The main hall in the late morning had a different quality than it did at dawn.
At dawn it was functional. Soldiers, crates, officers moving with purpose. By late morning the students had claimed it entirely, moving through the vaulted space in the clusters that formed within days of strangers being placed together. The hall was Victorian in its bones, high ceilings with iron crossbeams, tall narrow windows letting light in columns rather than sheets, stone floors worn smooth by decades of boots. The gas lamps along the walls had been retrofitted with something modern but the ornate iron fixtures remained, belonging to another century and having decided to stay. Old architecture that had absorbed the war without renovating for it.
Solandre walked through without slowing.
The groups parted around him naturally. He did not look at them. Not out of disdain. More the disinterest of someone who had already formed a conclusion and saw nothing worth revisiting.
He pushed open the cafeteria doors.
The smell reached him first. Institutional food, starch and artificial seasoning, the combination that existed in every large building feeding large numbers of people on insufficient budget. The cafeteria was enormous, high ceilinged, with long rows of tables and a serving line along the left side currently holding most of the academy's population.
He joined the back of the queue.
Twenty minutes passed. He counted them without impatience, as information rather than inconvenience. The line moved in the rhythm of institutional serving, three seconds per person, occasional stalls when someone asked something the server found unreasonable.
He reached the front.
Pasta. Artificial, produced from processed grain compounds that had become standard in the Central Kingdom since the agricultural losses of the first two years. Dried vegetables on the side, rehydrated imperfectly. He took a portion without comment and lifted his tray.
The cafeteria was full.
He moved through it slowly, scanning for empty seats. Tables of four, occupied. Tables of six, occupied. A long communal bench near the far wall, technically available but requiring him to sit between two ongoing conversations he had no interest in joining.
Then a table cleared directly in front of him.
Two seats, face to face. Small. The students who had been sitting there collected their trays and left without looking at him.
No one will sit across from me here. Too small. Too exposed.
He set his tray down.
A second tray landed on the other side at almost the same moment.
He looked up.
A boy, roughly his age, with long black hair falling forward across his face, his eyes entirely invisible beneath it. Lean, unhurried, carrying himself with the ease of someone who had made peace with taking up exactly as much space as he needed and no more. He did not acknowledge Solandre, did not acknowledge the implicit negotiation of two people arriving at the same two-person seat simultaneously, the moment most people would have filled with an apology or at minimum eye contact.
He simply sat down, pushed his tray to his side, and began to eat.
Solandre watched him for three seconds.
The boy did not look up.
Solandre sat.
They ate in silence. Not the silence of two people ignoring each other. The silence of two people who had independently arrived at the same conclusion about unnecessary conversation and were now existing in proximity without requiring anything from each other because of it.
The boy finished quickly, eating with the focused efficiency of someone treating the meal as a logistical requirement. He collected his tray, stood, and left without a word or a backward glance.
Solandre watched him go.
Interesting.
He pulled After God from his bag and opened it to his page.
The book was, by any reasonable measure, idiotic. He had thought so since the first chapter and continued thinking so across every chapter since, which raised questions about why he kept reading it that he had not answered satisfactorily. The premise was simple. A man who betrays himself to defeat his creator. The entire novel built around that single act, written as though the author considered this a tragedy rather than the most precise illustration of human vanity operating at full capacity.
A man destroys what he is in order to destroy what made him. And we are supposed to find this noble.
He turned a page.
The same species that built a barrier over a city because God told it to stop building things wrote this book and called it literature. At least it is consistent.
He read.
Outside the cafeteria windows, through the tall Victorian glass in its iron frames, the morning light came down clear and cold over the city below.
Maybe that is why I keep reading it.
The thought arrived without announcement and he let it sit.
Maybe somewhere underneath the idiocy I am hoping that the invention kills the inventor. Maybe that is all I am doing.
He turned another page.
The cafeteria noise continued around him, indifferent and constant, a hundred people eating and talking and existing without yet understanding what they were being prepared for.
He read until the noise faded entirely in his awareness. Then he closed the book, finished what remained on his tray, and sat for a moment in the quiet.
It was enough.
For now, it was enough.