The charter hall was on the second floor of the admin block, past medical and down a corridor Caelum had never had reason to walk before. Smelled like floor polish and printer toner and too many people who'd all showered with the same issued soap.
They'd converted what used to be a briefing room. Folding tables along the walls, each one manned by a charter rep in branded gear — logos on chest plates, logos on tablecloths, logos on pamphlets that were already getting stepped on. The long digital board at the back scrolled names and designation numbers in that ugly washed white the RMA put on everything.
Caelum stood near the entrance with his sling and watched the room.
It moved fast. Cadets he recognised from the trial were already at tables signing things. A girl from Unit 3 — he'd seen her at the debrief, bandage across her forehead, green marker — was talking to a man in a dark blue jacket. Veridian Corp patch on the shoulder. The man smiled like they were old friends. The girl's face said they weren't.
Ten days left. Then you get it picked for you.
He'd pulled up the charter list on his ARC before coming. The overlay had stuttered — sync had been unreliable since the matriarch, and the medic had mentioned something about recalibration he'd only half heard — but it eventually populated. Over forty charters recruiting from this cycle in EVROPA. He'd spent an hour reading through them in his room the night before and came away feeling worse than when he started.
The big names had tables but didn't need them. Veridian, Ashborne Collective, Lumenii Protocol, Strata United. Government contracts, priority gates, equipment budgets that made everything else look like scrap metal. They didn't recruit from the floor. They sent private invitations. If you hadn't gotten one, you weren't getting one, and standing near their table looking hopeful wasn't going to change that.
The rest blurred together after a while. Mid-range charters with aggressive pitches and three-year contracts you couldn't buy your way out of. Smaller outfits running C-class salvage operations for gear scraps. Regional specialists, nobody had heard of. Caelum had tried reading the liability clauses last night and given up around page forty when the language started repeating itself in ways that felt intentional, like they were hoping your eyes would slide right past the part where they owned your deployment schedule for thirty-six months.
And at the bottom of every list, in a font size that felt personal: the Universal Registered Charter. URC. The default. The place you landed if nobody picked you and you couldn't pick for yourself. No sponsor, no contracts, no priority access. A designation number and a rotation schedule and the understanding that you'd go where the RMA pointed, for pay that barely held your ration tier.
He'd grown up hearing cadets talk about the URC the way you'd talk about a slow drain. Nobody chose it. You just ended up there.
The recruitment tables were busy. A cluster from his cohort had crowded the Ashborne table, trying to look casual about it. Ashborne had a reputation for scooping lower-strata candidates with flashy combat output — they'd built a whole brand around it, the scrappy charter that turned district kids into operators. Good press. Caelum had never trusted good press.
He walked the room. Not approaching anyone. Nobody was approaching him. Electrical resonance, close-quarters, nerve damage in the dominant arm. That wasn't the kind of profile that made recruiters wave you over.
He watched the board update every few minutes. A designation number would switch from UNAFFILIATED to a charter code, and somewhere in this building a person had just handed over the next three years of their life for a logo on their chest and a contract they hadn't finished reading.
A notification hit his ARC:
CHARTER SELECTION — REMINDER DAYS REMAINING: 10 STATUS: UNAFFILIATED DEFAULT: URC — BINDING MINIMUM 6 MONTHS
Six months. He hadn't caught that in the orientation packet. Three hundred pages of legal text, and the binding minimum was buried somewhere past two hundred. He should have read slower. Or at all, past the first fifty.
He closed it and looked around again.
Dawson wasn't here. Wouldn't be. Whatever charter was getting Dawson Hawkins, the invitation had probably landed on his datapad before the debrief room finished cooling down. Council family, plasma railgun, the kind of candidate Tier 1 charters put on recruitment posters. Caelum didn't resent it exactly. He just noticed the absence and what it meant about the distance between their lives now that the unit was over.
Kifah he'd seen on the medical wing volunteer roster three times this week. She was stacking shifts like someone who'd rather scrub floors than sit in a room like this and make a decision. He got it. He understood it more than he wanted to.
He put the datapad in his back pocket. Stood there another minute watching the room churn, names cycling on the board, the folding tables doing their work. Then he turned and left, past medical, past the vending machines that still ate his credits half the time, back down the corridor to his wing.
The sling rubbed the raw spot on his neck. He didn't fix it.
His datapad buzzed on the walk back. Pulled it out expecting another countdown reminder.
Wasn't a reminder.
PRIVATE MESSAGE — DESIGNATION 845 SENDER: BELROSE, É.
CONTENT: Training ground C. Tomorrow. 0800. Come alone.
Caelum read it twice. Then once more, because the third time didn't make it make any more sense.
He pocketed the datapad and kept walking.