"Charging is a very rare ability," Bala said slowly, like he was choosing each word individually. "I've never personally met any—"
"Run it again," he ordered the soldier.
I stepped through the screen a second time. The system in my vision flickered. A new notification appeared, fast and quiet:
[Adjusting external readout. Recommend concealing primary class.]
The machine hummed. The screen scrambled for half a second, too fast for anyone but me to notice, and then reformed.
"Healer, level four,"
Everyone turned back to the screen. The soldiers looked at each other. My group looked at Bala. Bala looked at the machine with the expression of a man whose morning had just gotten significantly more complicated.
"That," he said carefully, "has to be a mechanical error."
He almost looked relieved saying it. Like the universe had briefly malfunctioned and was now correcting itself.
"Abram." He turned to me. "What is your ability?"
I ran the numbers quickly. The machine had just said healer. The system wanted my primary class hidden. Whatever a charger was, it pulled attention. And attention, outside the walls, had always been the thing most likely to get you killed.
"Healing," I said.
Bala's shoulders settled slightly. "Two healers in the group." He said it to the soldier beside him, almost to himself. The soldier nodded once. Some silent conversation passed between them that I didn't have the context to read.
"Follow me," Bala said.
We followed him through the gate. And the walls closed behind us.
***
It was a city. A real, actual, functioning city, and I want to be precise about what that meant to me in that moment, because I had grown up in the outside. I had grown up with the plain and the dust and the dark and the moaning.
I had grown up knowing that civilization was something that used to exist, something my mother described in the past tense, carefully, like a language she was slowly forgetting.
And here it was. Present tense. Tall buildings catching the light. Roads, actual paved roads, with vehicles moving on them in organized directions. Kids just walking around outside, not running, not hiding, just existing in the open air like it was normal, because for them it was. People going to work. Windows with lights in them. The smell of food from somewhere nearby that hit me so hard I nearly stopped walking.
The wall stretched in both directions further than I could see, and at the top of it, glass guard towers sat at intervals, soldiers visible inside, watching the plain. Perhaps waiting for the day the life layer failed, or the infected evolved further, or something else went wrong.
We got into a green army vehicle and were driven through streets I had no reference for. I sat in the seat and looked out the window and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't have embarrassed me.
The vehicle stopped outside a tall building. CGI Headquarters. Clean lettering on clean stone.
Journalists were waiting outside with cameras, which I had not anticipated. They photographed us as we walked in, this group of six people who had crossed the plain and arrived at the walls, and I became suddenly, acutely aware of what I looked like. The others were decent. I looked like a document of everything the outside could do to a person. I smiled at no camera.
***
Inside, Bala stopped in a corridor lined with numbered doors.
"Thirty minutes," he said. "Each of you has a room. Refresh. There's food, water, a bath. Change of clothes." He said it the way people say things they have said many times, efficient and without ceremony. "Thirty minutes, then I'll summon you."
He opened the doors and directed us each to one. I entered mine and closed the door behind me.
I stood there for a moment. The room was clean in a way I had no category for. Clean like a standard, like someone had decided this was what a room was supposed to be and had simply made it so. A bed with actual sheets. A mirror. A couch with folded clothes on it. And on the table, a tray with covered plates and a full bottle of water. I drank the entire bottle without stopping. Then I lifted the plate covers.
Chicken. Rice. Actual chicken, which did not exist outside the walls because outside the walls the chickens had gone the way of everything else.
I had not eaten a full meal in longer than I was going to calculate right now. I had mastered going without food the way you master anything the outside forces on you, not because you want to but because the alternative is lying down.
I ate everything in approximately ninety seconds with unwashed hands and no apologies. Then I ate the fruits. All of it.
There was also a mirror in the room. The mirror showed me something I hadn't seen in a while, myself, properly, in full. I looked exactly like what I was. Someone the outside had been working on for twenty years.
"When did I last bathe?" The honest answer was that bathing outside was a luxury with a specific danger attached to it, because being undressed and distracted was an excellent way to lose something important, like your life. But I was inside now.
I went to the bathroom, ran the bath, and got in, and I am not going to describe what the water looked like afterward because I have some dignity left and I would like to keep it.
I got out. Dried off. Went to the couch. White shirt. Black trousers. New shoes, actual new shoes, still with the slight stiffness of something that hadn't been worn yet. I picked up the shirt and looked at the buttons for a moment.
I did them up slowly. Got all of them. Considered it a personal victory. I was done in ten minutes and when Bala knocked I was already at the door.
He led us to a room on an upper floor. Six chairs arranged in a clean semicircle. Organized, deliberate, the kind of room where things get decided.
An elderly man in a lab coat stood near the window. He was thin, slightly unsteady on his feet, the kind of shaking that isn't nerves but something longer and more medical. He watched us file in with sharp eyes that didn't match the rest of him.
"Doctor Reed," Bala said. "Here's the team."
We sat. The two men stepped aside and spoke in low voices. Reed kept glancing at us, cataloguing, the way doctors look at things they find interesting and are trying not to show it. Bala came back.
"People struggle outside the walls," he said. "We know that. We've always known that. What we want to do is bring more people in. But before we open those gates wider, we need to fix certain areas." He looked at each of us in turn. "First, we want to make you citizens. But citizenship here is earned. You'll be given missions. Complete them, and you're in. Permanently."
He left a space. Max filled it immediately.
"Okay, sir"
Nobody argued. Nobody was going to argue. We had all just seen what was on the other side of that gate. Chicken and rice and rooms with mirrors and kids walking around outside like it was nothing. Nobody was going to argue.
"However," Bala said, "some of your abilities are below the operational threshold." He turned to Doctor Reed.
Reed stepped forward. "The two who are below level five will attend a gift school for three months. Training, development, If they fail to level up, we see what to do."
He paused. I did the math. Sherry was level four. I had said I was a healer and the machine had confirmed level four. The two below five were me and Sherry. Seeing what to do meant sending me back to the plain. 'That won't happen.'
"The others begin field orientation here at CGI immediately." He said it plainly, like logistics. "In case the two reach par, we'll brief the full team on the mission."
I looked across at Sherry. She was looking straight ahead, jaw set, processing. Max had his eyes on her with that particular expression of someone who doesn't like a plan but has already decided to accept it.
'Months in a gift school which has girls,' I thought. 'Perfectly manageable.'