I Choose the Skills Everyone Else Rejects

Talent Services gave Nate a badge that said OBSERVER and a locker two floors below Gallery Four.

Western Access opened at six. Nate arrived at twelve past, which still made him the third person there.

Darek looked at his boots before he looked at his face. "You brought them."

"You asked."

"I asked last time too." He went back to his terminal.

The preparation hall was colder than Nate remembered, the heating cycling somewhere behind the lockers without reaching the benches. Someone had moved Savin’s spear. He noticed that before he noticed anything else — the empty section of wall where it had leaned for a week, the paint slightly cleaner there than around it.

Tessa came through the inner door with a printed folder under one arm. Actual paper. Nate hadn’t seen paper at Field Command before.

"They approved it?"

"Wednesday." She set the folder down on the bench. "Command wanted it electronic."

"And?"

"I told them people scroll past electronic." She opened the folder and squared the pages against the bench with two taps. "Nobody scrolls past a form somebody hands them."

Nate looked at the stack. Five copies.

Nora arrived a few minutes later, medical pack already on her hip. She saw the folder and slowed. Olan came in behind her with his right hand in a support glove, the fingers moving well enough that Nate had to look twice to find the injury.

"You’re cleared?"

"Light duty." Olan flexed the hand. "Three fingers are fine. The fourth complains. The fifth has opinions."

The fifth person came last. Petra Sund, transferred in from the eastern survey group that week, tall and quiet with a sensor rig she clearly hadn’t finished configuring. She looked at the folder, then at Graveshare, then at nothing in particular.

Darek closed his terminal. "Before we go in."

Everyone stopped.

"Field Command approved a disclosure procedure this week. It applies to any deployment where Calder is rostered." He nodded at the folder. "Korr wrote most of it. Read the whole thing. Ask anything. If you decline, you’re reassigned today with no note in your record."

Nobody moved for a second. Then Tessa handed out the pages.

Nate had read the language weeks ago on her tablet. Seeing four other people read it at the same time was different. There was no way to look busy while it happened. He stood beside the lockers with his own copy in his hand and watched the top of Nora’s head while she went through it line by line.

The middle paragraph was the one that mattered.

If a rostered member dies while linked, the armament may recover part of the energy remaining in that person’s circulation. The bearer retains access to that energy after the deployment ends.

Olan finished first. He signed with his left hand, the letters coming out crooked, and passed the page back to Tessa without comment.

"You don’t want to ask anything?" Tessa said.

"I was in the corridor at Marker Twelve." He tucked the pen into his chest pocket. "I’d rather be on a roster with someone who knows what the walls do."

Tessa took the page. She didn’t argue with him.

Nora read hers twice. When she finished, she looked up at Nate rather than at Darek. "Does it hurt you?"

Nate hadn’t expected that. "What?"

"When it takes it." She turned the page toward him, one finger against the middle paragraph. "Does it hurt you when it happens."

He thought about Savin between Darek and Joric, boots dragging, and the heat that had flooded the plates before Nora had confirmed anything.

"No."

"Is that the truth or the answer you think I want?"

"It’s the truth." He kept his eyes on her. "It got warm. That’s all."

Nora looked at the page again. Then she signed it. "Then you should probably say that part out loud more often."

"Why?"

"Because ’it doesn’t hurt him’ is the sentence people are going to imagine either way." She handed the page to Tessa. "Better if you’re the one who said it."

Petra had been reading longer than anyone. She reached the end, went back to the middle, and read it again. Then she folded the page in half.

"I’m declining."

The hall stayed quiet. Darek nodded once. "Understood."

"It isn’t personal," she said, and she said it toward Graveshare rather than toward Nate, which Nate found more honest than if she’d looked at his face. "I transferred here eleven days ago. I don’t know any of you well enough to consent to that."

"That’s a reasonable answer," Tessa said.

Petra put the folded page on the bench. "Do I hand this to someone?"

"Me." Tessa took it. "You’re reassigned to the surface monitoring station. Report to Ames."

Petra collected her rig and left. Nate watched the door until it stopped moving.

"Four," Darek said, already opening the route file. "We’re going anyway."

Nora looked over. "Short-handed?"

"Observation only. Nobody’s cutting anything open." He turned the display toward them. "Lobe Four-C, outer wall. Survey wants a conduction profile along the boundary Sector Three shares with it. We walk the route, the sensors record, we come back."

Olan raised his good hand slightly. "Do we know if the boundary moved?"

"That’s why they want the profile." Darek closed the file. "Calder is observation status. No circulation, no armament forms, and if he tells you the floor is doing something, you listen to him before you check your instrument."

Nate looked at him. Darek was already walking toward the gate.

The deployment line activated as they crossed. Graveshare warmed, and the roster formed above the plates.

TESSA KORR — NORA KETT — OLAN REYSE

LINKED PERSONNEL: 3

Three names where there should have been four. Nate read them once and let the display fade.

Lobe Four-C ran narrower than the routes he’d walked before, the pale walls close enough on both sides that Olan had to turn his sensor case sideways at two of the junctions. Dark channels crossed beneath the floor in long diagonals. None of them were lit.

Nate’s ribs stopped aching eleven minutes in. He noted the time and said so out loud, and Nora wrote it down without looking up, and that was the whole exchange. Everyone here already understood what the Colossus did to injuries.

They reached the boundary section at 07:40. Tessa fixed the first sensor to the wall while Olan started the second unit one-handed, bracing the housing against his hip.

"Need help?"

"Ask me in thirty seconds."

Nate waited thirty seconds. Olan handed him the bracket without saying anything.

The profile ran for six minutes. Nate stood at the near end of the section and watched the corridor behind them, because that was what observation status meant and because standing still with nothing to do had started to feel worse than the work itself. His Circuit stayed shut. Graveshare stayed cool.

At 07:51, Tessa’s monitor changed tone.

"Rising."

Darek was already moving toward her. "How fast?"

"Faster than the last profile." She watched the number climb. "Not threshold yet."

"Pull the units."

Olan reached for the second sensor. That was when the wall moved.

Nate felt it come through the floor half a second before it arrived, the same way he’d felt the lift at Foundry, a shift transmitted through material rather than air. He got as far as opening his mouth.

The pale wall on the boundary side pushed inward across nearly four metres of corridor. Not fast. Not violent. It simply displaced, the way something enormous shifts in its sleep, and the floor went with it.

Olan lost his footing first. Tessa caught the wall with one hand and slid anyway. Nora went down onto one knee.

Nate braced. He got his weight low, ankle loose, hips under him, everything Rovan had spent thirty nights teaching him, and the floor took all of it and moved him anyway. His boots crossed nearly two metres of ground he hadn’t chosen to cross. His shoulder struck the opposite wall. Nothing about his stance had mattered at all.

Then it stopped.

The corridor had narrowed by a third. Dust drifted down from the drilled supports overhead.

"Report," Darek said.

"Here." Tessa.

"Here." Nora, standing, one hand under Olan’s arm.

"Fine," Olan said, though he’d landed on the injured hand and was making a face about it.

Nate pushed himself off the wall. "Here."

Darek looked at the narrowed section, then at the sensor unit still bolted where Olan hadn’t reached it. He left it there. "Out."

They went out.

Nobody talked much on the return route. Olan let Nate carry the recovered unit without being asked, which was its own kind of statement. Nora checked his hand twice before they reached the gate.

Nate walked at the rear with his Circuit closed and his shoulder aching in the old place.

He had done everything correctly. Weight low. Ankles loose. Body first. Every adaptation he’d broken himself building since the night he closed his First Circuit.

The floor had taken him across two metres anyway.

The gate cycled open ahead of them. Warm air came through.

Behind Nate, the corridor they had just left was a third narrower than it had been that morning, and the sensor they hadn’t recovered was still bolted to a wall that had moved without asking anyone.

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