My heart pounded in my ears as the grey letters loomed above. A hundred thousand people held their breath. I squeezed my eyes shut—tried to shut them out. Tried to shut everything out.
The sound hit me like a wave; gasps, murmurs, and whispers crashed together into a wall of noise. I couldn't parse the individual words. Didn't need to
Tiernan heir. F-Grade. Forty-one generations, and this is what they produced.
Officials materialised around me. Hands under my arms, lifting. Someone pressed a cloth to my face, and the white fabric came away red. I'd been bleeding from my nose, too, apparently.
"Can you walk?"
"I can walk."
They didn't believe me. Kept their hands ready as I straightened. The crowd's noise shifted. Less shock morphing into something else. Pity from some sections. Satisfaction from others, the Commons, especially.
I took a step. Then another. The pod gleaming behind me, as if it hadn't just ended my life.
Then something shifted.
It was subtle, like a pressure I hadn't known existed, suddenly releasing. Like my eyes had adjusted to darkness. The air looked different—fuller. Stillness held movement, with currents flowing through everything.
Ether? I was seeing Ether.
Awakening... right here, on the arena floor, my blood still wet and vivid on my palm. To be branded F-Grade and to awaken, all within the same moment. The murmur of the crowd pressed in on me, a backdrop to officials steering me forward. The silence from the Legacy boxes was absolute. Their quiet carried finality.
-
The back corridors were grey and industrial. Nothing like the gilded hallways I'd walked through earlier.
This was where they took the failures.
Staff moved past me with careful neutrality. Eyes that didn't quite meet mine. Voices that dropped to whispers after I passed.
"...Tiernan boy..."
"...such a shame..."
"...father must be devastated..."
I kept walking, the official's hand still steadying my elbow. The ever-present sensation of Ether thrumming through me, the awareness of currents flowing through walls, people and air. It should have felt like victory, instead it felt like mockery.
Congratulations. You can see the thing that's going to kill you.
A holoscreen on the wall cycled through the test's highlights. Chen Wei's S-Grade result, purple letters blazing. Alexei's impossible result; the crowd going mad. The two Commons testing A-Grade whose faces I didn't recognise. Their lives forever changed.
My result wasn't shown.
Of course it wasn't.
Trying to distract myself from the world, I reached for that presence I felt before. Something was there. I could feel it, coiled and waiting. Cold text flickered across my vision, though it wasn't quite visible. Not quite there.
||[T̷R̸U̷E̵-̶N̷O̸O̵S̷P̸H̷E̵R̷E̸ ̵-̷ ̵P̶R̸I̵M̸E̵R̴]||
||[STATUS: WAITING] ||
I tried blinking it away. It remained hovering in the darkness, as though it were an afterimage burned into my retinas. Unsure of what it was, I reached for it, mentally probing it. The interface shuddered, malformed, then resolved into something else.
||[REQUIREMENTS: ■■■■■■]||
||[STATUS: WAITING]||
Waiting. For what?
An official touched my elbow. "This way, Mister Tiernan. Your family is waiting."
-
Mother rose as I entered, crossing quickly to pull me into her arms. Her shoulder shook. I let her hold me. I had no strength for anything else.
Over her shoulder, I saw the room. Modest furniture, a single table sat in the centre with a few chairs surrounding it. A window overlooking nothing, just grey walls and empty corridors. Grandfather was nowhere in sight, his chair empty.
I stared at it. The absence felt louder than any words he could have spoken. He hadn't even stayed. Couldn't even face me...
Father stood at the window, his back to the room. Still, ever since I entered. Hadn't so much as turned… His shoulders were rigid, hands clasped behind him in parade rest. A soldier's posture.
The silence stretched.
Mother finally let go, her eyes red yet dry. She parted her lips—hesitated—then led me to a chair and sat me down. Her hand clung to my shoulder for an agonising moment before slipping away.
"You awakened." Father cut in. Not a question. A statement.
"You saw?" I replied.
"Everyone saw." A pause. "Everyone who mattered."
Father's hands tightened behind his back. I could see the tension in his shoulders, the rigid line of his spine. When he finally turned, his face—
I expected anger. Disappointment. That cold Tiernan mask I'd seen him wear a thousand times.
This was neither. He looked wrecked. Eyes hollow with lines I'd never noticed carved deep into his face.
"There are options," he said. His voice was controlled, but something underneath it cracked. "Medical exemption. I know doctors who owe me favours. We can claim neurological damage from the testing. Or administrative deferment. I have contacts in the Bureau. We can push the paperwork, lose it in the system, buy time-"
"Father."
"-and there's always the private sector. Security work. Consulting. It's not glamorous, but it's safe, Marcus, it's-"
"Father."
He stopped and looked at me. Really looked at me for the first time since I'd entered the room.
"I'm enlisting."
Father didn't move. For a long moment, I thought he hadn't heard me. Then something in his face collapsed.
"No."
"It's not your choice."
"The hell it isn't." He stepped forward. Not threatening, desperate. "Do you understand what happens to F-Grades in the corps? Do you have any idea what the mortality statistics are?"
"Eighty per cent in the first year. Ninety-five within five." The numbers came out flat. "I know."
"Then you know what you're signing up for! A death sentence! A Goddamn death sentence, Marcus! and I won't-" His voice cracked. He stopped, swallowed, tried again. "I won't sign off on that. I won't watch you-"
"You said it didn't matter."
The words cut through everything. Father went still.
"What?"
"This morning. In the shuttle." I stood. My legs steady. The numbness had settled into something colder. "You said you didn't care what grade I tested. You said I was your son. That you would be proud regardless."
"Marcus-"
"Was that a lie?"
"That was before."
"Before what? Before the machine told you I was worthless?"
"You're not-" He ran a hand through his hair, composure shattering. "That's not what this is. You don't understand."
"Then explain it to me."
"I can't watch you die!" The words exploded out of him. Raw. "I've signed death notices, Marcus. Thousands of them. F-Grade boys and girls who awakened just like you, who thought they could beat the odds, who enlisted with that same stubborn look on their faces. I signed the papers that told their families they weren't coming home. And I will not-" His voice broke completely. "I will not sign yours."
And in that moment, I understood, I understood it perfectly. I understood exactly what he wasn't brave enough to say.
You're F-Grade. You'll fail. You'll die. And I can't have that stain on the Tiernan name.
"I'm still enlisting," I said.
Father's face hardened. The grief calcified into something else. Something desperate and ugly.
"If you walk into that recruitment office," he said, each word precise and cold, "you are no longer my son."
Mother gasped. "James-"
"No." He didn't look at her, his gaze solely focused on me. "If he wants to throw his life away, he can do it without the Tiernan name. Without our support. Without anything from this family."
I stared at him, waiting for the words to hurt.
They didn't.
They just confirmed what I'd already known. What I'd always known, since before the grey letters appeared above that pod. My grade mattered. It had always mattered. Everything else was just pretty lies to make the waiting easier.
"Then disown me. Save everyone the embarrassment."
My fingers found Lydia's pin. Three generations of Tiernans had worn it to their testing, all that weight reduced to a small click as the clasp released. Standing from my chair, I placed it on the empty seat, Grandfather's seat, before turning for the door.
The door was already in my hand before Mother moved. Her hand closed around my wrist, grip stronger than I expected. Tears spilt silently down her cheeks. I looked at her hand. Then at her face and pulled free.
-
The streets of Acheron blurred past. I didn't remember leaving the arena or the walk—just the moving of one foot after another.
A holo-billboard flickered overhead. Chen Wei's face, fifty feet tall, purple letters blazing beneath her. S-GRADE. The crowd below pointed upward, voices bright with admiration.
No one looked at me.
Her triumph arched above me. Unseen, I drifted through a world that had already forgotten I existed.
The Federal Recruitment Centre squatted between two industrial buildings, grey and utilitarian. A line of people snaked out the door, mostly D-Grades. They looked desperate, as if they had nothing left to lose. I joined them. The girl ahead of me couldn't stop her hands from shaking.
No one spoke. We all knew why we were here. We all knew what it meant.
The line moved slowly. Forms were distributed. I filled mine out mechanically. Name. Date of birth. Genetic grade. Awakening status.
Marcus Tiernan. 12th of February, 3173 ME. F-Grade. Awakened.
The clerk barely glanced at it. He stamped it and slid it into a pile with all the others.
"Report to Processing Centre Seven at 0600 tomorrow. Bring nothing. You'll be issued everything you need."
I nodded.
The copper taste was gone. It had been since the pod. In its place sat something nameless—not quite freedom, not quite grief. Ahead, the sun set over Acheron's industrial spires, painting everything the colour of rust. Of old blood. Of endings. Of beginnings.
The ground had already disappeared.
All that was left was the fall.