Yeah.”

“If I fall on you in the middle of the night, that’s Origin’s fault. Not mine.”

My mouth did something it hadn’t done in days.

It almost smiled.

The barracks hummed with whispered conversations and restless mattresses before—

“LIGHTS OUT!”

The room went black.

Every voice died mid-syllable. Somewhere near the far wall, one last whisper dissolved into nothing. Rocky’s boots crossed the doorway, the door slammed, and he was gone as quickly as he came.

Darkness.

Real darkness.

I lay on bunk 213 and stared at the underside of Beatrix’s mattress a couple feet above my face. My shoulders throbbed in slow, deep pulses from Rocky’s formal introduction. The thin blanket smelled like laundry detergent and absolutely nothing else. No fabric softener. No familiar smell. No trace of whoever slept here last year.

Around me, fifty strangers breathed.

Mattresses shifted. Someone rolled over three bunks down. The building ticked and settled against the January cold. Above me, Beatrix adjusted her weight once, twice, then went still.

I pressed my palms flat against the mattress.

These hands.

Dad was at St. Francis, and I didn’t know if anyone had spoken his name today. I didn’t know what the machines beside his bed were doing, what they were measuring, or whether anything had changed since I’d last seen him. I didn’t know if a nurse had checked on him this afternoon, or if he was just lying in a room as dark as this one, alone, while his daughter got sorted into a color-coded box somewhere he couldn’t reach.

I didn’t even know if he’d know I was gone.

Twelve hours ago I’d had a name, clothes that belonged to me, and a plan that involved a real college with a real degree. Now I had gray sweats, a three-digit number, a drill sergeant who could probably bench-press my entire future, and a bunkmate with purple eyes who thought my name was aggressively pretty.

Tomorrow they’d start figuring me out. Poking. Measuring. Asking questions I didn’t know how to answer.

Good luck.

I put my own father in a coma and I still didn’t understand how.

I pulled the blanket to my chin, tucked my hands underneath my body, and closed my eyes.

Whatever Origin thought it was going to find inside Recruit 213… I hoped it was ready.

Because I wasn’t.