Reception Hall B was larger than the word "hall" implied — a broad, vaulted space with rows of benches arranged to face a raised platform where two figures in cream-colored robes stood with the practiced patience of people who had done this many times. Around Taric, perhaps sixty others shuffled in from the corridor, all wearing the same grey clothes, all carrying the same sealed envelopes, all with the same careful, measuring look in their eyes that he suspected was also in his.

  Convicted criminals, Taric reminded himself. Every single person in this room was a convicted criminal. Including him.

  He took a seat near the middle and watched the room fill.

  They were a diverse and damaged-looking group. Some sat alone and stared at the floor. Some found others they seemed to recognize and clustered together immediately, whispering. A few sat with a kind of unnerving stillness, already assessing. Two people near the front were crying with the specific silence of people who had decided that the crying was going to happen whether they permitted it or not, and so they had stopped fighting it. The heavyset man from Taric's ward — the one who had been gripping the partition — had found a seat on the end of the third row. He was now hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, staring at a point on the floor with the absolute concentration of someone trying to anchor themselves through eye contact with an inanimate object.

  Three seats to Taric's left, a thin young man with hollow cheeks and fingers that couldn't stop moving — tapping his knee, running along the seam of his sleeve, pressing the edge of his nail into his palm — was whispering to himself. Not words, exactly. A rhythm. As though the rhythm was the only thing keeping something at bay.

  When the hall was full, the taller of the two robed figures stepped forward. He was broad and unhurried, with the presence of someone accustomed to being listened to. His hair was pale, close-cropped, and his eyes moved across the room with a quality that was simultaneously kind and profoundly impersonal — the way a surgeon looks at a patient: concern without attachment.

  "You are in Cosmulo," the man said, without preamble. "This is where you will live. The terms of your sentence do not include duration. You will remain here until your biology determines otherwise."

  The murmur that moved through the crowd at this was not a single sound — it was layered. Taric heard, within it, everything from processing silence to the sharp inhalation of disbelief to, from somewhere three rows back, a single word said very loudly: "What?"

  The heavyset man stood up. He had been inevitable from the moment he'd walked in.

  "No duration," he said. Not quite a shout. Not quite under control. "What does that mean? No duration — you mean there's no — they told me three years. The documentation said three years of assessment, behavioral modification, I read the documentation, I—" He stopped. His face had gone a shade of red that wasn't quite rage and wasn't quite panic. "I have a family. I have a business. Three years, they said. Three years and then—"

  "Mister..." The robed man checked something at the podium. "Mister Calder. Your documentation was not produced by this facility. Cosmulo does not set terms. Cosmulo operates its own framework." His voice was not unkind. That was the most unsettling part. "Please sit down."

  "I'm not — no. I'm not sitting down. You need to — there needs to be—"

  From somewhere in the middle of the hall: "Oh god." A woman's voice, completely quiet, as though she'd just understood something about a situation she had misread until this moment.

  Calder was shaking now — large, visible tremors that ran through his shoulders. "This isn't right. This isn't right. There's a process, there are rights, there's—" His voice cracked on the last word. Not from weakness. From the specific fracture that happens when someone's entire map of reality develops a seam. "I need to talk to someone. I need to call someone. I need—"

  "There is no calling," the robed man said. "There is no outside contact. There is Cosmulo. There is the system." A pause. "Please sit down, Mister Calder. This is the last time I will ask."

  Calder sat down. Not because he had accepted anything — the way he sat made that clear, every muscle still locked and resistant — but because the alternative had become suddenly and completely unavailable.

  The hall had gone very quiet.

  The taller robed figure continued, steady as water. "Cosmulo operates under a system of evolutionary development. Each of you carries a genetic potential — a Path — that can be activated, developed, and advanced. Your value in this world is determined by your Synchronization Grade, referred to as SG. The higher your SG, the more capable you become. The lower it remains, the fewer opportunities you will have." He paused. "This is not a punishment. It is a framework. Adapt to it or do not. The system does not negotiate."

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  The second robed figure — shorter, female, with close-cropped silver hair and an expression of absolute precision, as though she had pared every unnecessary element from her face — stepped forward and continued without break. "You have received an initial allotment of forty-seven Drenn. This is sufficient for approximately three days of basic food and shelter. After that, you support yourself. The Evolutionary Clergy holds a monthly assessment event in every major settlement — those deemed suitable may receive the Evolutionary Vaccine, which activates your Path officially. Attendance is voluntary. Participation is encouraged."

  She said the last sentence the way people say things that mean the opposite of what they sound like.

  The young man with the tapping fingers had gone still. Taric watched him from the corner of his eye. His rhythm had stopped — replaced by nothing, which was worse, the specific nothing of someone whose coping mechanism has just been overtaken by the scale of the thing.

  And then — from near the back of the hall — something changed in the quality of the air.

  It was not loud. It began as a low sound, almost sub-vocal, the kind of vibration that you register in your chest before your ears. Then it became visible: a man on the left end of the back row had risen from his seat, and he was not standing in the way that Calder had stood — furious, contained, demanding. He was standing in the way that a person stands when their body has stopped receiving instructions from the part of the mind that gives instructions.

  Taric turned to look.

  The man was perhaps thirty-five, with a lean, weathered face and dark eyes that had gone to a place that was not this room. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing the same grey as everyone else, but there was something wrong with the quality of him — a heat, almost, not of temperature but of something biological. The air around him had a shimmer to it that Taric couldn't quite account for.

  "I'm not staying," the man said. He wasn't addressing anyone in particular. He was saying it the way you state a fact about the weather. "I'm not staying here. I don't belong here. I told them. I told them at the trial. I told them at the facility. I'm not — this is wrong. This is wrong, and I'm leaving, and—"

  He took a step toward the aisle.

  And then two things happened very nearly simultaneously.

  The first: the thin young man three seats from Taric lurched to his feet and was sick — suddenly, completely, without warning — and the sound of it broke something in the room's careful silence, and two or three other people made sounds of distress, and a woman near the front said, loudly, "Someone needs to—" and nobody finished the sentence because nobody knew what came after it.

  The second: at the doors to the hall — not the doors through which the condemned had entered, but a smaller door on the lateral wall that Taric had noted but not focused on — a figure in pale cream stepped forward. He was not one of the two robed officials at the front. He was younger, with a lean, angular face, and he moved with the specific economy of someone who has been trained to move without being noticed until the moment arrives when being noticed is the point.

  His eyes were fixed on the standing man at the back of the hall.

  He had a device in his right hand — small, dark, held loosely, the way professionals hold things when the casualness is deliberate.

  The man at the back of the hall — still saying "I'm leaving, I'm not staying, this is wrong" — took another step, and then the young man in pale cream crossed the room in four rapid strides and put his free hand on the standing man's arm.

  Not roughly. With practiced certainty.

  The standing man went rigid. Then his legs stopped working, and the cream-clad figure caught him as he folded, lowering him into his seat with a professional smoothness that made the whole thing look almost like assistance rather than intervention.

  "Easy," the figure said quietly, very close to the standing man's ear. "Easy. You're still here. Just breathe."

  Whether this was kindness or something else entirely was impossible to tell from the delivery.

  The standing man was breathing. His eyes had come back from wherever they'd been, but they were glassy, and his hands, resting on his knees, were trembling.

  The thin young man near Taric had been helped by an attendant who had appeared from somewhere and was now quietly, efficiently managing the situation. Nobody looked at him directly.

  The two robed figures at the front had not stopped. They had paused for perhaps six seconds during the incident and then resumed, unhurried, as though the interval had been scheduled.

  "Your briefing documents outline the basic geography, currency, and survival protocols of Cosmulo," the silver-haired woman continued. "We recommend reading them before leaving this facility." She folded her hands. "Questions will not be taken at this time."

  They left the platform without waiting for a response.

  Taric sat with the briefing document in his lap and read it twice. Around him, the hall emptied in layers — first the ones who had decided that action was better than understanding, then the ones who needed a few more minutes, then the ones who were still sitting with the document and the knowledge that no one was coming for them.

  The cream-clad figure was still in the hall. He was standing near the back door, apparently doing nothing, which was a particular kind of doing nothing that Taric recognized: the nothing of someone who is waiting for someone to make a move that will tell them what to do next.

  His eyes moved to Taric — a quick assessment, a brief calibration — and then moved on.

  Taric waited a little longer. Not from indecision — from the feeling that he was missing something. That the briefing had told him the shape of a thing and nothing about what lived inside it.

  Then he picked up his pack and walked out into Cosmulo for the first time.

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