The psych node tried very hard not to look like an interrogation room.

  Soft light. Pale blue walls. A fake plant in the corner, leaves too glossy to be real. The chairs weren’t bolted down. Someone had decided that mattered.

  Kaden sat in one of them anyway, back straight, hands on his knees. The cushion felt wrong under him after a day of metal benches and hard deck.

  Aurora chimed in the corner of his vision.

  [PSYCH EVALUATION – MERCER, KADEN]

  [SUBJECT: MERCER, KADEN]

  [STATUS: ACTIVE]

  The woman across from him wore a dark uniform with no branch stripe. Just the Hegemony crest on one shoulder and a small Aurora pin at her collar. Short hair, grey at the temples. Tablet resting on her lap.

  “Cadet Mercer,” she said. “I’m Doctor Hale. Behavioral oversight.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “You can relax,” Hale said. “This isn’t disciplinary. It’s standard protocol after a fatality.”

  “I’m relaxed,” Kaden lied.

  Aurora pinged softly.

  [STRESS: ELEVATED]

  Hale’s mouth quirked. “Aurora disagrees.”

  He resisted the urge to tell Aurora where it could shove that assessment.

  She glanced at her tablet, then back at him. “We’ll cover a few areas. History. Perception of the event. Current mental state. If I think you’re a danger to yourself or others, we’ll talk about that. If I think you’re functional, I’ll sign off and the Academy’ll keep grinding you down on schedule. Sound fair?”

  “Doesn’t really matter if it does, does it?” he said.

  “That’s not the question I asked.”

  He breathed out through his nose. “Sure. Fair enough.”

  “Good.” Hale tapped her tablet. Something flickered at the edge of his vision, a subtle tightening only someone with a HUD would feel now. Back then, he’d only had walls and screens.

  [DATA ACCESS: PERSONAL HISTORY]

  “Let’s start with home,” she said. “Tell me where you grew up.”

  “Tier one arcology,” Kaden said. “Lower decks. Node Fifty-Two.”

  “Describe it,” Hale said. “Not the official designation. Your version.”

  He hadn’t thought about the place in a while. Not properly. It came back in smells first.

  “Crowded,” he said. “Loud. No windows. You only saw the sky on public days if you got picked for terrace access. Most of the time it was just stacked corridors and recycled air.”

  He could see it clear now. Narrow walkways of stained composite. Pipes and conduit crawling along the ceilings. Light strips that flickered when someone three floors up overloaded a grid.

  “In our block,” he went on, “we had four rooms for six people. Two families. Shared kitchen. Shared hygiene unit. Walls thin enough you knew when the neighbor was fighting or fucking or both.”

  Hale didn’t flinch at the language. “Parents?”

  “Father,” Kaden said. “Maintenance tech. He worked infrastructure. Pipes, power trunks, climate control. Always came home with dust in his hair.”

  “And your mother?”

  He stared at a spot on the fake plant, like he could see her face in the plastic.

  “She got conscripted when I was little,” he said. “Three, maybe four. I don’t really remember her, just flashes. A red jacket. Her laughing at something my sister did. Then she was gone. Navy took her, same as it takes everyone. Official status now is ‘KIA in Andromeda.’”

  “Do you believe that?” Hale asked.

  “I believe she’s not here,” Kaden said. “The rest doesn’t change much.”

  She hummed quietly. “Any siblings?”

  “One younger sister,” he said. “Mira. Two years behind me.”

  “Did you feel responsible for her?” Hale asked.

  He shrugged. “We all looked out for each other. Dad was gone a lot. Somebody had to make sure she didn’t get into stupid shit.”

  Hale’s gaze flicked to a corner of the room for a heartbeat. Probably reading some overlay only she could see.

  “Conscription is at sixteen for your tier,” she said. “Walk me through that day.”

  Kaden almost told her to read the file. Then he caught himself. That wasn’t how this worked.

  “The wall woke me up,” he said instead.

  The memory was sharp: the way the room lights had shifted from dull yellow to hard white, the shrill chime from the door panel, the text scrolling across the cracked display.

  HEGEMONY CONSCRIPTION NOTICE

  CITIZEN: MERCER, KADEN

  TIER: 1

  REPORT TO INDUCTION NODE 12 – 72 HOURS

  “No personal HUD back then,” he said. “Just the door screen screaming at me.”

  “How did your father take it?” Hale asked.

  He saw him in his memory. Standing by the tiny kitchen counter, still in his orange maintenance coverall, fingers wrapped around a mug of synth-coffee that always smelled burnt.

  “He had a bag half-packed already,” Kaden said. “Documents, spare clothes, a cheap multiblade. He didn’t say ‘I’m sorry.’ Just ‘eat, shower, we’ve got things to do.’”

  “What kind of things?” Hale asked.

  “Paperwork,” he said. “Node registration. He checked my boots twice. Took me down to the local Aurora kiosk to confirm my report slot and transport time. Practical stuff.”

  Back then, Aurora had been something you touched through public terminals and wall screens. Green-lit kiosks where you thumbed an ID pad and it spit bureaucratic truth at you. No overlay in his eyes. No AP bar. Just text.

  He could hear his father’s voice, low and matter-of-fact.

  Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t pick fights with your instructors. Don’t chase glory. Come back alive, and if Aurora likes you, maybe your sister won’t have to live on this deck.

  “He told me not to be a hero,” Kaden said aloud. “Said heroes die early and leave their families with nice speeches and shit pensions.”

  “And what did you think of that?” Hale asked.

  “I thought he was probably right,” Kaden said. “Still do.”

  Hale nodded slowly. “Induction node,” she said. “What happened there?”

  Kaden remembered the induction hall as huge and cold. A wide space filled with too many teenagers trying not to look scared. No HUDs. Just nervous faces and the constant thrum of machinery.

  “They ran us through tests,” he said. “Physical first. Running in place in mag-boots. Pull-ups. Endurance on a treadmill with the grav dialed high. Some kids puked.”

  “Did you?” Hale asked.

  “No,” Kaden said. “I’d been hauling parts for my dad since I could walk. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t new.”

  Then there’d been the cognitive stuff. VR rigs that wrapped around his head, screens pressed close to his eyes. Pattern matching, reaction times, basic problem solving. Crime-and-punishment scenarios where some remote Aurora node watched which way he jumped.

  “And then?” Hale prompted.

  “Then they wired us in,” Kaden said.

  They’d lined them up in chairs, one by one, a nurse and a tech on either side. A cold wipe at the back of his neck, a brief sting as the implant went in. Pressure, a low hum that sank into his bones.

  “For a second,” he said, “I thought I was gonna puke. Then it cleared and… everything felt a little too sharp.”

  The world hadn’t changed much, but now there’d been depth to it. Tags when he looked at signs. A soft glow around exits. A faint ghost of a cursor that followed where he thought.

  “They put our stats on a wall screen first,” he said. “Said it was so we didn’t freak out when the HUD kicked in.”

  He could see it: a grid of names and numbers, his among them. Then, a moment later, the same panel flickering into his vision. First time he’d seen Aurora talking just to him.

  [AURORA-CADET PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT]

  PHY: 6

  AGI: 4

  COG: 7

  RES: 5

  AP: 5

  “Six in physical,” he said. “Four in agility. Seven in cognition. Baseline in stress resistance and AP.”

  “How’d that feel?” Hale asked.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  “I was sixteen,” Kaden said. “I thought it meant I was special.”

  She smiled faintly. “And now?”

  “Now I know it just means I wasn’t broken,” he said. “I was a little stronger and a little smarter than the average conscript. That’s it.”

  “They assigned you Rifleman track at that point?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Kaden said. “They said I could’ve fit Tech if my agility was higher. But my AP was only baseline, and there were kids with better numbers and better test scores. Rifleman’s the default. Backbone of the Marines.”

  “Did you want something else?” Hale asked.

  He thought about it.

  “Didn’t know enough to want anything,” he said. “I just wanted out of Tier One. Rifleman sounded like a way to do that.”

  Hale tapped her tablet again. A little notation blinked at the edge of his HUD.

  [HISTORY SEGMENT LOGGED]

  “When you arrived at the Academy,” she said, “did you feel prepared?”

  “No,” Kaden said. “But I don’t think anyone does.”

  He remembered the first sight of the Academy node from orbit. The planet below, a swirl of brown and blue and lights. The docking arms reaching out like claws. The sheer scale of it had made his chest tight in a way he hadn’t wanted to admit.

  “They crammed us into reception halls,” he said. “Assigned bunks. Issued gear. Screamed at us a lot. Standard stuff.”

  “How did you adapt?” Hale asked.

  “Slowly,” he said. “I was decent at the classroom parts. Aurora interfaces, theory, tactical briefs. Took me a little longer to get the shooting stances right. I’m not… graceful.”

  “Anyone stand out in those first weeks?” she asked. “Friends? Rivals?”

  “Navarro,” Kaden said, without thinking.

  Hale’s eyebrows lifted a tiny bit. “Tell me about Navarro.”

  “Talia Navarro,” he said. “Tier One, like me. Grew up in a different arcology. Rifleman track. Mouthy.”

  He saw her clearly: short dark hair, sharp eyes, grin that got wider when she was about to say something she shouldn’t.

  “We got thrown in the same bunk room,” he said. “Twelve of us in that block. She was the first one to make fun of my aim in the sim range.”

  Hale tilted her head. “And you took that… how?”

  “I told her if she kept talking, I’d make her carry my ammo,” he said. “She laughed at me. Then she beat my score in the next run and I shut up.”

  He remembered that night. Navarro perched on the lower bunk, shuffling a battered deck of cards she’d smuggled in. Jensen sprawled on the opposite bunk, boots off, socks mismatched.

  “Jensen too,” Kaden added. “He was in the same room. Same track. Quiet until you got him going, then he wouldn’t shut up.”

  “Describe a moment with them,” Hale said. “Before the incident.”

  He let his eyes unfocus. The psych node room blurred. The barracks came back.

  Hard bunks. Metal frames. Personal lockers that stuck if you didn’t smack them right. The ever-present hum of life support.

  Navarro sat cross-legged on his bunk, cards in her hands, dealing in a quick, practiced rhythm. Jensen was on the opposite bunk, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, eyes bright.

  “Okay,” Navarro said, flicking cards out. “Five-card, no wilds. Bricks to buy in.”

  “Bricks?” Jensen asked. “You’re using the protein rations as chips?”

  “You got a better currency, Jensen?” Navarro said. “I don’t see any credits lying around.”

  She tossed two nutrition bricks into the makeshift pot, a shallow metal tray between the bunks. Someone had peeled the wrapper off one earlier. It looked like beige clay.

  Kaden picked up his cards. Two pair. Not bad. Not great.

  “Just so you know,” Jensen said, peeking at his own hand, “I am terrible at this.”

  “Good,” Navarro said. “I like free food.”

  She looked at him. “Mercer, your face is already screaming ‘I’ve got something.’”

  “I do not,” Kaden said.

  Jensen snorted. “You can’t bluff for shit, Kade.”

  The words hit like a body blow in the present. For half a second, in the psych node chair, Kaden saw Jensen not in the barracks but on the deck of the training hulk, blood in his teeth, trying to grin.

  You still can’t bluff for shit, Kade.

  His throat tightened. He blinked hard. The room went blurry for a heartbeat.

  In the memory, Navarro tossed a brick in. “Call,” she said. “Let’s see how bad you are at lying.”

  Sixteen-year-old Kaden tried to keep his face neutral and slid his own brick forward.

  Jensen stared between them, then threw both his hands down. “Fold.”

  “You didn’t even look,” Navarro said.

  “I did look,” Jensen said. “And I saw my future: hungry.”

  Kaden huffed out a laugh then. “You’re such a coward, Jensen.”

  “An alive coward,” Jensen replied. “Which is my favorite kind.”

  Navarro laid her hand down: a pair of queens and a whole lot of nothing.

  Kaden laid his down: two pairs, sevens and eights.

  “Goddammit, Kaden,” Navarro groaned.

  “Told you,” Jensen said. “Look at his face. That’s the opposite of a poker face. That’s a ‘please don’t notice I’m winning’ face.”

  “I hate both of you,” Navarro muttered, but there’d been no heat in it.

  Back in the psych node, Kaden realized his vision had gone slightly watery. A warm track cooled on his cheek.

  He hadn’t felt it fall.

  He scrubbed his fingers over his face, annoyed at himself, and his hand came away damp.

  Hale noticed. Of course she did. She didn’t comment, just watched him like she was cataloguing the fact.

  “You okay?” she asked quietly.

  “No,” Kaden said. “But keep going.”

  She nodded once, like that was the answer she’d expected. “Instructors,” she said. “How did you react to them? Authority in general?”

  “I did what they told me,” he said. “Mostly. You don’t fight the people who control your oxygen and your graduation.”

  “Resentment?” she asked.

  “Not really,” Kaden said. “They’re part of the machine. The machine’s ugly, but it’s not like I had a better one waiting.”

  Hale’s fingers moved on her tablet. “You understand the Hegemony’s rationale for conscription and centralization?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Aurora drops out of nowhere, starts rewriting humans. We get stats and skills and suddenly every petty warlord and old-state military wants to play god. Someone had to grab the wheel before we ripped ourselves apart. Hegemony did. At gunpoint.”

  “Do you approve?” Hale asked.

  He thought about it. About propaganda feeds in the arcology. About his father’s hands raw from maintenance and the way the conscription notice had felt like a relief and a threat rolled into one.

  “I think it’s shitty,” Kaden said. “I also think we’d probably be dead without it. So I don’t waste time being mad at the only lifeboat we’ve got.”

  Hale’s mouth twitched again. “Pragmatic,” she said. “Aurora likes pragmatic.”

  He didn’t answer that.

  She glanced at her tablet. “We’ve covered childhood, conscription, early Academy, your social anchors,” she said. “Let’s bring it back to the incident. You’ve been through general debrief and medical debrief. How do you feel about what happened?”

  He stared past her at the wall.

  “Feels like shit,” he said.

  “More specific,” she said. “Do you feel responsible?”

  “Yes.”

  “For the turret malfunction?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “For Jensen’s death?” she asked.

  He swallowed.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Aurora pinged in his HUD.

  [SELF-ATTRIBUTION: HIGH]

  Hale glanced at something only she could see. “Why?” she asked. “You’ve been told repeatedly the odds were bad from the moment he was hit.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kaden said. “I was there. My hands were on him. I didn’t know what to do. That’s on me.”

  “Even if nothing you did would’ve changed the outcome?” she asked.

  “That’s what they say now,” he said. “After. Maybe they’re right. But I was in the moment and I didn’t have options. I had sealant and panic. That’s what I’m stuck on.”

  She was quiet for a beat.

  “So your problem isn’t that he died,” Hale said. “It’s that you were ignorant while he died.”

  He almost argued, then realized that was exactly it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much.”

  She leaned back slightly. “Do you blame Aurora?” she asked.

  “For what?” he said. “For not magically saving him?”

  “For giving you information without giving you the tools to act on it,” she said. “It showed you his HP dropping. Time-to-failure numbers. It didn’t tell you ‘press here, inject now, tilt this far.’”

  He thought of that falling HP bar. Of the little icons he hadn’t noticed. Of the modules that’d been grayed out in his HUD.

  “I don’t think Aurora cares enough to blame,” he said. “It’s like gravity. It does what it does. People decide how to use it.”

  “And the people?” she asked. “The Hegemony. The Academy.”

  He blew out a slow breath. “I think they did the math and decided most of us don’t need more than basic first aid until we hit Andromeda. I think that calculus killed Jensen. But I also think they’re working with limited time and too many bodies. I’m not gonna fix that by being angry in a psych room.”

  Hale’s eyes softened a fraction. “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Learn,” Kaden said, before he could talk himself out of it. “Whatever I can. So next time it happens, I’ve got something other than sealant and good intentions.”

  “Next time,” she repeated.

  He grimaced. “Lieutenant Corin said it. ‘Next time someone’s screaming under your hands.’ Made it sound like a promise more than a possibility.”

  Hale’s fingers flicked again. Another tiny notation flashed at the edge of his HUD.

  [PATTERN FLAG: ASSUMED RESPONSIBILITY FOR OTHERS]

  “Last section,” Hale said. “Humor me. What scares you most right now?”

  He almost said “dying.” It was the obvious answer. The one they probably expected to hear.

  He pictured Andromeda. The things they’d seen in briefing vids. Ships tearing apart. Boarding actions. Aurora logs full of names and tags.

  But when he opened his mouth, that wasn’t what came out.

  “I’m not afraid of dying,” he said slowly. “I mean, I don’t want to die, but… that’s part of the job. They tell us that on day one.”

  “Then?” Hale asked.

  He thought of Jensen again. The way the HP bar had ticked down. The way his hands had slipped on blood. The way his mind had gone white around the edges, filled with useless training slides and nothing that mattered.

  “What scares me,” he said, “is that next time it happens, I’ll be in the same place. Someone I know, on the deck in front of me, bleeding out, and I still won’t know enough to make a difference.”

  Hale watched him for a long moment. No pity. No disgust. Just assessment.

  Aurora chimed.

  [EVALUATION INPUT RECEIVED]

  “Thank you for being honest,” she said.

  He snorted softly. “Does that help my score?”

  “In a way,” she said. “It tells me you’re not repressing hard enough to snap unexpectedly in the middle of a breaching drill. The Academy likes that.”

  “Glad I can make somebody happy,” he said.

  She tapped a final command on her tablet. A soft tone rippled through his HUD.

  [PSYCH EVALUATION – MERCER, KADEN]

  [RESULT: FIT FOR CONTINUED TRAINING]

  [NOTES: SELF-BLAME HIGH / FUNCTIONAL – MONITOR]

  “You’re cleared for full duty,” Hale said. “You’ll have optional follow-ups. You’ll probably skip them. That’s your choice. I’d recommend you don’t, but I’m realistic.”

  He stood. The chair creaked under him.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  She hesitated, then looked past him for a second, at something Aurora was probably piping into her view.

  “You’ve had a bump in RES already,” she said. “Aurora doesn’t hand those out for nothing. The System thinks you can take more pressure than you could yesterday.”

  He remembered the little notification in Med Annex 3. The shift from RES 5 to 6. A number changing in the corner while Jensen’s absence stayed exactly the same.

  “Feels like a shit prize,” he said.

  “I didn’t say it was a good trade,” Hale said. “Just that it happened. What you do with it is up to you.”

  He nodded, because what else was there to do, and moved toward the door.

  “Mercer,” she said.

  He paused.

  “Your father told you not to be a hero,” Hale said. “That’s still good advice. You don’t have to be a hero to decide you want to be useful.”

  He didn’t trust himself to answer that without saying something he’d regret, so he just gave a short nod and stepped out.

  The door hissed shut behind him. The fake plant stayed on its shelf, undisturbed.

  The corridor outside was quieter than the main training hall. Just a couple of cadets moving past, voices low. Somewhere, machinery hummed, a faint vibration in the soles of his boots.

  Aurora’s icons sat at the edge of his vision. The ones Corin had dropped there.

  [FIELD MEDICINE – INTRO]

  [TRAUMA RESPONSE – LEVEL 1]

  [Status: 12% Complete]

  He closed the panel.

  Somewhere ahead of him, Navarro and the others were in the barracks, probably pretending not to be checking their own HUDs every five minutes. Somewhere behind him, Jensen’s name was etched into a digital wall, filed under “acceptable losses” in a system that didn’t feel the loss at all.

  Kaden started walking.

  He couldn’t change the turret malfunction. He couldn’t change Hegemony policy. He couldn’t change the fact that the next time a shard of metal found soft meat instead of bulkhead, someone would scream his name.

  What he could change was what he knew when it happened.

  That was the part he’d decided he wasn’t allowed to leave to chance.