The last scenario ended not with a dramatic save, but with a tired chime.

  [SCENARIO COMPLETE]

  The fake corridor lights came up. Smoke bled away into the vents. HP bars over the mannequins snapped back to 100% as the annex node reset its toys.

  “Enough,” Corin said.

  Her voice cut across the lab. Conversations died mid-mutter. Gloves peeled off. Kits clicked shut. Cadets backed away from tables and walls, the crowd coalescing into something like a loose formation in the open space near the door.

  Kaden wiped a streak of half-dried synthetic blood off the back of his hand. The stain didn’t care. His gloves were a patchwork of red and brown.

  Aurora quietly updated a corner of his HUD.

  [TRAUMA RESPONSE – LVL 1]

  [PROGRESS: 34% → 36%]

  Incremental, the way everything was.

  “Classroom,” Corin said. “You’ve bled on enough plastic for one day. Time to talk about what you actually learned.”

  They filed out of the lab and back along the annex corridor. The node obligingly painted a line toward Classroom 2-03 like they might have forgotten the way. The air in the hallway felt too clean after the recycled grit of the mock corridor.

  Song walked beside Kaden, unusually quiet. Synthetic blood marked his cuffs too, darker against the fabric.

  “You good?” Kaden asked.

  “Define ‘good,’” Song said.

  “Not throwing up,” Kaden said. “Not quitting.”

  “Then I’m amazing,” Song said, but the joke didn’t quite land.

  They took their usual seats. The room filled slowly, cadets moving like they were each carrying an invisible pack.

  Corin waited at the front, leaning against the desk. She didn’t look tired. If anything, she looked sharper than she had that morning, like the day had put her into focus instead of wearing her down.

  When the last chair creaked, she spoke.

  “Today was not about being perfect,” she said. “If you thought it was, congratulations: you were wrong all day.”

  A few cadets managed weak smiles.

  “Today was about failing properly,” Corin went on. “You’re going to fail. People are going to die on you. The only thing you get a say in is how many, and how often, and whether the ones who live actually had a chance or you just got lucky.”

  She swiped a hand through the air. For a second, the holo tank flickered with a scatter of data: bars, graphs, casualty icons. Then she killed it before anyone could start squinting at their personal slice of the graph.

  “Here’s what Aurora thinks,” she said. “As a group, you got faster over the course of the day. Fewer catastrophic delays. More of you made the same call Mercer and Song made in the corridor sim: prioritize the ones with the best numbers, not the ones bleeding the most dramatically or screaming the loudest.”

  A few heads turned toward Kaden before snapping forward again.

  “Aurora likes that,” Corin said. “The System wants you to behave like efficient little triage machines. It rewards that. It will absolutely hand out levels and skills faster to people who think like that from the start.”

  She let that hang for a heartbeat.

  “I like that too,” she said. “Most of the time. Because it keeps more people walking, and I enjoy not writing letters home.”

  She pushed off the desk, pacing a slow line in front of it.

  “But,” she added, “I also don’t want a bunch of walking calculators in armor. You’re not drones. You’re not Aurora’s pets. You’re human. You’re allowed to care that D died. You’re allowed to remember their tag, even if all the System gives you is a line in a log and a low-yield flag.”

  Kaden’s jaw tightened. He didn’t look at anyone.

  “I’m not going to tell you there’s a correct emotional response,” Corin said. “Some of you are going to compartmentalize. Some of you are going to feel every death like a punch. Both types can make good medics. Both types can get people killed if they stop thinking.”

  Her gaze swept the rows.

  “So here’s your takeaway,” she said. “You will never have enough time. You will never have a safe scene. You will always be choosing who gets you and who does not. Use Aurora’s numbers. Use your training. But don’t hand your conscience to the System and ask it to carry it for you. It won’t. That’s not its job.”

  Aurora pinged softly in Kaden’s HUD, like it wanted to argue.

  [ROLE: SYSTEM – PERFORMANCE TRACKING]

  He dismissed it before it could finish.

  Corin sighed once, quietly.

  “Some of you are going to have nightmares tonight,” she said. “Over mannequins. Over numbers. That’s fine. Get them out now. Beats having your first one in a real corridor with real screams.”

  There were a few uncomfortable shifts at that.

  She glanced up at the clock strip over the door, then blinked something in her HUD.

  “Aurora’s telling me I’m out of time, which is offensive but accurate,” she said. “Here’s your schedule for tomorrow.”

  Kaden’s HUD obligingly shifted, overlaying the next day’s blocks.

  [SCHEDULE – DAY 133, TERM 2]

  0700 – BREAKFAST

  0800 – INTERSTELLAR HISTORY & HEGEMONY POLICY (CORE)

  1000 – INTERSTELLAR HISTORY & HEGEMONY POLICY (DISCUSSION)

  1300 – AURORA SYSTEM MECHANICS: SKILLS & CLASSES (INTRO)

  1500 – COMBAT MEDIC PRACTICAL (PENDING)

  Two of the entries glowed with little tags.

  [CURRICULUM CORE] – INTERSTELLAR HISTORY & HEGEMONY POLICY

  [CURRICULUM CORE] – AURORA SYSTEM MECHANICS

  “As you can see,” Corin said, “tomorrow the Academy’s going to sit you down and explain why you’re going to be shot at and how Aurora decided to turn that into a career ladder.”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  A couple of cadets chuckled under their breath. It sounded more like an exhale than amusement.

  “Pay attention,” Corin said. “You don’t have to like the Hegemony, but you do need to understand how it thinks. Same goes for Aurora. If you want to use the System instead of being used by it, you need more than ‘red bar bad, green bar good.’”

  Her gaze snagged on Kaden for a fraction of a second. It wasn’t a challenge. More like a reminder.

  “After your enlightenment sessions with History and the fine people who pretend to understand Aurora’s internals, you get me again,” she said. “We’ll see if any of it stuck.”

  She straightened, hands going to the small of her back for a moment before she dropped them.

  “Until then,” she said, “go eat. Hydrate. Sleep. Don’t stare at your stat sheets all night and convince yourself you’re broken. If you are broken, Aurora or I will tell you in the morning. Dismissed.”

  Chairs scraped. Cadets shuffled out in a slow tide. The annex node opened doors ahead of them, flicking lights to guide them back toward the main arteries of the Academy.

  Song walked with Kaden as far as the junction where tracks split.

  “You think History’s going to make any of this make sense?” Song asked.

  “Doubt it,” Kaden said. “But at least I’ll know which committee decided to throw me at another galaxy.”

  “Comforting,” Song said. “See you tomorrow, Mercer.”

  “Yeah,” Kaden said. “Get some sleep.”

  They split, Song veering toward a different barracks block. Kaden followed the path back to his own, boots dragging a little on the deck.

  The main corridors were loud again. Rifleman cadets returning from their own sim blocks, talking over each other, complaining about instructors, comparing scores. The war in the training hulk had already turned into a story with softened edges for most of them.

  The barracks smelled the same as that morning: sweat, fabric, metal, cleaning agents that never quite masked any of it.

  Kaden stepped inside. Conversation dipped for a second as a few heads turned his way, then flowed back to its previous channels. He wasn’t the spectacle he’d been the day after the incident. Just another body with fresh stains on his sleeves.

  Navarro lay on her bunk on her back, boots off, a disassembled rifle laid out in neat pieces on a towel beside her. She flicked a glance up at him as he came in.

  “Look at you,” Navarro said. “Did they let you keep any of the fake blood, or did you drink it all for fun?”

  “Nice to see you too,” Kaden said.

  He tossed his kit bag into his locker, then sat on the edge of his bunk, facing hers across the narrow aisle.

  “How was the range?” he asked.

  “Boring,” Navarro said. “They stuck half of us back on fundamentals. Apparently a turret misfires in term two and suddenly everyone forgets how to clear a jam by the book. You?”

  Kaden thought of HP bars falling, of D’s flat red.

  “Busy,” he said.

  Navarro rolled onto her side, propping her head on her hand.

  “So,” she said. “How’s the glamorous life of Combat Medic Cadet Mercer?”

  “Less glamorous than you’d think,” Kaden said. “More tubes. More screaming.”

  “Real screaming?” Navarro asked.

  “Sim screaming,” Kaden said. “Might as well have been real.”

  She studied him for a second.

  “You going to talk about it,” she said, “or am I supposed to make up my own version where you heroically save everyone and Aurora gives you a medal and three skill points?”

  He huffed a quiet laugh.

  “Four casualties,” he said. “One corridor. We saved three.”

  “And the fourth?” Navarro asked.

  “Overlay said twelve percent chance if we went there first,” Kaden said. “Lower if we didn’t. We went for the one with sixty-seven instead.”

  Navarro was silent for a moment. Somewhere down the row, someone laughed at a joke Kaden didn’t catch.

  “You made the right call,” she said.

  “Textbook call,” Kaden said. “Corin’s words.”

  “What’s the difference?” Navarro asked.

  “Ask me when it’s not plastic and hoses,” he said.

  She swung her legs over the side of the bunk, sitting up so they were more level.

  “Listen,” Navarro said. “When I’m out there and something hits me, I don’t want the guy running toward me thinking about his feelings. I want him thinking about odds. So if Aurora tells you I’m sixty-seven and the other idiot is twelve, you better haul your ass to me first.”

  “You’re assuming I like you that much,” Kaden said.

  Navarro snorted. “You love me. I’m charming.”

  He smiled despite himself.

  “And if it’s the other way around?” he asked. “You’re twelve. Someone else is sixty-seven.”

  Navarro considered that. Her jaw tightened, just a little.

  “Then you go save the other one,” she said. “And I haunt your ass if you do anything else.”

  “Sounds crowded,” Kaden said.

  “You wish,” Navarro said.

  She leaned back on her hands, looking up at the underside of the bunk above her.

  “They’re throwing you in the deep end fast,” she said. “You’ve what, twenty-four hours’ worth of ‘medic’ on your file now?”

  “Give or take,” Kaden said.

  “And they’re already making you choose who dies,” Navarro said. “Feels on brand for the Hegemony.”

  “Tomorrow they’re going to explain why that’s a good thing,” Kaden said.

  He pinged his schedule, more for something to look at than because he’d forgotten.

  0800 – INTERSTELLAR HISTORY & HEGEMONY POLICY (CORE)

  1000 – INTERSTELLAR HISTORY & HEGEMONY POLICY (DISCUSSION)

  1300 – AURORA SYSTEM MECHANICS: SKILLS & CLASSES (INTRO)

  Navarro made a face.

  “History,” she said. “Lucky you. We’ve got close-quarters drills. Again.”

  “You can swap,” Kaden said. “I’ll take the bruises, you take the lecture.”

  “Absolutely not,” Navarro said. “You’re the nerd. I expect a full report. Bullet points. Maybe pictures.”

  “Sure,” Kaden said. “I’ll bring you a chart on why you’re property of the Hegemony.”

  “I already know that,” Navarro said. “They put it on the contract when they chipped us.”

  Her tone was light, but there was an edge under it.

  “The 1300 block is Aurora,” Kaden said. “Intro to skills and classes.”

  Navarro whistled quietly. “Now that one I do want to hear about,” she said. “Maybe they’ll tell us how to game it.”

  “Pretty sure that part’s classified,” Kaden said.

  “Everything fun is classified,” Navarro said. “Anyway. You’ll figure it out. You always do. Smartest idiot I know.”

  “Thanks,” Kaden said. “I think.”

  She lay back down, rolling over to face the wall.

  “Get your gear squared away,” Navarro said. “Then get some sleep. If you fall asleep in History, they’ll make the rest of us do essays out of spite.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kaden said.

  He stowed his kit properly, wiped down what he could, stuffed his dirty undershirt into the laundry chute. The motions were automatic. His mind drifted.

  By lights-out, the barracks had settled into familiar noise: the low murmur of conversations tapering off, the creak of bunks, the hiss of the vents.

  The room went dark except for the faint emergency strips along the floor. Kaden lay on his back, staring at the slats above him.

  When he closed his eyes, he saw two scenes at once.

  Jensen on the deck of the training hulk, blood pumping out fast and hot between Kaden’s fingers. HP bar in free fall. No plan, no framework, just panic and sealant and the horrible certainty that he was watching something he couldn’t stop.

  And D in the sim corridor. HP already low, numbers screaming failure, the loaned triage overlay quietly telling him that his time was better spent elsewhere.

  He’d chosen B. Chosen A. Chosen C. Chosen not to choose D.

  Aurora put a small, polite suggestion at the edge of his vision.

  [REST RECOMMENDED]

  [MEMORY CONSOLIDATION: OPTIMAL DURING SLEEP]

  He let it sit there for a while.

  Tomorrow some history officer was going to stand in front of a room and talk about the Advent, about how Aurora had turned the sky green and humanity into a spreadsheet. They’d talk about the Hegemony, about how the upper one percent had grabbed the reins and decided sixteen-year-olds were a renewable resource.

  They’d talk about Andromeda, about the first contact that hadn’t been an accident or a miracle, just another line in Aurora’s long-planned sequence.

  Kaden didn’t plan on arguing with any of it. He didn’t care enough about politics to pretend he’d change anything.

  But he did care about knowing the rules. Where the pieces were. Who moved them. Who decided that four casualties in a corridor was an acceptable training tool and that kids from Tier One arcologies got chipped and leveled and shipped toward someone else’s war.

  He blinked the notification away.

  “Fine,” he murmured, barely audible even to himself.

  He closed his eyes and tried to let the day settle into something Aurora could chew on. The mannequins. The HP bars. The way his hands had moved, clumsy and then less clumsy.

  Tomorrow he’d get the official story. The version of the last hundred years the Hegemony wanted pumping into soldiers’ heads.

  He didn’t have to believe it.

  He just had to remember it.