Myra : "Alright. I am required by the program to cover this, so I will. Try not to fall asleep."
She turned to the board.
Myra : "Four years ago God decided humanity had failed. He sent angels not to punish, not to negotiate, not to give us a final opportunity to reflect. To erase. Clean the earth and start over with something less disappointing."
She wrote three words on the board.
East. Central. West.
Myra : "Humanity's response, as it has always been during times of crisis, was to immediately divide itself. The Eastern Kingdom covers the Americas. They are scientists. Every piece of technology we use to fight the angels comes from them. They study angel corpses the way a physician studies a disease and build things from what they find. The Central Kingdom is where we are now. Men and women both. We house, we supply, we hold ground. The Western Kingdom is women only. No man enters without explicit permission. They specialize in intelligence and information."
She set the chalk down.
Myra : "That is the world. Any questions?"
Silence.
Myra : "Good."
Solandre had known all of it. He had read more on the subject than most people twice his age and had formed opinions he had not been asked for and would not be offering. He stayed in his seat not out of respect. More because standing up would have required a reason he could not be bothered to invent.
He watched Myra instead.
She moved through the material the way someone moved through a room they had crossed a thousand times. Her voice did not change register when she talked about the dead. It did not slow when she mentioned the percentage that remained. She delivered catastrophe with the same tone she delivered logistics, which Solandre found more honest than anything performed solemnity would have offered.
Myra : "Two years. Physical conditioning, combat training, team engagement. At the end of it you will have access to the pacts and you will officially become soldiers of what remains of humanity."
She paused. The room waited.
Myra : "I want to be clear about something. You are not obligated to become soldiers. You are sixteen. Most of you should not be anywhere near a front line and under different circumstances you would not be."
Her expression did not change but something in the room did. The shift of people hearing something they had not expected from this source.
Solandre looked up from the desk.
She was looking at the board, not at them.
Myra : "But. There is no age requirement for protecting what you love."
She said it without drama, without the pause a lesser speaker would have placed before it. It arrived flat and landed hard.
A beautiful line. Also an extraordinary thing to say to a room full of adolescents and leave on the table without apology. She knows exactly what she is doing.
He did not decide how he felt about that.
The class continued for another hour and a half. Myra covered engagement protocols, standard formation patterns for angel contact, the documented behavioral tendencies of the lower categories. She cited Eastern Kingdom research by name and date with the ease of someone who had read the original papers and formed her own conclusions. She did not simplify. She did not reassure.
When the hour ended she dismissed them without ceremony.
Myra : "Same time tomorrow. Don't be late."
The room filled with the noise of people who had been waiting two hours for permission to talk to each other. Chairs scraped. Names were exchanged. Someone near the window laughed at something Solandre had not heard.
He packed his bag and left.
The corridor outside 4-F was quieter than the room behind him. He walked without hurrying, his bag over one shoulder.
They were already making friends.
He had watched it happen in the thirty seconds between his chair and the door. The instinctive pull of people toward each other in unfamiliar places, the performance of easy warmth that most deployed so naturally they did not notice they were performing it.
It is not stupidity. It is what people do because it is what people need.
But every connection formed in this building is a future notification. A name attached to a body that will eventually be in a place where angels are. The math is not complicated. The more people you allow to matter the more ways the world has to reach inside you and remove something.
He checked his watch as he reached the elevator. The cafeteria would be half empty at this hour, the lunch crowd not yet arrived, the morning crowd already gone.
He pressed the button and waited.
The elevator groaned its familiar complaint.
The doors opened.
He stepped in.