Chapter 589 | The Kids From the Dome [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 589: 589 | The Kids From the Dome [CASTLE BONUS]

"Six Heroes," Cole said, in the same flat register. "Three days of mourning. The rankings updated on schedule. The industry has never once stopped, and that has never once been because the industry was brave." He shifted his weight off the left side, which was the only concession he made to having a chest full of staples. "I’m not arguing against Crane. I’m arguing against the framing. We are not holding the Invitational to prove courage. We are holding it because the calendar is load-bearing, and when you remove a load-bearing element, the students are the ones standing underneath."

"Then we hold it," Grant said. "With his framing, not hers. No offense, Crane."

"Constant offense, Grant, but continue."

"Kids need something to point at." He turned his cup in a circle on the table. "Right now every single one of them is pointing at the dome. You give a seventeen year old ten weeks and a hard date and a thing to train for, and the pointing changes direction. That’s not optics. That’s just how people work."

Sable spoke for the first time in twenty minutes, and the room quieted for it, because she spent her words like they were rationed.

"Hold it. Move the perimeter out four hundred meters. Credential in waves. No walk-ins."

Garrison looked at her. "That’s a forty percent staffing increase on gate control."

"Then hire forty percent more gate control." She took a drink of water. "You have the budget. You’ve had it since March. You didn’t spend it because nobody had died yet."

Garrison’s jaw worked. He did not argue. Imara noticed, and filed that too, because she had been noticing Garrison and Sable for three years and had learned exactly nothing.

Ashby drank his tea and let it sit a moment.

"The Invitational proceeds," he said. "Second week of December, as scheduled. Garrison, you’ll have the expanded credential protocol and whatever staffing it requires. Isabelle, you’ll handle the media frame, and I want to see it before the Commission does." He set the cup down. "Which brings us to the thing everyone in this room has been thinking about for forty minutes while pretending to think about tarps."

Imara’s chest went tight.

"The Tuesday and Thursday rotations," Eli said gently, and of course it was Eli, of course he was the one who would say it out loud so nobody else had to. "First-year agency placements. They were supposed to begin the week of the Crucible."

"They were," Ashby said.

"And 1-A’s paperwork is already through," Isabelle added. "I saw the packets last Thursday. Crestline, Halcyon, Meridian’s support division, two placements at the Lang Agency. Sixteen of twenty confirmed."

Imara set her good hand flat on the table.

"And 1-B," she said.

Nobody answered right away, which was answer enough.

"Say it, Garrison."

"I wasn’t going to say it to you."

"Then say it to the table while I’m sitting here, because that’s worse and you should have to do the worse version."

Garrison looked at her for a long second, and to his credit he did not soften it. "1-B lost their homeroom instructor to nerve damage and their theory instructor to a flail chest. Your cohort held a corridor with a support beam and a girl’s wool. Mine’s an institutional read, not a personal one. Twenty students in 1-B are three weeks out from an event that put nine of them in medical, and you want to put them on a Tuesday shift at an agency with a public-facing lobby."

"I want them working."

"You want them distracted."

"I want them working." She heard her own volume come up and did not bother pulling it down, because she had never once in her life pulled it down and it had never once cost her anything she wanted to keep. "Do you know what my class did on Monday? Twelve of them were back in the common room before dinner. Wilkinson asked me when conditioning restarts. Mendoza handed me a forty-one page document reworking the evacuation model that failed him, because he decided the version where Belmont didn’t answer roll call was unacceptable and he rewrote it until it wasn’t. Ortega taped her own hands and went to the auxiliary gym at five in the morning."

"Which proves they’re motivated. It doesn’t prove they’re ready."

"Nothing proves ready. Ready isn’t a state, it’s a verb." She leaned forward, and the arm reminded her it existed, and she ignored it. "They are going to feel like victims for exactly as long as we keep treating them like victims. The day you put them in a real agency with a real shift and a real supervisor who does not care that they were on the news, they stop being the kids from the dome and start being staff. That’s not a kindness. It’s the only medicine I’ve got."

Eli’s voice came in soft underneath hers. "Soleil cried through my Thursday review. Not during. Through."

Imara’s mouth closed.

"I’m not opposing you," he said. "I want that on the record with Garrison’s note. I’m saying there’s a girl in your cohort who has not been able to say the word wool out loud in my office since the plaza, and I would like us to decide what we’re doing about her before we decide what we’re doing about a schedule."

"She’s testing her ceiling Saturday," Imara said.

Eli blinked. "How do you know that?"

"Because Belmont’s been putting in field reservations for Zeta at six in the morning for a week and a half and I stopped auditing that form in September." She met Ashby’s eyes. "And because that girl is going to find out what her Aspect actually does with someone she trusts holding the other end of it, instead of finding out in a hallway when she’s out of options. Which is what happened the last time."

Cole made a sound that was not quite agreement.

"Belmont," Radiant said, and the name landed like a dropped weight.